Building Inspection Pact Was Needed : The agreement should go even further, however, to help improve seismic safety

Late last month, Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude announced a cooperative agreement that will end duplicative building inspections by the city’s Fire Department and its Building and Safety Department.

Under the agreement, now in effect, the Fire Department is no longer responsible for checking the plans for an estimated 5,000 new buildings annually. Building and Safety Department inspectors, who were often doing the same work on the same projects, will now handle such matters exclusively.

Braude says that the move will streamline the inspection process and also free up fire inspectors for other work, even though they will still be involved in high-rise, high-occupancy building projects.

“It will help make the city more user-friendly and help it compete with other localities. It will result in a decrease in fees and it will save time,” says David Fleming, whose many hats include that of chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s government relations committee and that of vice president of the city’s Fire Commission.

The changes do indeed make sense, but we would urge Braude, who chairs the City Council’s public safety committee, to go even further in a related direction.

As we now know, building codes are adequate, but many buildings have not been constructed to those codes. The state Seismic Safety Commission said as much last November, noting that this failure accounted for a large amount of the damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Moreover, the commission said that damaged buildings showed evidence of shoddy construction, flawed design and inspections that had failed to point out those shortcomings. We’ve heard the same from Rawn Nelson of the Structural Engineers Assn. of California, and the problem was reiterated most recently by U. S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros.

All have urged mandatory additional training for inspectors to help them do a better job. Perhaps the consolidation will provide a starting point for such improvement.