Permitting and inspection delays for home renovation projects remain a significant barrier to both climate progress and residential construction — they’re driving up costs and straining workforces among contractors and building departments alike. SPUR is cosponsoring two pieces of legislation — Assembly Bill 1738 (Carrillo) and Senate Bill 222 (Wiener) — that would reduce friction at key chokepoints in the permitting and inspections processes by expanding best practices already being implemented by many cities and counties. Both bills would make electrification more affordable and accessible for Californians facing rising costs for energy, housing, and home upgrades.
Expanded Use of Remote Virtual Inspections
SPUR is co-sponsoring AB 1738 with Permit Power. The bill would require local building departments throughout California to offer remote virtual inspections (RVIs) for water heaters, HVAC, solar and battery projects, home hardening in compliance with California’s Wildland Urban Interface code, minor electrical work, and most accessory dwelling unit/junior accessory dwelling unit installations. Such inspections allow owners, contractors, and building department inspectors to use photos, recorded video, or live video to conduct inspections remotely, rather than driving to the jobsite.
Long inspection windows and delays for simple home renovations take time away from the more urgent need to build new housing, and they drive up the cost of electrification, home hardening, and other projects. Many of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning contractors SPUR interviewed for a recent policy brief reported waiting 2 to 6 hours for inspections that take only 5 to 15 minutes, resulting in full-day work stoppages. Homeowners can face more than $1,000 in cost increases due to full-day work stoppages — increases that lead many homeowners to bypass the permitting process. SPUR found that in most jurisdictions, fewer than 20% of water heater changeouts were permitted; in many, only 5% to 10% were.
AB 1738 aims to modernize California’s building inspection system to make permitting faster, more flexible, and less costly for homeowners, contractors, and local governments. As SPUR reported in a recent article, RVIs save contractors and city workers travel time, reduce building department backlogs, speed up permitting and the completion of home retrofit and electrification projects, and ensure that city staff focus on higher-complexity inspections and new home construction. More than 19 California jurisdictions — including Santa Barbara, Placer County, the City Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, and Santa Rosa — offer RVI programs.
AB 1738 passed out of its first committee, the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee, 12–0 with bipartisan support after testimony from SPUR and Placer County’s chief building official, Tim Wegner, who described the many benefits of the RVI program that Placer implemented in 2019. As he detailed in his testimony, the technology has saved the county’s building department significant time and money, and not once has any contractor or homeowner misrepresented work or misused the tool. AB 1738 has now passed out of its second Assembly committee, Local Government, 10-0 and is now awaiting referral to the Appropriations Committee.
The coalition supporting AB 1738 includes wildfire groups, housing allies, and clean energy advocates.
Heat Pump Access
SPUR is co-sponsoring SB 222, the Heat Pump Access Act, with the Building Decarbonization Coalition and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The bill aims to modernize and streamline California’s outdated permitting infrastructure for heat pump installations. Heat pumps are critical for helping households access the cooling and air filtration they need to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and poor air quality. Last summer was Earth’s hottest on record. California averages 35 dangerous heat days per year. By 2050, 50 dangerous days per year are expected. More than a quarter of Californians and 54% of San Francisco Bay Area residents currently lack access to cooling, and heat pumps are a crucial and highly energy efficient tool for addressing this gap.
California’s climate action plan was praised globally for its goal of achieving net neutrality by 2045, which would require slashing emissions by 85% and air pollution by 71%. To achieve these laudable emissions targets, California will need to convert at least 20% of existing building stock to electric appliances and install 6 million heat pumps by 2030. Achieving this scale of deployment will be impossible without ensuring that building owners can transition to heat pumps easily and affordably.
Unfortunately, building owners and contractors face barriers to securing permits to install heat pump equipment, including long inspection wait times, onerous local architectural requirements, and wide variations in requirements across jurisdictions. For heat pump water heater installations, building owners must obtain several types of permits. The cost of securing a permit can range from $50 to more than $2,000, depending on the jurisdiction and its requirements.
SB 222 takes a comprehensive approach to standardizing the permitting process for heat pump installations statewide, reducing time constraints and lowering costs for contractors and consumers alike. The bill would require jurisdictions to implement an automated permitting system for simple installations, establish guardrails around burdensome setback and noise limitations, obtain a single permit for heat pump installations, and prohibit homeowner associations from imposing architectural review standards that prevent the adoption of clean appliances.
SB 222 passed out of both the Senate Housing and Senate Local Government committees in January and is awaiting referral on the Assembly side.
Learn more about solutions to heat pump equipment installation problems in our brief Greenlighting Green Heat.