SF subcommittee reviews DBI backlog data, proposes new plan-check categories and a general queue

The Client Services Subcommittee of San Francisco’s Building Inspection Commission on Thursday reviewed Department of Building Inspection (DBI) data showing permit-review delays and backed staff plans to add intermediate plan-check categories and a general queue intended to shorten waits for small and medium projects.

Neville Pereira, DBI’s deputy director for permit services, told commissioners staff sampled about 150 projects and assigned predicted review times based on valuation, occupancy and scope. “We looked at about a 150 projects,” Pereira said. In the sample some records showed unusually long calendars: “It took 726 days to issue this from the time the application was created,” he said, attributing much of that delay to upstream entitlement and applicant-response time.

The department proposed moving beyond the current binary model (over-the-counter vs. standard review) to create two intermediate work streams: a Category 2 for reviews that take roughly 1–4 staff hours and a fast-track for 4–8 hours, while keeping over-the-counter reviews under an hour and standard reviews for projects over 8 hours of staff work. Pereira said those staff-hour estimates would be mapped to customer-facing expected turnaround times (for example, DBI suggested an over-the-counter expected turnaround of roughly two business days) and that the department will publish those commitments.

To reduce assignment-related stalls, DBI proposed shifting from assigning projects to an individual plan checker to putting them into a general queue and having the next available examiner pick them up. “We’re gonna take it out of assigning it to an individual and just assign it to the queue,” Pereira said, adding that supervisors would continue to oversee assignments and that the system will log reassignments. He said the queue approach should lessen delays caused when an assigned reviewer is on leave or overloaded and allow smaller projects to move faster because work-stream queues will draw from different pools.

Commissioners pressed staff on data quality and the sample methodology. Commissioner Tu asked whether the sample included pandemic-era anomalies and whether ‘time to issue’ included time with the applicant. Staff said the sample used files filed in 2019 (pre-COVID) and confirmed that the ‘time to issue’ measure includes intervals when the file is awaiting additional information from the applicant, which can inflate calendar days beyond DBI’s control. Pereira acknowledged that some records were misclassified post facto (for example, files taken in as an intake form rather than properly processed as over-the-counter) and said DBI intends to assign categories prospectively at intake going forward to generate a cleaner baseline.

Pereira also agreed to add a column correlating estimated staff hours to expected business-day turnaround for customers in the next presentation, and commissioners recommended refining category names to avoid consumer confusion.

Separately, the subcommittee moved and seconded a resolution making the findings required under Assembly Bill 361 and California Government Code section 54953(e) to allow remote attendance; the measure passed by voice vote.

Next steps include additional internal data analysis and another subcommittee cycle to review refined category names and the hours-to-days mapping, with staff targeting a mid-June public rollout of the new process but noting that timeline could slip to July. The subcommittee set a follow-up meeting and adjourned at 5:01 p.m.