Submitted by Ken Watts
The following is a portion of an article written by Margaret Carmel of BoiseDev on February 7, 2023. With the heavy snow load and the seismic activity in Island Park, the county building inspector can be your best friend. Fortunately Fremont County has a very good inspector. A Boise man filed suit against the City of Boise last fall alleging gross negligence after its Planning & Development Services department failed to address changes in building plans to his house or notice major code violations before giving it a certificate of occupancy. On September 9, Alexander Abel filed a complaint in Ada County’s Fourth District Court against the City of Boise seeking damages after he says the city failed to accurately review changes to building plans he submitted to build a home, check for proper structural engineering calculations and didn’t do a thorough enough inspection to catch “glaring” errors before signing off on the final product. In the summer of 2018, Abel said he hired Flynner Homes to design and build a home for himself and his mother to live in. He applied for a building permit and submitted a set of construction plans and other documents prepared by Flynner. These plans included structural calculations completed by a structural engineer to accompany them for building permit staff to review. Abel later parted ways with Flynner before the building permit was issued and the company notified the city they were no longer affiliated with the project in November…… Christensen Homes then altered the construction drawings and created plans for the house with “very significant changes” from the plans originally submitted to the city. These plans included changing the foundation from a concrete slab to a crawl space, reorienting the home and increasing the size to 6 bedrooms. However, despite the changes, Abel says Christen Homes never submitted any new structural calculations to the city and the city never required them to be submitted, the complaint alleged. “Despite there being very obvious and significant structural differences between the Christensen Plans and the Flynner Plans, the city unexplainably relied upon the Flynner Structural Calculations when reviewing and approving the Christensen Plans,” the complaint said. In July 2019, Abel got a building permit and Christensen Homes started work on the project. Between that summer and November 5, 2020, Abel says the city “purportedly” sent its inspectors to the home several times to check if the builder was following the approved plans and building codes. “During the numerous inspections, the City’s inspectors failed to recognize the open and obvious inconsistencies between the construction being performed and the Approved Plans,” the complaint said. The final property inspection before issuing a certification of occupancy was completed on September 10, 2020. A certificate of occupancy was issued that day and officially verified on October 16, 2020, even though Abel says the home did not meet the requirements of the International Residential Code or International Building Code and were not built according to the construction plans. Afterward, Abel hired an outside consultant to inspect the home and learned there were “many code violations” that should have prevented it from being issued safe to live in. On November 5, 2020, Abel says city officials visited the home and confirmed there were numerous code violations in the house and several were missed during the final inspection.
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