Council slows plan check but rejects builder self-certification
Malibu City Council adopted language to speed rebuilding reviews but stopped short of letting architects self-certify their plans comply with code.
The Malibu City Council has spent five hours putting the brakes on its building inspectors over reports of over-enforcement of rules on people rebuilding after the big fires.
But it stopped short of allowing project architects to self-certify that their plans are legal — as opposed to having city staff check those plans.
All of this comes from complaints from fire victims at Big Rock, who have seen their technical applications to rebuild get hung up in "plan check," the city review of safety and compliance with technical codes.
By a 5-to-nothing vote last Thursday, the council agreed on language aimed at speeding things up. But it stopped short of allowing professionals to self-certify their highly technical calculations.
Self-certification would have allowed licensed professionals to simply wave off city inspectors and certify that they had followed all the rules, sidestepping plan checkers and building inspectors at city hall.
Setting up such a process would paralyze the city hall staff for more than a year, according to planning director Yolanda Bundy. She told the city council that she does not have the staff to set up a bureaucracy to handle self-certification, which she said would benefit only a handful of fire victims at the expense of the vast majority.
One city council member warned that any self-certified building would be marked for life as having not been reviewed or inspected by the city during construction.
Council member Doug Stewart, at Thursday's meeting:
"The property owner is also taking on the responsibility of being the self-certifier. It's got a lot of liabilities all the way around. It sounds fun and sexy and everything else until you start looking at who is responsible for it. And at the end of the day, the city is on the hook."
Even members of the city council who had supported self-certification agreed that handling the crush of rebuilding permit reviews and inspections from last year's fire is more important than setting up an entirely new process to bypass them.