Back on January 10th, SDCI transitioned to providing plan reviews via plan mark-up instead of traditional letters. This Building Connections article serves as a resources refresher for applicants responding to review comments.
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 response letters corresponding to each correction letter. (Note: You will still receive correction summaries 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 a rule, please respond by embedding your responses in the marked-up plan set per our correction response process.
- Remember, as in our previous 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 only after all reviews have been completed in the review cycle
- The key refresher this article is about are:
- 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 Reader (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.