It’s been just under five months since the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs broke up into two smaller agencies — and reviews of the change, at least so far, are mixed.
DCRA’s highly publicized split in October came after years of residential complaints about the sprawling former agency, which was responsible for regulating businesses and enforcing compliance with the city’s building code. Leaders at the new Department of Buildings (DOB) and Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (DLCP) spent the past two years preparing for the change, which lawmakers generally said was intended to streamline services.
But at a D.C. Council performance oversight hearing Thursday, some frustrated residents and housing advocates said they haven’t observed much of a difference so far at the DOB, which inherited DCRA’s building inspection and zoning compliance responsibilities as well as the former agency’s director, Ernest Chrappah.
Advertisement
“I can’t say, director, I’m feeling very good at the moment — there’s been 46 witnesses and an awful lot of complaints about shoddy construction,” D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson (D) told Chrappah after hours of public testimony. “This hearing feels, to me, almost like we’ve gone back in time to hearings a couple of years ago when there were so many complaints about the effectiveness of the inspection process.”
Mendelson has been DCRA’s most vocal critic on the council: He spearheaded the bill to break it up into two agencies over an attempted veto from Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who had argued the split would be costly and impede steps DCRA was taking to address its issues. The chairman publicly criticized Bowser when in late September, one day before DCRA’s split, the mayor announced that she was appointing Chrappah as the acting director of the new DOB. Retaining DCRA’s leadership, Mendelson argued, would prevent DOB from being able to achieve a truly fresh start in its operations — which was the intent behind creating the new agencies.
But Chrappah said Mendelson should also look at the full picture: Generally speaking, more residents are now living in better housing conditions and homes that are built up to code than in the past, he asserted. Fines had been levied against the problematic housing properties mentioned throughout the hearing, he said, and DOB works with the attorney general to pursue additional enforcement.
Advertisement
“I also get angry when I hear about residents who live in terrible housing conditions. I also get annoyed and angry when I hear about construction defects,” Chrappah said in response to Mendelson. “The feelings you have, I have the same feelings.”
Chrappah said DOB had also exceeded target metrics related to performance in fiscal 2022 as well as the first quarter of fiscal 2023 — including the number of housing code violations it abated and vacant properties it helped return to productive use. He also touted the DOB’s revamped public dashboard, which includes a look at those performance metrics, in addition to new tools that allow users to look up vacant properties by neighborhood, and view the average time it takes to get a construction permit.
“I try to balance my frustration with the positive,” he added.
Advertisement
Many who critiqued DOB’s performance at Thursday’s hearing discussed issues long associated with DCRA: nuisance vacant properties that have long gone unaddressed and failures to ensure building construction adheres to city code. Testimony included residents from buildings and housing complexes that have notoriously had problems with housing code enforcement, like Marbury Plaza and Woodberry Village in Southeast Washington.
Others questioned Bowser’s choice to keep Chrappah at the helm, noting that some of DOB’s processes mirror patterns from before.
Sarah Bagge, a Ward 4 resident who purchased a condo in a newly renovated Brightwood Park building in 2019 with the help of a District program for first-time home buyers, testified that she and her neighbors began experiencing problems not long after moving in. They consulted a building code professional who found “extensive” code violations. When a DCRA inspector did their own review in 2021, Bagge said, they found 47 violations, including walls that were not sufficiently constructed to stop a fire from spreading.
The code violations had apparently been missed by a third-party inspector approved by DCRA during construction, Bagge testified. She said that DCRA’s inspection report indicated the third-party inspector had “failed to find dozens of violations, including several ‘life safety’ violations.”
Advertisement
Moreover, DCRA sent her and her neighbors notices to correct the issues within 90 days; a cost estimate to address them, she said, was hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her only recourse was taking legal action against the developer, which has added to the costs of essential repairs.
“It’s likely that developers in the District often cut corners knowing that DCRA, and now the Department of Buildings under the same leadership, will not stop them,” Bagge said. “I’m concerned that nothing will change under the same leadership and ask the council members here today how the harm that we had already incurred will be addressed.”
Chrappah said he would ask his team to look into Bagge’s case, with Mendelson calling the fiasco “extremely unfair to condominium purchasers.” Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) later replied that the issue was recurring: “Other residents in my Ward who are dealing with the same issue have reached out to the attorney general’s office. Please do reach out to the [Office of Attorney General]” she added.
In addition to highlighting the agency’s performance metrics, Chrappah also said that DOB avoided any interruptions to service while transitioning from DCRA. In the name of advancements, he said that DCRA was experimenting with artificial intelligence for its permit approval process and aimed to strengthen its enforcement capabilities to prevent issues like the ones Bagge described.
Advertisement
“While DCRA isn’t a perfect agency by any measure, it’s not every day we see a large breakup of a complicated agency,” said Troy Prestwood, president of the Ward 8 Democrats who offered rare praise of Chrappah during his testimony. “I can’t think of the last time a director of an agency had to break that agency up into two separate agencies while continuing to run the agency at hand,” he said, adding that he was speaking in his personal capacity.
Asked in early January about progress at the two new agencies, Mendelson said in an interview he had fewer concerns about DLCP, which he called “the less troubled half of DCRA.” But his concerns remained about Chrappah, whose appointment as DOB’s head will require confirmation by the D.C. Council.
While Mendelson said he’d received fewer complaints about the reorganized DOB compared with the feedback he often received about its predecessor, he stressed that the agency was still in its nascent phase.
“It’s not a disaster so far,” Mendelson added.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c3%2BOaWloamRksaS%2BwGabnqiRp8Gusc2tZKieXZfCqrjDoqWgq12ZsG6vzqanpZmZo8G0ew%3D%3D