Having worked as a building inspector in Dedham for 18 years, and as a remodeling contractor for 25 years before that, Jim Sullivan has been on both sides of the construction coin. Accepting the job as Needham’s building commissioner, he said, was the obvious next step.
After so many years working in the town next door, Sullivan said starting someplace new was a plus for him. He said he finds Needham to be an intriguing town with many positive aspects that made the role appealing. “They’ve got bylaws and processes for most things,” he said. “When you have a process that’s written down and you can say, ‘Well, that’s the process the town uses and it’s not my opinion,’ it has more power behind it.”
He likes that Needham is busy with plenty of work to fill the days — much of it due to new construction. “In the interview process they told me they did 100 teardowns last year. That was shocking. On top of new construction, that’s a lot of new houses every year.”
He sees value in the work of the large house committee, especially for the level of control the town could have to mitigate building in already heavily congested areas. “I think it was needed to try to limit the size of these houses on smaller lots,” he said. “You want to keep the town affordable for current residents, that’s my view.”
But, Sullivan said, there’s a place for everything. “If you’ve got a full acre of land, fine — you can build an 8,000-square-foot house. If you have a 7,500-square-foot [lot], a 10,000, and you’re trying to squeeze in a 5,000-square-foot house, it’s doable, but for every house it shouldn’t be,” he said. “I think the town needs a tool they can use as part of the process.” His two predecessors helped shape the policy.
Sullivan has been impressed with how organized Needham is and with the investment it makes in running the town well. “They have a really set plan, and they make long-term plans and they try to fulfill them,” he said. He appreciates the fact that Needham’s building department has four dedicated employees.
For Sullivan, the new position is a shift from being consistently in the field to taking a more managerial role. In the busy summer season he might be doing inspections more than once a week, but in general he plans to be in-house and available. “That’s a plus because if there’s an issue, it gets taken care of right away,” he said. “That’s a plus for us and a plus for the people coming in and asking questions.”
One of his primary focuses is the review stage of permit applications. “It has to be 100% clear what is being built. That means every room on the plan is labeled.” He doesn’t like the label “bonus room.” “That doesn’t define what the use is, so five years from now it turns into a bedroom and it wasn’t built as a bedroom, it doesn’t have a smoke detector in it.” He hopes this will help home buyers years from now. “Having good records makes things (easier) in the future. I might not be here, the other inspectors might not be here, but they can pull up what was approved and be confident that that’s what was permitted.”
He also said keeping projects moving by ensuring timely inspections is key for him. “If someone’s doing a bathroom in your house and you only have one or two bathrooms with a full house, it’s important that we get out there same-day to move that along.” He said contractors often blame the inspectors for delaying projects, but he wants homeowners and builders alike to know that the department keeps a log of all calls and can check whether a request for inspection has been attempted. “Technology has helped us keep a better reputation.”
Keeping contractors accountable is top of his list. “You see some of the same guys dozens of times a year. You get to know people but you don’t want to become their friends because if you get too friendly people expect you to do them a favor, and that’s just not the job. There’s the right way and the wrong way,” Sullivan said. “We work for the residents of Needham.”
As in every industry, Sullivan said, construction comes with the good and the bad — house flippers falling into the latter category in his opinion. “Every penny they spend on the house is less they’re making, so they try to shortcut everything,” he said. “Guys like that are in and out of town, they’re not contractors that work here all the time or live in the town and have a reputation. That’s mostly where your problems come from.”
And occasionally projects go bad and homeowners look to the building department to bail them out. “As an inspector you have very little control over that. We can only do so much with what the law allows us,” he said. “You try to guide people through the problems, but we can’t recommend other contractors, we can’t say, ‘do this, do this.’ That’s not legal and that’s not our job. The line is, ‘We approve, we deny, we don’t design.’ That’s a good rule.”
His advice to homeowners embarking on any project is to clearly set their budget and ask people you trust for builder recommendations. “Go into their house, see what they’ve done, see the quality of the work. Don’t assume anything. Don’t find somebody online. And don’t look for a good deal because they’re usually not that good.”
On the commercial side, Sullivan will be more directly involved, managing several different departments to get a project to its start date. “It’s a lot of detail, a lot of committees and a lot of approvals.” While a residential project may take a month to fully permit, a commercial project could take six to eight months.
Having been on the job less than two weeks, Sullivan is still getting up to speed on many of the infrastructure projects in the pipeline. He didn’t want to weigh in yet, but when asked about the Pollard Middle School project, he said, “My advice is build for what you need.”
Although the cost of building schools has skyrocketed across the state, renovations can often cost more than a new build, he said. “Some of these schools are so old that you’re better off tearing them down. Their lifespan ended 50 years ago.” With all the electronics, such as smartboards, laptops and phones that require power, rehabbing an existing building might involve rewiring the entire space to bring it up to current standards. “It’s not cheap, so you’re not saving a lot of money,” he said. “It may be less expensive, but you still have an old building and the maintenance on that. Whereas a new building, you really don’t have maintenance for at least 10 years, and even then the maintenance is still minimal.” But, he said, every project is different and needs to be considered case by case.
Sullivan said he’s excited for this new position and feels lucky that there is so much support from other town departments such as HR and IT. “Lots of towns don’t have that,” he said. “Needham does a lot of things right that a lot of towns don’t even look at doing.”
Sullivan replaced Joe Prondak, who left in November after serving in the role for two and a half years.
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