Anchorage officials want private plan review kept, with power to drop poor reviewers

Anchorage's building official and engineering services manager are recommending that the city make its private plan review program permanent, while warning that it carries a conflict of interest: project managers or contractors, not building owners, often pick the engineers who review their plans.

Building Official Greg Soule and Engineering Services Manager Daniel King wrote the Third-Party Plan Review 2026 Annual Report, set to go before the Assembly Tuesday, Oct. 20. They also want clearer authority to remove reviewers who do poor work. Either change would require a new ordinance.

Under the program, builders may hire an approved private engineer or architect to review plans before submitting them to the city. The Assembly expanded it to commercial projects in 2024 and in December 2025 pushed its sunset from the end of 2025 to the end of 2026.

The ordinance expects owners to hire the reviewers. Instead, the report says, project managers or contractors typically choose them for how quickly they finish and whether they agree with the comments. Some engineers have said they knew their drawings had errors and waited for the city to catch them so they would not have to tell the client no.

From June 2025 to June 2026, private reviewers handled eight of roughly 540 commercial permits and 167 of more than 800 residential permits. The department audited two of the commercial reviews and 16 residential ones, finding two structural failures and one fire-life-safety failure among the residential audits.

One reviewer was responsible for "multiple egregious life-safety risks," including missing fire-resistive construction and discontinuous lateral systems. The department met with the reviewer and warned that approval could be revoked.

The report calls the program historically successful for residential projects but says commercial use has been too low to ease the city's workload. With the building safety section fully staffed since December 2025, most permits now average three days or less per review cycle, down from nine days or less at the peak of 2024 staffing problems.

The building official now relies on a fraud provision to act against underperforming reviewers. The proposed language would allow revoking approval for "incompetence or lack of knowledge," an appealable decision, making enforcement easier "without having to prove malintent."