Building inspectors working to catch up

All city building inspectors completed the training required by the state to renew their licenses and certifications last week, causing a bit of a backlog in inspections. But building inspection division manager Jose Roig assures the Austin Monitor that his inspectors “should be all caught up” by the middle of this week. Roig said via email, “Although we had several carryovers of inspections from the previous days,” inspectors are “making every effort to complete the inspections, and some are even working overtime.” As of Sept. 20, Roig reported, “We had performed 237,039 inspections for the fiscal year of 2014/15. Inspections are scheduled for the next business day, and we perform an average of 93 percent of inspections on-time.” Roig provided a chart showing the number of inspections performed in residential and commercial categories as well as the average number of inspections performed by each inspector, buildings receiving completed inspections within 24 and 48 hours and inspections completed after 48 hours. The chart shows that 93 percent of inspections are performed within 24 hours, with another 4 percent performed within 48 hours and a final 3 percent performed after 48 hours. According to the chart, inspectors performed 153,849 residential inspections within the past year and 83,190 commercial inspections during the same time period. Building inspectors performed an average of 178 inspections per week, or about 37 inspections per inspector per day between Aug. 10 and Sept. 20, according to Roig, with an average of 13 inspectors working each week. An average of 28 percent of inspections resulted in a failing grade during that same time period.