Building Connections: Exploring the DC Department of Buildings

Hello and welcome to Building Connections, a serial opinion column that will explore numerous aspects of enforcement policy at the District of Columbia Department of Buildings (DOB). Here, my colleagues and I will inform the public about DOB initiatives and dispel myths around District policy.

Along the way, we hope to create a space for productive engagement on regulatory enforcement with District residents thinking about these issues. Yes, DOB is a regulatory agency, so enforcement is part and parcel to our mission. So, too, is acting as a positive catalyst for economic development. We must do both.

When our agency was created from the old Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, the law established four appointed positions: Director, Zoning Administrator, Chief Building Official, and Strategic Enforcement Administrator (most agencies only have an appointed director). I’m the strategic enforcement administrator at DOB. You may have seen all four of us being confirmed by the DC Council on October 18, 2023. It has been a pleasure to work with Director Brian Hanlon, Zoning Administrator Kathleen Beeton, and Chief Building Official (CBO) Nicole Rogers. In future installments of this column, you will hear from them directly.

My area is enforcement. Within DOB’s organizational structure, my teams perform housing and property maintenance inspections, as well as vacant buildings. Broadly speaking, these teams are responsible for existing buildings. On the other hand, CBO Rogers’ teams are responsible for permitting and construction of buildings. Zoning Administrator Beeton’s teams deal with questions about building use and compliance with the zoning regulations, which are related to building design. However, enforcement touches the work of the entire agency. My office also issues all DOB-related fines, and develops the agency’s multi-year strategic enforcement plan.

That leads me to the first of what I hope will be many exciting announcements made in this space: DOB has just released its first yearly code enforcement report for Fiscal Year 2023. If the strategic enforcement plan is a set of long-term enforcement goals for the agency, the yearly enforcement report operates as a periodic review of how those goals are coming along. It also contains a wealth of data about DOB’s enforcement initiatives.

Here are some topline numbers to frame your understanding of DOB’s work. In FY23, DOB responded to almost 20,000 “complaints.” A “complaint” means that a member of the public reached out to ask the agency to investigate something that was wrong, such as rental housing in disrepair, a vacant building, or illegal construction. Those 20,000 complaints are not all instances of DOB’s customer engagement. The number comes after removing duplicate requests on the same subjects and is limited to enforcement topics. DOB ultimately identified more than 30,000 violations from these complaints. After discovery, but before the report was produced, DOB confirmed that about 40% of those violations were fixed. (As an aside, please use 311 to file a complaint – it is the most expedient tool to do so.)

Correcting known violations is the goal. We never want to just “catch” a wrongdoer or collect a fine. We enforce fines to incentivize folks to fix something that’s wrong with a property: for example, repairing rental housing; registering a vacant building; or getting a permit for construction activity. As a result, it is common for DOB to guide somebody back into compliance, and then to reduce or even forgive a fine. One of our most important programs is called “deferred enforcement,” which allows recipients of violations to avoid paying fines if they fix things quickly and provide proof.

We take the fact that only 40% of FY23 violations are confirmed fixed as a challenge for us to improve. Prosecuting a case, or repairing a violation, takes time. DOB cannot collect a fine until the appeals process handled by the Office of Administrative Hearings is completed. The longer a case is open, the more likely it is that DOB convinces the responsible party to make the repair or win the right to collect the fine. Therefore, fine collection and proof of repair as a percentage of cases are expected to rise as all cases age.

Finally, it is important to consider the never-finished work of our data team. The reason DOB can even track when a violation is fixed is because, starting in 2018, we began building the process to log fixes in our data. New refinements are being made all the time. For example, the agency has been reconciling vacant building data with the Office of Tax and Revenue (OTR), and recently rolled out improvements to the user interface for the vacant buildings section of our dashboard. Our data grows more robust as it ages.

That brings me back to the purpose of this series, which is to spark dialogue about DOB’s data and encourage thoughtful engagement around enforcement. We’re also planning deep dives on illegal construction inspections, housing inspections, vacant buildings, zoning, permitting, and more.

Your homework is to read the strategic enforcement plan and yearly enforcement report, and to scour DOB’s public dashboard for the data and information about your favorite subjects. Then, reach out to me at keith.parsons@dc.gov with questions, topics, or concerns, and I will see you again in a few weeks!