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Reminder: New Plan Review Process Effective January 10

Illustration of several computers being used to review the same shared file.On January 10, SDCI transitioned to providing plan reviews via plan mark-up instead of traditional letters. We appreciate your understanding as we rolled out the technology and staff learned new procedures.

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 as (document type Plan Set or Plan Set – Land Use) for the next review cycle. We have a helpful video to help you learn how to navigate the new process.

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.

We recognize that this transition requires changes to how you respond to our correction reports. We firmly believe that the changes we are instituting will lead to a reduction in the number of review cycles required to issue a permit.

  • Remember, 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 be new 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.

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. One thing that would allow us to work more quickly is to have applicants include a good set of bookmarks in every plan set that is submitted. 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.