Closeout and Certification

Our dedication to closest and certification is the best in the industry and we can prove it. About 12 years ago DSA went through somewhat of a crisis. California Watch had done some investigative reporting and written multiple articles outlining the giant backlog of school projects that remained closed without certification. They told the public that this meant there were thousands of school sites that were possibly unsafe. This caused quite a shakeup at DSA and resulted in the hiring of a new State Architect with a mandate to solve the problem.

Six months earlier, unaware of the investigative reporting in the works, but keenly aware of the major flaws in the certification process, we set about creating a closeout and certification system that we intended to use on our projects to fix these problems. We hired a consultant and spent over $40k to take our vision and create a database that could be used by our inspectors in the field and would allow collaboration by all other team members including architect, engineers, district personnel, lab of record and construction manager. It was our goal to have a place where reports would be submitted and tracked by all members so issues could be resolved as the projects progressed instead of at the very end, which s how it had always been done.

When DSA hired a new State Architect and announced they intended to tackle this issue, Stephen Payte contacted the DSA office and volunteered to present our system. Stephen gave a presentation at DSA headquarters that went out to all 4 offices about what we were creating and what we thought DSA needed to accomplish. This helped shape the ideas behind the DSA box and the relative success of closeout and certification since its inception. It is not perfect and we had many other features we would have liked to see implemented, but the difference between the box and the old process is night and day.

We have always taken closeout and certification seriously and continue to do so to this day.

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