Approved Minutes — original pdf

Approved Minutes

REGULAR CALLED MEETING Electric Board APPROVED MINUTES The Electric Board convened in a Regular Called Board Meeting on February 16, 2022 using WebEx video conference at the Permitting Development Center at 10:25 am. Board Members in Attendance: Christian Spies, Rogelio Wallace, David Johnson, Ben Brenneman, Michael King, Delwin Goss, Gabe Flores, David Deshaine and Randy Pomikahl Members Not in Attendance: Ben Brenneman Staff in Attendance: Rick Arzola (DSD), Jordan Word (DSD), Marty Starrett (DSD), Joshua Davis(DSD), Maria Jaramillo(DSD), Roderick Burns(DSD) and Mitchell Tolbert(DSD) February 16, 2022 1. CITIZEN COMMUNICATION: There was no registration of citizens to speak at this Electrical Board. 2. APPROVAL OF MINUTES: The minutes from the December 15, 2021 regular called meeting was approved. Vice Chair member Johnson made a motion to approve the minutes as written, Board member Pomikahl second the motion, and the motion passed 8-0. Board member Goss phone it after the approval took place. 3. DISCUSSION a. IBC Changes in relation with the IEC and IECC- DSD Plan Review Manager Mitchell Tolbert mentions that current edition to the IBC does have some verbiage of generators and backup systems that does not have any effective changes to the electrical code but indicates the 2024 edition will a lot that specifically focuses on EV chargers with minimum requirement of parking stations. Additional upcoming changes are on the horizon but plan review will take a closer look at those in 2023 and how they coincide with NEC. b. Austin Energy Criteria Manual- Marty Starrett provided information that Austin Energy quarterly meeting was set for Wednesday Feb 17. No further update was provided. c. Disconnect Locations- Staff Marty Starrett mentioned he had requested staff from Austin Energy to speak in today’s Electrical Board but no one from A.E replied. In an unrelated topic, staff Tolbert mentioned that AE was working on creating a “pre- review” group that will assist in coordinating issues related to disconnect means being required outside of NEC requirements. As of now that pre-review group is still in the forming stages and DSD hopes to know a little more about it and what will it entails in the coming days. d. Residential and Commercial Inspection Update- On the commercial side, Marty informed that two inspectors have left the inspection team and has posted two replacements position to re-fill. Expectancy to refill those positons is by the end of the week. On the residential side, Jordan Word updated that inspections are about a half day averaging about 7 carry overs per inspector and much is attributed due to 6 vacancy positions in the combination inspection program. Interviews have been completed for those vacancies and hope to have new staff to begin the training program.  e. DSD Permit Process-. Service center staff Josh Davis replies to some questions from board members in regards on the difficulty in retrieving permits back that have been submitted for stand-alone permits. Board members are expressing their frustration in the length of time of permit processing and the procedure on the website to apply. In Josh response, the problem that staff is seeing is the type of description and wording of the permit request that are being submitted. Previously that was never the case as customers were allowed to visit One Texas Center, sit down with an agent and discuss face to face on what they were needing the permit for. Now with everything being online, it has become time consuming issue due to errors on permit requests and that it takes additional time to make sure on what the contractor needs. Board is requesting to attain a report from staff on how many stand-alone permits were issued, denied and or went to plan review and to determine what type road blocks, as far as permit submittal they are encountering, more like a top 10 most common errors. Board member Pomikahl suggests that if contractors could provide their most common permit request rejections so that they could be educated in preventing those errors. f. Update on Plan Review. Staff member Tolbert commented that there has been some implemented thoughts on how to improve the plan review intake process and are currently formalizing activing plans to assist a quicker process to eliminate the back log of review times and hope to be back to a standard review time by the end of March. In addition, plan review has hired two additional electrical plan reviewers to assist with back log and with their expertise in their field, it will help speed along in the back log issue. With the population growing and new office and retail buildings being seen around town, plan review sees about a 25 percent decrease in first time plans submitted from the year before however in the number of revisions that have come back from those new plans have seen an rise of about 35 percent. So that the activity level is much higher than before and plan review is seeing more additional work in a different form. Residential plan review continues to see its spike in plans submitted. 5. FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS a. Austin Energy Criteria Manual b. Disconnect Locations c. Residential and Commercial Electrical Inspection update d. DSD Permit Process with the Service Center e. Update on Plan Review 6. ADJOURN: Without objection, Vice Chair Johnson adjourned the meeting at 11:07