Once Again, Big Developers Win

Sumner County Check your Reps

There is a guy that I follow out of east Tennessee. He was a financial guy that writes some hard hitting opinion pieces. The other day I read one of his pieces about Bill Lee’s new law concerning the privatization of building inspections. You will find his article here. I would suggest a read. He’s a lot smarter than I am.

However, I always want to look up things for myself. Was this hyperbole? Maybe he’s exaggerating. I found an article here about the new law. The new law was signed in April and takes effect in October.

Safety - As enacted, authorizes the use of certain third-party examiners, inspectors, engineers, and professionals in lieu of a local or state examiner, inspector, engineer, or professional for certain permitted processes and requirements; establishes procedures and requirements for the use of a third-party examiner, inspector, engineer, or professional. - Amends TCA Title 68, Chapter 120; Title 68, Chapter 221 and Title 69, Chapter 3, Part 1.

That is the summary of the bill. Take a wild guess who sponsored this on the house side. Your representative, William Lamberth. Guess who co-sponsored on the Senate side? Your senator, Haile.

When these developers come to our town, they pay someone to do a traffic study. That traffic study shows where the traffic is failing. We saw that with The Parks, and again with Lennar over on New Hall. The report says, your traffic is failing, our subdivision won’t turn that F into an F, therefore we are not a problem. They pay for these studies, and they say the same thing. Funny how that works.

Now the government is going to let them have their own inspectors because they are impatient and don’t want to wait for the local jurisdictions that they have already overwhelmed with their subdivisions and apartment complexes. They can choose their own inspectors.

As long as that third party is registered with the state, the developer can choose them, pay them, and submit the report to the city. There aren’t any issues with that. Seems like a great idea to me. (read with a sarcastic tone since that’s how I would say it)

This works for commercial properties where cities sit on their hands. A city decides they aren’t happy about the gas station, grocery store, or strip mall, even though the property is zoned for it, so they sit on the plans and don’t approve them for months. Agreed, that’s not fair. This allows a private inspector that turns in the report to the city, and the city is forced to respond in 10 days. Ok, sounds good for commercial projects in big cities. Let’s take this to a small city and home inspections.

Let’s say four or five of the subdivisions here in White House have finished building 5-10 homes each. They have their own building inspector come out and inspect them. Our city planning director gets 25-50 inspections dropped on his desk. Our planning department is top notch, but this would add a burden that is not fair to small cities. He would then have 10 days to go over all of these inspections, along with his regular duties. Sounds like great legislation to me.

Surely if you talk to your representative, they will tell you that this won’t happen. This is just for those cities that have been punishing developers by sitting on plans for months. Why not look at changing things on that side? Why not look at making it more lucrative to become a building inspector? Why not target the legislation at commercial developments only until they see how this will play out?

Government never fixes any issues, they just seem to create more. Well, I guess we will watch and see how this works out this fall.

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