LUXURY BY DESIGN,
QUALITY BY CHANCE

SPOTLIGHT FOLLOW-UP

Local inspectors often overworked, undertrained

By Sacha Pfeiffer, Globe Staff, 7/26/2001

OUTH DARTMOUTH The mistakes began with the frame itself.

In 1994, Richard and Lillian Vargas hired a contractor to build their retirement home, a four-bedroom colonial nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac in this Southeastern Massachusetts village with its sweeping views of Buzzards Bay and the Paskamansett River. And the contractor promptly set about shattering that dream.

The two-story house was framed crookedly, causing interior walls to lean and bow. The back decks were not bolted to the house, a serious safety risk. The stair railings were built so sloppily that they sway precariously a particular hazard for Richard Vargas, who lost his vision in a grenade attack during the Korean War. But time after time, town building inspectors approved the work, despite multiple and obvious code violations that a private inspector hired later by Vargas said ''seriously impair the usability of the house.''

The Vargas home-building disaster is further evidence of what the Globe Spotlight Team reported this spring, that the housing boom of the 1990s has produced a bumper crop of homes built with inferior materials and slipshod workmanship.

But the Vargas case underscores another problem the all-too-frequent failure of underpaid, overworked, and often inexperienced local building inspectors to protect home-buyers from incompetent builders.

The problem is pervasive in many of the state's fastest-growing communities, where local inspectors are unable to keep pace with the brisk rate of new construction. In other communities, particularly small towns with part-time inspectors, local building officials sometimes lack the qualifications and training necessary to do their jobs effectively.

What's more, the Globe has found, the state agency responsible for overseeing local building officials takes a lenient approach to enforcing certification requirements that were widely praised as professionalizing the inspection process when they were instituted nine years ago.

The agency, the Board of Building Regulations and Standards, has revoked the certifications of only four of the state's nearly 600 certified building officials since 1998. Yet board records which are so disorganized that the agency could not even say exactly how many certified building officials are in the state indicate that as many as 20 percent of them would have faced revocation for failing to meet minimum requirements for certification if they had been held to agency regulations.

And the four who were decertified were penalized not because they had failed to maintain their certification requirements which they had but because they hadn't shown up for a hearing to explain why they had fallen behind.

Delinquent building officials who did attend hearings were granted extensions, an apparent practice of rubber-stamping extension requests that renders the board's own disciplinary rules meaningless.

Even so, the agency's director, Thomas L. Rogers who himself was rated unqualified to be a local inspector a mere two years before being appointed the state's chief of inspections insists that the board aggressively enforces certification requirements, saying that ''no one's escaping'' agency scrutiny.

But even qualified inspectors say they seldom have the time or resources to perform rigorous inspections.

''This is terrible to say, but some of these inspections are almost cursory,'' said Sharon building inspector Joseph X. Kent. ''If you look at a house and it looks like everything is being done like it's supposed to be done ... you're not going to give that house much more of an inspection.'' In the meantime, Vargas, like other homeowners who have already poured their life savings into badly flawed homes, has little recourse against city and town inspectors: A 1982 decision by the state Supreme Judicial Court protects municipalities from being sued if inspectors negligently issue building permits or occupancy permits.

Instead, victims like the Vargases must hire lawyers to sue home builders, all the while inhabiting dwellings that fail to meet even the minimum standards of the state building code. One example from the Vargas case: The North Dartmouth contractor, Roberto Barbosa, neglect ed to install a center support column in the garage, putting the master bedroom above it at risk of collapsing. As a result, Vargas and his wife sleep elsewhere. And as the Vargases discovered, even home buyers who prevail in court often win hollow victories, since many builders routinely declare bankruptcy to dodge judgments against them.

After the couple sued Barbosa who, they later discovered, was unlicensed he filed for bankruptcy protection. Later, after the couple won a verdict against Gary Edwards,cq the Fairhaven builder who obtained a building permit for Barbosa, Edwards, too, sought shelter in bankruptcy court.

Edwards said he got the permit for Barbosa as a favor, but said he was unaware the house had been built until the town notified him of the problems. Barbosa could not be reached.

Vargas, meanwhile, is left to wonder if he was a victim of incompetence or if his lack of sight made him an easy target.

''My wife would say, `This looks crooked,''' Vargas recalled, `and [Barbosa would] say to me, `Believe me, Mr. Vargas, this is not crooked. This house is big, so it presents optical illusions.' But it's not an optical illusion. It's crook ed. And my wife wasn't wrong.''

Their plight is not uncommon.

A four-part Globe Spotlight Team series April 29-May 2 examining substandard home construction found that municipal inspectors routinely overlook or ignore construction defects, including problems as glaring as those found in the Vargas's home.

Consider the building errors uncovered at Hopkinton Highlands, a luxury subdivision by Toll Brothers. In homes that sell for $700,000 and up, a building consultant retained by the Globe do cumented walls not properly secured to foundations, inadequate support for carrying beams, and brick fronts so sloppily built they may cause water problems. All are serious flaws, but none had been cited by the town's building department. Even chimneys built too short to meet code, obvious to anyone driving by, went unnoticed by town officials.

Several local inspectors and building commissioners interviewed by the Globe conceded that they often do not have enough time to conduct thorough inspections of new homes. Typically, five or six inspections, often as brief as 10 minutes each, take place during the construction of a new home, which can easily take more than a year to build.

