AUGUSTA, Maine — Developers and contractors testified to Maine lawmakers Tuesday that prolonged wait periods to get elevator inspections, caused by understaffing, are slowing housing production statewide by weeks and sometimes months.
There are 90 units currently on a waitlist to have an elevator inspected by one of Maine’s two licensed inspectors, senior inspector John Burpee of Maine’s Elevator and Tramway Safety Program told the Legislature’s joint select committee Tuesday. One inspection takes 10 hours to complete, meaning the two employees working together can finish one a day, he said at a presentation to the committee.
“We’re definitely challenged trying to meet all these inspections,” Burpee said.
The inspection program was inundated with requests in the tail of the COVID-19 pandemic, Burpee said, as pandemic-related funding spurred a wave of new buildings being permitted. Since then, he said, that “surge” has passed, but a new one could be on the horizon, as the state needs to ramp up housing production aggressively to meet its housing goals.
A state study released last month found that Maine should build at least 75,000 housing units by 2030 to accommodate its existing and future residents. It doesn’t bode well that Maine’s two elevator inspectors are struggling to sign off on all existing housing units in a timely fashion, legislators and developers acknowledged on Tuesday.
“Maine has the least amount of people supporting the industry as far as elevator inspectors go, and that results in the longest lead times in elevator inspections,” testified Ben Brennan, a sales executive with KONE Elevators & Escalators.
Brennan said he’s also done business in New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, and found Maine to be woefully underresourced by comparison.
Maine’s two inspectors, Stanley Quinn and Glenn Crosby, are charged with inspecting every single elevator installed in buildings around Maine. That includes the elevators in residential and commercial buildings, the elevators found in wind turbines and various other vertical lifts.
Despite the state’s assurance that it’ll discharge Quinn and Crosby to inspect elevators within two to three weeks of being asked to do so, construction managers are waiting weeks and even months for an inspection.
“There’s no predictability, there’s no clarity and it creates real planning issues for us trying to get the building ready for occupancy,” said Tyler Norod, executive director of the Westbrook Housing Authority.
These wait times are a problem not only because they slow down the pace of housing production, but because when it comes to affordable housing, any hang-ups can have costly consequences if deadlines are not met.
“You have to make sure you have your certificate of occupancy in the timeline that you proposed in order to meet all of your capital contribution benchmarks,” said Brian Kilgallen, an affordable housing developer with the Portland-based nonprofit Community Housing of Maine.
Every time a building is late by a month, Kilgallen said, people are without their housing and developers accrue tens of thousands of dollars in fees.
In Maine, an initial elevator inspection usually costs around $500 to $600. Kilgallen knows of other developers working in Vermont and New Hampshire who pay higher fees to get an inspection done, which goes towards hiring additional inspectors. Construction managers and developers in Maine would gladly foot that bill, he said.
“A delay is more expensive than a half percent fee,” Kilgallen said. “This is something that can be easily fixed. I think increasing the fees to allow them to hire more people is definitely more cost efficient for us.”
Another solution proposed to the legislative committee Tuesday was to allow these elevator inspections to occur before the final weeks of a project. There’s an extensive checklist required in order to call for an elevator inspection, Brennan testified. It basically requires a building to be safe and move-in ready by the time the inspection is conducted, he said.
He and Kilgallen see no reason why an elevator inspection can’t be done earlier in the process.
“That issue of whether or not that area is going to be safe [should] be taken up, or under the purview of, the municipality granting the certificate of occupancy inspection,” Kilgallen said.
No action was taken by the legislative committee on Tuesday. The committee’s senate chair, Sen. Teresa Pierce, D-Cumberland, said Wednesday that lawmakers will look into ways to get more staff available to inspect units but likely won’t take up the matter again until the beginning of the January legislative session.
“This isn’t an indictment of the inspections or the state,” Norod said. “We appreciate how hard they’re working with such limited staff in a growing market, right. We just want to give them more support, and we’re willing to pay for it to get there.”