Plans & Permits

While we were waiting for our engineers to finish the plans for our brewery we went over to talk to the construction officials about the permitting process.  As you may recall we needed to get a more detailed set of plans from a licensed engineer for two reasons (1) in order to get permits to do the work and (2) so we could get accurate bid from contractors. 

Our engineers told us that the way the permitting process works is that you submit the plans to the town for review, then once the town approves them you can send the plans out for bid from local contractors.  Makes sense to me.  The logic there is that if you get bids before the town approves the plans and then they change the scope of the work will change which will most likely affect the cost. 

When we spoke to the town about this process they said you submit the applications for construction permits, including the names of all the contractors doing the work when you submit your plans.  Naturally we asked what would happen in the event of any changes the town required.  They lead us to believe that if a licensed engineer signed and sealed the plans and they were up to all NJ state codes there shouldn’t be any changes.   

The problem we had with this process was that once the engineers finish the plans we would then need to take a few weeks to get bids and line up the contractors.  Only then could we submit the plans to the town for review.  If we could have the town officials reviewing the plans while we were working on getting the contractors lined up that would have saved some time. 

We mentioned this to the construction officials and they said we could submit the plans with “to be determined” in the contractor section of the permit application if we wanted to get the process started sooner.  Hopefully that will move the process along, but we image not too much will happen until we get them the names of the people doing the work. 

The plans are supposed to be ready this week so we’ll see what happens once we get them.