(SF) DBI hits back on Civil Grand Jury Report

CITY INSIDER, SFGate.com -

Guess who wasn’t enamored with that Civil Grand Jury report criticizing the Department of Building Inspection for lack of leadership, ethical problems, and lax code enforcement?

That’s right: DBI.

In an interview Wednesday, acting Director Tom Hui, Deputy Director of Permits Ed Sweeney and spokesman Bill Strawn said the report wasn’t entirely fair, and seemed to criticize them for problems that have long since been resolved.

Take, for example, the report’s findings that DBI has left 11 percent of code violations unresolved over the past several years and needs to step up its code enforcement and fee collection systems.

Sweeney said the report focused on the two years after the economic downturn, right after the department had been forced to lay off 30 percent of its building inspectors, or 130 people. They have become “much more aggressive” over the past two years, he said — hiring back 38 people, doubling the number of inspectors assigned to code enforcement and tripling the number of code enforcement hearings they conduct.

“Between 2000 and 2012 we received 135,000 complaints that we investigated and followed up on,” Strawn added. “Out of that group there are probably 5,000 or 6,000 open notices of violation … That’s less than 5 percent.”

He said the department must “respect due process laws” and wants to work with building owners to bring their structures up to code, not simply punish them.

Strawn also said that some of the ethical issues the report raised — including a 2006 FBI investigation that resulted in the indictment of a DBI manager and the 2010 criminal prosecution of a former employee accused of faking documentation on some projects — were unfair to bring up. The 2010 investigation, for example, was into a person who hadn’t worked for DBI since 1999 — and Sweeney said the department helped bring the case against him.

“The bigger picture is that every employee goes through ethics training annually,” said Strawn. “I really think it’s misleading to suggest — if there were ethics issues in the ‘90’s, we are not having them today.”

The department is already working to improve its technology — for example, they have fee inspectors now using mobile tablets to enter information into the system, instead of clerks — and a process to hire a permanent director is underway, Strawn said.

DBI is working on an official response to the report and will submit it to the courts in the coming weeks, he added.