But there is another reason for minimal oversight: Kent, the Sharon official, and other building officials said revenue-hungry municipal officials view their offices as cash cows to fund other programs, leaving them chronically short-staffed.

The fact is, many municipalities rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in permit fees collected by local building departments, which typically see little of that money funneled back into their budgets so they can adequately oversee an explosive growth in home building. Instead, most permit revenue is fed into a city or town's general operating fund.

High-growth Hopkinton, for example, took in roughly $762,000 in building permit fees last year and is projected to reap several hundred thousand dollars more than that this year, yet its building department's annual budget is less than $200,000 leaving a surplus of well over a half-million dollars.

Richard H. Gooding chairman of Hopkinton's Board of Selectmen, said town officials are committed to giving Building Commissioner Richard J. Bowker ''all the help in the world he needs.'' But Gooding said the town is reluctant to hire new employees since a sudden change in the economy could lead to layoffs, and prefers instead to contract for extra help with neighboring towns.

Adequate funding is a struggle at every level. The Board of Building Regulations and Standards has one part-time and nine full-time employees, and Rogers noted that his budget has remained fairly static since the agency was formed three decades ago.

Many building officials say their broad range of duties, including zoning, code enforcement, and plans examination for all residential, commercial, and industrial construction from schools and nursing homes to malls and movie theaters frequently leaves them strapped for time.

Compounding the problem, meager salaries make it difficult for communities to attract qualified competent inspectors, especially during a building boom that's yielded more high-paying work than most contractors can handle. Local inspectors generally make $35,000 to $45,000, while building commissioners typically make between $40,000 and $60,000.

Since the Globe's findings were published, Bowker has dismissed the part-time inspector whose job it was to oversee the Toll job site. But that inspector was paid just $25,000 a year.

State inspectors, of which there are only 14 in Massachusetts, often make even less than their municipal counterparts, with salaries ranging from $38,000 to $50,000.

According to a 1992 state law, building officials must be certified and must maintain their certification by earning 45 hours of continuing-education credit every three years. One reason for the requirement: The state building code, which is updated periodically, contains about 800 pages of language that is complex, technical, and often subject to interpretation.

Building officials can receive credit hours by taking approved classes at area colleges or universities, or courses offered by national building associations. They can also earn limited credit by attending meetings of one of the state's three building officials associations, although Kent described those as ''useless, a bunch of knuckleheads in a room.''

In an interview with the Globe, Rogers said local building officials know ''the end is near'' if they don't keep up with their credit hours. But according to But according to board records, 112 of the state's nearly 600 certified building officials had earned fewer than the minimum required hours when the most recent three-year cycle ended in 1999.

The board says not all those officials are delinquent, since some began their jobs in the middle of the cycle. But the agency did not respond to multiple requests to clarify its data.

Rogers insists that the state can't dismiss every building official who falls behind, particularly small-town inspectors whose communities lack the funds to send them to out-of-town classes or whose workloads leave little time for coursework. But Rogers himself is emblematic of a systemic problem.

In 1990, the board found Rogers, then an administrative assistant to the executive director at the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, ''not qualified'' to be a local inspector because he did ''not meet the requirements.'' Two years later, he was named administrator of the board, making him the state's chief inspector and putting him at the helm of the very agency that earlier had judged him unfit for a lower-level inspector position.

Asked why the board rated him unqualified, Rogers asserted that ''skulduggery'' was at the root of the unfavorable rating, and said the board recanted and found him qualified after he made a call to a politically connected friend.

Before his stint at the Water and Sewer Commission, Rogers was assistant building commissioner at the city of Boston's Inspectional Services Department from 1984 to 1987, where he was described by City Council President Joseph M. Tierney at a 1985 news conference as having ''no qualifications, no management experience, and no leadership ability.''

Given the gaps in the municipal inspection system, and the fact that local inspectors are enforcing a minimum-standards code, many building specialists strongly recommend that people buying new homes hire private inspectors. All the while thin oversight by state and local officials often leaves home buyers defenseless.

Consider the case of Edward and Mary Bobka who four years ago moved into a $330,000 house in Franklin. The house was later found to be in violation of several code requirements, and the town building commissioner ordered the builder, Toll Brothers, to fix the problems.

Toll appealed the findings to the state, which upheld the findings and ordered the defects fixed. But the citations ultimately proved toothless: The problems were never corrected. After being threatened with a lawsuit by the Bobkas' lawyer, Toll bought back the house from the couple earlier this year.

The Vargases have fared worse. Their home looks much older than its seven years. Floor joists are riddled with cracks and dry rot; the brick front steps have pulled away from the house, leaving a gaping crack between the stairs and front door; the first and second floors are visibly out of alignment; and doors throughout the house do not shut close due to uneven settling.

The condition of the house has so discouraged the couple that they have yet to fully unpack; bags and boxes of clothing and other household items remain piled in various rooms as the Vargases wait for repairs to be made a prospect that seems increasingly unlikely as time goes by.

''All we want is to get the house we paid for,'' said Richard Vargas. ''That's all we've ever wanted. We just want to put these courts and awyers and stressful conditions behind us.''

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached by e-mail at pfeiffer@globe.com