Wednesday, December 15, 1999
City staff holds ‘once-a-millennium’
reunion
By Bill Whitaker
What do city building inspectors dream of come Christmas?
Answer: A cozy little manger, but only if it boasts the highest
carpentry, plumbing and electrical standards. That goes whether
the inhabitants are divine or merely mortal.
That’s probably one of the nicer things ever uttered about
building inspectors. Among some businessmen, homeowners and construction
contractors in town, building inspectors rank just below journalists,
IRS officials and lawyers in popularity.
“Oh, not lawyers!” joked city building official Cassie
Hughes, who currently oversees a staff of 14 at City Hall, including
the building inspectors who frequently emerge, seemingly to bedevil
businessmen and homeowners. Their impact is so frustrating to
some that building inspectors routinely figure in the fiery rhetoric
offered whenever somebody runs for City Council.
Which is why Hughes decided that, before the millennium was
out, she would have a reunion of city building inspectors, past
and present, just to let them know someone appreciated their work.
Sure enough, two dozen building inspectors, some retired, others
now working in other cities, gathered in Abilene’s otherwise
abandoned City Hall Saturday to reminisce.
“I just wanted to do something to show how aware we are
of all the things they’ve done,” Hughes explained. “Today
we go into the buildings these people inspected years ago, whenever
there’s, say, an addition to be made, and we look at the
records they made. So they’re still having an impact on the
work we’re doing now.
“You know, when you think of the history of Abilene, we
have not had a major building catastrophe or failure or fire.
I think that’s a credit to the building inspectors. You could
say they’ve done a good job of trying to ensure Abilene is
safe.”
That’s why, at least once every millennium, even local
grinches might concede honoring building inspectors is a worthy
idea.
Seeing double
Some building inspectors say that, for all the griping one
hears come election time, few builders and businessmen voice serious
complaints.
“You talk to any builder I’ve ever done a job with
and I don’t think they hated to see me coming,” insisted
69-year-old Gene Fraser, a one-time building contractor who worked
as an inspector from 1975 till 1992. “I don’t know how
it is now out there, but I never felt I had a bad relationship
with the people I worked with.”
On the other hand, former inspector John Pierce, 47, currently
building official for the city of Lubbock, concedes it’s
not a job for those faint of heart.
“It’s not easy work being an inspector, though I
think some imagine it’s going to be,” he said of a job
that often attracts folks from building professions. “This
sure isn’t semi-retirement. For the most part, you’re
dealing with people you’ve once competed with in the building
business. That adds one more element of friction when you tell
them they need to do something.”
Fortunately, some building inspectors have a sense of humor,
a quality that emerged during Saturday afternoon’s reunion.
The best tale came from Pierce himself. He recalled the time
a local eye doctor went out and bought a piece of property solely
because his business address would be 2020. Alas, this ingenious
marketing ploy went to blazes when city officials, making out
street signs for the new division, discovered they’d made
an error on their original designs.
Result: Suddenly the eye doctor’s business address would
no longer be 2020.
“It was terrible,” Pierce said. “He’d already
gone out and bought the land and gotten an architect to do the
building. So he came back and asked us to make an exception, so
that his address could still be 2020. He begged us and begged
us and, of course, we tried to explain we just couldn’t do
it.”
Hughes, 44, remembers how desperate the eye doctor was. The
fact such a change would throw the then-evolving 911 emergency
grid system out of whack had no impact on the man. The eye doctor
was seeing only red.
“He was in the office,” Hughes remembered, “and,
well, he got down on one knee and said, ‘Please, please,
give me 2020!’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, get up, get up!’
Really, it was one of the most awkward moments in my career.”
During the past fiscal year, the city’s building inspection
team did 23,420 inspections involving everything from building,
plumbing and electrical concerns to condemnation. Hughes insists
her crew has encountered few complaints from people, “though
when we tell them they need to do something that’s going
to cost them money, it can be frustrating.”
And those who malign the building inspection staff, regardless
of whether it’s election time or not?
“Usually they’re the same people who don’t like
the IRS and don’t like having to stop for red lights,”
Hughes said.
Bill Whitaker can be reached at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
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