As Chicago Buildings Commissioner Stan Kaderbek announced a fresh crackdown on the city’s rickety porches last week, hundreds of inspection reports documenting code violations sat in stacks, awaiting enforcement.
The lag time between a building inspection and the crucial step of entering violations into city computers has recently doubled to two months because clerks have struggled with a new computer system, department officials told the Tribune.
Among the violation reports recently stuck in the backlog was one for a South Side porch where a 9-year-old girl fell to her death last month, according to city records.
During the months that violations await entry in city computers, owners are not notified of problems, and court dates–when judges usually order repairs–are not scheduled.
While department officials declined to estimate the number of code violations stuck in the backlog, some inspectors estimated that 1,000 or more reports, including many porch cases, are awaiting data input.
One department employee on Thursday counted 16 boxes full of inspection reports awaiting data entry, with some dating back as far as a year.
The backlog “is not good,” said Building Department spokesman Pete Scales. “But it is what it is. We are quickly catching up with ourselves.”
Clerks have worked overtime on weekends in recent weeks to make a dent in the backlog, which doesn’t include the most pressing cases–deemed “dangerous and hazardous”–that go to court right away, Scales said.
Still, the paperwork delay has led some inspectors to question the effectiveness of the department’s crackdown, which includes a new team of three inspectors devoted exclusively to porches.
Some 500 building owners were cited for potentially hazardous porch conditions during a citywide sweep in the wake of the June 2003 Wrightwood Avenue porch collapse that killed 13 and injured 50.
About half of the owners cited in the 2003 crackdown haven’t applied for permits to fix their porches, the Tribune reported last week. Without permits, the Buildings Department doesn’t know whether the problems were ever addressed. Revisiting the 250 porches that did not obtain fix-up permits will be the first task of the new team of porch inspectors, Kaderbek said.
