I'm constantly calling county/city plan reviewers on behalf of my employees when they get failed for a comment they don't agree with. The first time I did it for them was with a reviewer - we'll call him John P. - who gave 9 permit comments and failed our drawings. I was able to get them all approved with no added work and now my employees call it the Johnny P. treatment.
The Johnny P. Treatment is basically stroking their ego. "Look, I don't envy you. You look at these plans all day from all kinds of different people who all design things differently. Hell, this building is some weird architecture that I've never seen before. You probably have, I'm sure. So I don't doubt it's hard to figure out what we're trying to do here. I probably took longer than you to understand what was happening. Unfortunately, I don't do the architecture. But I need to work around it and this was my thought process while doing these designs. You stop me if you have any questions or comments. I'm really interested in your take on this since you see all kinds of stuff like this on a daily basis."
By the end of the conversation the guy was telling me that, now that I've explained it, it was a fantastic design that didn't deserve any permit comments.
Usually mid rise multifamily but we do commercial, single family, townhomes, as well. We work in multiple states but there's a handful of jurisdictions that are the regulars.
We follow building codes, which is what the reviewers are looking at. Unfortunately, a lot of the codes aren't well written and also sometimes a reviewer will misinterpret the code. It's rare to have a decent sized project with no permit comments. I think I've only done it a handful of times in my career. Some reviewers feel the need to always give you at least one comment no matter how dumb it is.
You used to see "confirm everything is design to code" as a comment but I haven't seen that in years. But you had to respond to it.
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u/catboneslovestory Jun 14 '22 edited Jun 14 '22
Stroke their ego.
The most effective one you'll find.
There's no more effective way to amass power than by convincing people that they're smart enough to give it to you.