Seattle residents looking to schedule building inspections might need to pencil in a little bit of patience as the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) announces a temporary outage in their systems. The SDCI is preparing to upgrade its online permit and inspection system, known as the Seattle Services Portal, and this move is set to take place from Thursday, July 11, at 5:30 p.m. until Monday, July 15, at 7:00 a.m. There's a slight risk that this service interruption could persist into the following workday.
Digging into the "whys" of the situation, the SDCI is migrating the system to cloud servers to "improve system performance and reliability." This was explained in a detailed notice on Building Connections, the SDCI's blog. During the outage, neither online nor phone scheduling will be available, so stakeholders are urged to schedule their inspections for the dates between July 12 and July 16 ahead of time, by 3:00 p.m. on July 11. It's a bit of an inconvenience for sure, but one that is aimed to ultimately to bring better service in the long haul.
For those concerned about inspections during this period, the SDCI has offered some reassurance. All inspections that have been scheduled in advance for this timeframe will still be performed as usual. However, they remind customers to have all the required plans and permits available onsite on the day of the inspection. In the case of informational delays, the SDCI promises to leave a paper copy of the inspection results at the respective site on the same day of the inspection.
Results from inspections conducted during the system upgrade will not be immediately available online. To be precise, they won't be updated in the Seattle Services Portal until at least July 15, when inspectors will finally be able to access and enter data into the system. Patience will be key as the SDCI works to bring a more robust, reliable service to its user base – embracing a small hurdle now to leap into a more streamlined future for Seattle's building and inspection processes.
