Court Opinion

ID: 9593474
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:22:36.251185+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:54:24.027440
License: Public Domain

Agid, J.
(concurring) — I concur in the result reached by the majority because the State did not meet its burden of establishing that the building inspector complied with the requirement of the Uniform Building Code § 202(c) (1988) that he obtain the occupant's permission before entering to do an inspection. The trial court did not find either that Ms. Browning consented to his entry or that her testimony to the contrary was not credible. Because something more than apparent acquiescence is necessary to comply with the Uniform Building Code (UBC) the evidence was properly *101suppressed. Similarly, the State failed to meet its burden of proving that the contractor had requested the inspection and cannot rely on the actual or apparent authority derived from section 305(c) of the code to justify the inspector's entry.
The remainder of the opinion is dicta. There may be some unfortunate consequences flowing from the discussions of both administrative searches and apparent authority, and I believe both should be left to another day.
Section 305(c) of the UBC (1988) provides:
It shall be the duty of the person doing the work authorized by a permit to notify the building official that such work is ready for inspection. . . .
It shall be the duty of the person requesting any inspections required by this code to provide access to and means for inspection of such work.
As a practical matter, these regulations place on the contractor, not the property owner, the responsibility for assuring compliance with the inspection requirements of the code. The contractor is the owner's actual agent for inspection purposes, and it ignores reality to decide that the contractor does not have even apparent authority to consent to an inspection under these circumstances.
UBC § 305(d) requires "a final inspection and approval of all buildings and structures when completed and ready for occupancy and use." Occupancy prior to final inspection is not authorized by the code. Thus under normal circumstances, it will be only the contractor who is in a position to permit entry to the premises. Since the owner's occupancy of the house prior to final inspection was in apparent violation of the UBC and it is the duty of the contractor to call and to arrange access for the final inspection, it unnecessarily confuses the law to say that the UBC requires the owner's permission to enter to perform a final inspection.
It is also unnecessary to characterize this as an administrative "search" under Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. *102523, 18 L. Ed. 2d 930, 87 S. Ct. 1727 (1967). As the Camara Court itself recognized,
[B]ecause the inspections are neither personal in nature nor aimed at the discoveiy of evidence of crime, they involve a relatively limited invasion of the urban citizen's privacy.
387 U.S. at 537.
This inspection was even more remote from the traditional notion of a "search" than were those involved in Camara where inspectors came unbidden to residential premises on a random basis to determine whether they were in compliance with health and safety codes. Under the UBC, construction inspections are requested by the contractor and are not random. They are done at specified times during the construction to enable the contractor to move on to the next stage of the project after the responsible agency has determined that the previous stage complies with the code and the residence will be safe for the occupants of the building when it is completed. See, e.g., UBC § 305(e) (foundation, concrete slab, frame, and lath inspections required prior to final inspection and before covering the work). While the building inspector is a public official, he comes on the premises at the request of the permit applicant to look at construction, not to search for evidence of a crime. There is no basis for confusing the issue by characterizing inspections of this type as "searches".
This case could and should be decided solely on the State's failure to prove compliance with the UBC requirements, leaving questions of actual and apparent authority and administrative searches for a case presenting facts on which we can decide them.