Week 25: Stuck!

We are still awaiting a decision from the Bureau of Engineering regarding our highway dedication waiver.
I recieved a call this morning from the engineer I spoke with on Friday and she said that the project was 20th in line for review. She was not clear on the length of duration for review, but said that it was going to take some time...a lot of time.

Stay Tuned.

Week 24: Plan Check Continues.

It’s been a busy Fall and so I haven’t had time to update the Blog as of late. My teaching responsibilities at Woodbury University have been dominating my schedule and so not much has happened with Corralitas since I last updated things.

Well, that’s not exactly true. Normally, when plan check corrections come back, the procedure is to try to get them corrected and back to the building department as soon as possible. In this case, because of my busy schedule the project has been more-or-less in slow motion. Another rather unsettling issue also came to light during the sign-off portion of the project: Highway dedication!

When a project is in plan check it requires the applicant to get several sign-offs from the various bureaus involved with the day-to-day operations of the city. Most of these sign-offs are easy to get cleared, but require some time at the building department. Unfortunately, because our project is on a steep slope and fronts onto a narrow street, it involves a lot of extra clearances and close inspection by the engineers at the city. We found that the city has a blanket policy in place requiring all hillside streets that do not meet current city requirements to be improved. In order to do this they need to allocate or in my words “steal” land from homeowners. I use the word “steal” because, not only are they not paying you to give up part of your property, you must pay for the entire process. By my calculations this would cost the client about $6,000.00 in revised design, engineering, and civil documents, not to mention the city fees, and lost time. We are currently waiting for the head of Public Works to decide our case.

Why didn’t we know about this issue prior to plan check? We did. Every project requires careful research on the part of the designer, and we were told in our research phase that the highway dedication requirement was not a big deal and only required a sign-off at the counter. We were not told that it required a base fee of upwards of $2000.00 and would involved possibly deeding part of the property to the City of Los Angeles. We have submitted our case to the head of Public Works in order to obtain a waiver. This process is expected to take up to several weeks and has set our plan check re-submittal for late December-early January.

Stay tuned for more updates!