PITTSBORO — The main office for Chatham County’s building inspectors is a gaggle of cubicles around a central area.
That area is smothered with building plans, code books thicker than a bodybuilder’s arm and other paper strewn about. It’s not unorganized, but busy.
For a county growing like Chatham is, that’s not too surprising.
Building inspectors serve as one of the primary gatekeepers of Chatham County, making sure building plans and finished products are up to state and county code and, as inspector Brandon Ancona phrases it, maintain “life safety.”
“A superintendent is responsible, a contractor is responsible, we’re responsible, the engineer’s responsible — we’re all kind of responsible,” Ancona said. “With so many components and things that are going on, even with a single-family dwelling, let alone a 30,000-square foot commercial (building), things can just get missed.”
Chatham’s building inspections crew was under the microscope at a recent county budget workshop, where discussions revolved around drastic personnel shifts. The department lost four people in a two-month span. David Camp, the county’s director of central permitting & inspections, said one went to another county role, one left for the private sector and one moved to a different municipality.
For a rapidly-growing county like Chatham — which slowed in construction growth last year, but is expecting a rebound — keeping a complete team in-house is important, especially when it comes to state law. N.C. General Statute 143-139.4 states the local inspection departments must conduct inspections within two business days after the request, with requests coming after noon deemed to have been received the next day. But as Camp said, the number of inspections in Chatham is rising, which makes that target tough to keep.
“We were up to about eight days or so on occasion,” Camp said. “That’s obviously not good. Anything more than two or three is not good. We’ve whittled that down with the staff that we have now down to five days. I would like for it to be three days as soon as possible.”
A week later, he emailed the News + Record to say the department was down to four days on average.
Not having a full cadre of inspectors to pull from makes things difficult, particularly with what their daily responsibilities are. An average day for Ancona involves a schedule of around 25 different inspections ranging from five minutes to two hours and from plumbing to electrical.
The county is currently in need of an inspections supervisor and an electrical-specific inspector, but according to Camp, they’re not alone.
“We’re all struggling with keeping and retaining building inspectors,” he said. “I talk to the state Department of Insurance quite regularly, and (they’re) having trouble finding people as well. So we’re all in the same boat, we’re all competing against each other. That’s what you’re seeing a lot of.”
This deficiency has led to the implementation of a new incentive plan. Staffers will get bonuses for achieving certifications — levels 1, 2 or 3, and for different types of inspections like building and plumbing. The county set aside $42,386 in the upcoming budget for this incentive program.
Carolyn Miller, the county’s human resources director, said at a May 23 budget workshop that the program is designed as an “added incentive for folks for something to look forward to.”
Camp said he’ll likely need more inspectors in the future, especially when Chatham Park comes online in the coming years.
“Obviously, I’m thinking about it a lot,” he said. “The difference between thinking and acting is spending a lot of money. I can’t really go out and get positions authorized until I can substantiate (the need). It really truly hasn’t happened, the explosion from Chatham Park, yet.”
But it’s an expenditure the county will likely need to address in the near future. Camp said he’s begun contemplating increasing permit fees — he said Chatham has some of the lowest in the region — since it would be “better” to not place the cost on the average taxpayer that doesn’t use the inspections department.
In the meantime, Ancona and his colleagues will continue to inspect homes, commercial buildings and more with the goal of keeping people safe.
“We’re essentially another set of eyes,” he said. “Our main priority is life safety, whether that’s personal life safety or safety of the building. That’s what we focus on.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.