City of Seguin agrees to more help in response to growing demand for inspections

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today

Darren Dunn

(Seguin) — The city of Seguin is looking for a little bit of help when it comes to dealing with all the growth that’s currently taking place inside the city limits. The Seguin City Council on Tuesday approved an agreement that will allow the city’s planning staff to hire a third party vendor to handle some limited building and home inspections inside the city. 
 
Planning Director Pamela Centeno says her staff has been working hard to try to keep up with the demand for inspections, but she says they need the additional help to make sure that the projects are done right and will not delay the work that needs to be done by the developers. 
 
“You have in front of you a professional services agreement for a third-party inspector. This is to supplement the city’s inspection team. I’ve given you some numbers there. You’ve all heard, and you’ve all seen the growth that we are going through. We did hit a record yesterday in inspections. Our building inspection’s team conducted 120 inspections (Monday). We worked late until 6:30 to get that done so we are still trying to offer next day inspections as much as we can, but we need a little bit of help,” said Centeno.
 
Council members supported providing the help to staff, but they said they wanted to make sure that the inspectors, provided by the company, worked in a way that was consistent with the process, codes and values currently in place within the department.  Centeno says they have taken all the necessary steps to make sure that staff has a chance to weigh-in on that work once it’s done. 
 
“I conducted interviews with three different firms. The one that we selected, he has come in and spoken with us and the building officials sat down as well, and we talked about the process, but we’ve gone through the codes. Through this process, they will always be very closely connected to us. They will send daily reports on the inspection results. If there is any issue or concerns from the contractors or from the third-party inspector, we will still be very involved in that process, so we are just not handing it over. We are still working with them but they are going out and doing the inspections and sending the results to us,” said Centeno.
 
Centeno says there are several housing projects that are in various stages of development, including an apartment building that will bring 170 new units to Seguin. Several housing, commercial and manufacturing developments are also underway currently in the city of Seguin. 

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