28-Plan Review and Inspection: Contractor services

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CITY COUNCIL AGENDA ITEM BRIEFING SHEET Submittal Date: Originating Department: Presented By: Agenda Item No.: 07/09/09 Engineering, Planning Shawn Napier, P.E. City Engineer Council Date: and Development /Director of Public Works 28. 07/13/09 RECOMMENDED MOTION: Move to continue utilizing Bureau Veritas to perform building inspection and plan review services and charging plan review fees, fire code plan review fees, and fire code inspection fees equal to charges from Bureau Veritas and increasing the certificate of inspection fee to $50. POLICY ISSUE(S): Plan Review and Inspection; Contractor services BACKGROUND: In January the City of Paris entered into a 60-day agreement with Bureau Veritas (BV) to perform plan review and building inspections for the City. City Council set a time frame of 75 days to hold a meeting with the local contractors and builders to get feedback. A meeting was held Friday morning April 3rd t0 get feedback on the services provided by BV. Most of the comments at the meeting pertained to code questions rather than the services provided by BV. After the meeting several city employees had a chance to talk with some of the contractors' one on one and the majority of contractors liked having BV doing our building inspections. The accompanying table shows the fees charged and collected by the City and the fees charged by BV. The chart is broken out into four individual fee columns. The first column is "Plan Review Fee" which the City does not charge and the second column "Construction Inspection Fee" is where the building permit fee that the City charges is shown. The City does not currently charge for fire code plan review or inspection which are the third and fourth columns. The next column is a total fees charged by both BV and the City. The last column "Net" shows the differences in the `Total" column, with the numbers in red and in parenthesis showing that the city did not take in as much as the plan review and inspections cost. Bureau Veritas had billed the City of Paris a total of $235,035.79 as of June 30, 2009, and the City had paid that same amount to them. As of June 30'h, there were no Bureau Veritas invoices awaiting payment, but one invoice was received on July 7`h covering wark done through June 30lh. That invoice was for $9,072.65 bringing the total of all Bureau Veritas invoices to $244,108.44. According to the Community Development Department, fees paid to Bureau Veritas have exceeded fees collected by the City for the same projects by $81,590.39. It is estimated that related staff vacancies in the Community Development Department have saved the City $98,300 to date. Staff recommends retaining Bureau Veritas to perform all of the services they are currently providing, we also recommend charging a Plan Review Fee, Fire Code Plan Review Fee and Fire Code Inspection Fee. These fees would be the same as BV charges the city and just be a pass through charge. To date the City has been charged $68,850.89 for plan review fees, $11,050.00 for Fire Code Plan Review Fees and $3,800.00 for Fire Code Inspection Fees. The Plan Review Fee is skewed because 82% of the entire amount was charged ($56,543.91) for a single project (Paris High School). Staff also recommends increasing the amount we charge for a Certificate of Occupancy (CO) Inspection from $10.00 to $50.00. We have information from three other cities (Melissa, Forney, and Crandall) comparable in size to Paris, two of them charge $100.00 and other one charges $75.00. The result of adding the fees and increasing the CO fee will mean that the City will break even on the BV charges. City of Paris Revised 2/04/08 )Al J