Heaven Doherty is the City of Hermiston’s building inspector. She starts her day at 7 a.m. by answering emails and sorting through same-day inspection requests filling up her inbox. By 9 a.m., she is in the field, doing 20 to 50 inspections until about 5 p.m. on projects ranging from single family homes to apartment complexes with hundreds of units and data centers the size of football fields. On one particularly busy day, she said she racked up six miles’ worth of steps while walking through job sites to inspect the plumbing, wiring, load-bearing walls and more.
And now, after just 18 months on the job, Doherty was awarded the Building Inspector of the Year award from the Oregon Building Officials Association. The Hermiston Herald previously reported news of the award which comes amid a construction boom in the city and rising demand for inspection services. Last year, Hermiston generated more than $200 million in building permit fees and 130 new homes were built.
Doherty shares what it’s like to be, as she says, a building inspector “living my best life in Eastern Oregon.”
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If you’re doing new construction or a remodel in the city of Hermiston – a single-family home, an apartment complex, a retail space, all the way up to a massive new data center – you are most likely going to run into Heaven Doherty. For the last year-and-a-half, Doherty has been Hermiston’s only building inspector. It’s up to her to make sure that the plumbing, the wiring, the load bearing walls and a lot more are all up to code. She’s now getting statewide recognition for her work. Doherty recently received the Building Inspector of the Year award from the Oregon Building Officials Association, and she joins us now. Congratulations and welcome to Think Out Loud.
Heaven Doherty: Hi Dave, thanks for having me.
Miller: Can you describe a typical day?
Doherty: For us here in Hermiston, we have a lot of construction going on. We do about $200 million in permits, about 130 homes, and then a bunch of commercial work. So I get in around 7 a.m., and I spend from 7 to 9 a.m. organizing my inspections or returning phone calls, doing emails. And from 9 to 5 p.m., I’m out inspecting, and I can do anywhere between 20 and 50 inspections a day.
Miller: How could you do 50 inspections at the high end in one day? Because you’re one person, you have to drive around to get from one house in progress to, I don’t know, an apartment building in progress. How do you do 50 in a day? How do you even drive to 50 places in a day?
Doherty: Well, we are a small community in general. We have about 20,000 people so driving isn’t a big deal. But, because I’m multi-certified, I do plumbing, mechanical, structural and residential electrical. I can have several inspections at one property to do. Or even at one data center, I could have 15 inspections at one data center alone. So I spend quite a bit of time at the sites themselves.
Miller: OK, that makes a lot more sense. It’s not necessarily 50 different places, and it counts as an inspection if you’re looking at some new plumbing thing and you check that off and that’s its own specific inspection?
Doherty: Correct.
Miller: Let’s take a step back. I do want to hear more about the work itself, but how did you end up in this career? My understanding is you’ve had other careers leading up to it.
Doherty: I have. In my early 20s, I worked for a general contractor for about eight years, and I did contract management and project management. From there, I moved on and did various jobs, but I worked for the City of Pendleton for about 13 years in finance and public works. I always knew I wanted to get back into the building department. So eventually there was an opening and I got in. I was a permit tech at that time, issuing permits and taking phone calls in the office. But I had a building official that really believed in me and thought I would make a good inspector. He pushed me to become an inspector. So I did. I went through the Chemeketa College Inspection Technology Program and got a degree in Inspection Technology. And here I am, living my best life.
Miller: Why did he push you into it, do you think?
Doherty: I think that I really had a drive and I love construction. I think he saw something in me that he thought would make a good inspector. So he continued to push me and allow me to work full time and go to school.
Miller: You mentioned that you spent about eight years on the other side, working for a contractor doing contract and project management. At that time, what did you think about building inspectors?
Doherty: We just knew they had a job to do and it might have been a little annoying at times [laughing], but they’re there for a reason. They’re there to come in and inspect, and make sure that you’re meeting minimum code.
Miller: That is the honest version of how you would have seen it back then? Or a kind of retrospective understanding of what your job actually entails?
