SDCI is pleased to announce that we will transition to providing review comments via plan set markup on January 10! We have prepared a short video to help applicants understand the new process. We will also publish step-by-step instructions on the Seattle Services Portal Help Center.
The primary change that we are asking of applicants is that they document responses to comments directly in the plan set provided to them by SDCI at the end of each review cycle instead of sending letters corresponding to each correction letter. (Note: You will still receive correction letters from individual reviews as they are completed.) When all responses are documented, we ask that applicants upload the response plan set (as document type Correction Response Plan Set or Correction Response Plan Set – Land Use) along with the new, clean plan set for the next review cycle.
We recognize that this transition requires changes to how you respond to our correction reports. We are confident that the new plan review process will reduce the number of review cycles required for us to issue a permit. We ask that you bear with us during the first few weeks following the transition as our staff also adopts new business processes to help us realize these improvements.
- Under the new process, you will still:
- Receive email notifications that a review has been completed
- Find review summary reports by discipline in the Seattle Services Portal as they are completed
- Submit updated plan sets after all reviews have been completed
- What will change under this process is:
- When all reviews are completed, you will receive a marked-up plan set which contains the comments from ALL the review disciplines.
- Instead of preparing responses to each individual correction letter as you do today, you will be asked to reply to the comments directly in the marked-up plan set using either Bluebeam (requires a license) or Adobe Acrobat (free). If you work with subconsultants, you will need to coordinate with them to include their comments in your response plan set.
- As we transition to delivering marked up plan sets, you may receive both letters and marked up plan sets with our corrections documented. As a rule, please respond to any letter you receive with a letter and any marked up plan set by embedding your responses in the marked up plan set.
Help us perform reviews more efficiently! As we have worked on this transition, many of our reviewers indicated that they rely on bookmarks to navigate the (sometimes lengthy) plan sets that we receive from applicants. We can review plan sets more quickly when applicants include a good set of bookmarks in every plan set they submit. Please follow the requirements for submitting pdf documents, outlined in Tip 106, General Standards for Plans and Drawings, to include a good set of bookmarks in every plan set you submit. For information on how to add bookmarks to your pdf documents, please refer to the following links for Bluebeam documents and Adobe documents.