Doherty: [Laughs] Probably retrospective.
Miller: But then the flip side of it is if you think that your experience on the building side has affected the way you approach your daily work now?
Doherty: Yeah, I understand both sides, right? I understand that they’re trying to get this project done and that they have overhead costs, they have daily costs, they have financial costs in it, and here we are coming in. We should be partnering with them to continue to get the project moving forward. But we should be meeting the minimum life safety codes as we do that. So, if we can build a great partnership and not hold up the project, but continue to move it forward while we’re making some adjustments to meet those codes, I think that’s the best way.
Miller: To go back to the average number, the range of inspections you might do in the course of a day, 20 to 50 … On any given day, how many of those inspections may result in your saying, “No, it’s not quite right, that’s not quite up to code?”
Doherty: I would say, honestly, probably 5% to 10%.
Miller: OK, not super high, but that’s a relatively significant percentage that adds up over the days or the weeks. What are the most likely code violations?
Doherty: There’s a lot of different ways that you can look at things. But I think just missing the little details on the plans: the connections, maybe supports, maybe bracing, just those little details that we’re here to catch, right? They’re out there working and they’re going at a pace that they need to, for their financial benefit. We’re here to come in and say, oh, look, right here we have something that we may have missed, let’s get that in. And it’s an important, significant part of this project.
Miller: Am I right that every now and then those code violations you find, the only way to fix them is to have the contractors undo a significant amount of work to get to the root of the problem?
Doherty: Unfortunately, if we come in too late, yeah, that can happen. That’s an unfortunate incident that we try really hard to mitigate, but it can happen.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for a difficult conversation you’ve had recently?
Doherty: Yeah, at a large commercial project, we came in to do a final. When we got up on a mezzanine, we found out that the large sprinkler main was significantly too low over the mezzanine. So you couldn’t even get under it. And this was an egress mezzanine. So they are going to have to go in and redesign the whole sprinkler system for the building.
Miller: And it was up to you to say, “hey folks, this is what I found and this is what you’re going to have to do?”
Doherty: Yes. Of course, we partner with fire marshals very closely as building inspectors. And I called them and had that conversation with them, and they agreed. So yes, I was the one that had to deliver that unfortunate news to them.
Miller: Is it fair to say that you’ve been in every building that’s been constructed in Hermiston in the last 18 months? Is that an exaggeration, or that’s just the reality of your job?
Doherty: That’s the reality of my job.
Miller: Does that mean that there are times when you might go into a new restaurant or some building after it’s up and running, a commercial space as a patron, and say I was here when it was under construction?
Doherty: Oh yeah, absolutely. Stores, restaurants, gyms.
Miller: What is it like to inspect an enormous data center that might be 200,000 square feet?
Doherty: It can be overwhelming at first. But at the data centers, we go ahead and take those down into phases. If you can break it into phases, it becomes more manageable to inspect. I was out at a data center this morning and probably inspected four different phases in that building. But if we get it just manageable chunks into phases, we can get that done easy.
Miller: It’s not uncommon for people in Portland to lament wait times for permits and for inspections. Do you hear that in Hermiston even though you have same-day inspections for requests that come in before 7 a.m.?
Doherty: I don’t hear it so much about inspections. But of course we hear that about plan review turnaround. But we are quick. I mean, we might be 10 days for our plan review turnaround. So I think people always want something right now, but sometimes it takes a little bit of time.
Miller: And finally, what does it mean to you to have been named Building Inspector of the Year by the Oregon Building Officials Association?
Doherty: I was very surprised and definitely humbled. And maybe a little scared that people thought so highly of me.
Miller: Scared?
Doherty: Yeah, it’s kind of like, oh, I guess I gotta live up to that now.
Miller: Heaven, it was a pleasure talking to you and congratulations again.
Doherty: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Heaven Doherty is Hermiston’s building inspector. She was recently named the Building Inspector of the Year by the Oregon Building Officials Association.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
