Turning up the heat on a rogue dishwasher

Imagine Judi Kaplan’s surprise when she got a letter from the city of Los Angeles last month informing her to schedule an inspection of her dishwasher.

The dishwasher she bought in 2001.

“NOTICE OF INTENT TO EXPIRE PERMIT,” said the missive from the Department of Building and Safety, which was actually addressed to her “C/O DISHWASHER.”

Judi Kaplan is a retired teacher married to a doctor and they live in the Laurel Canyon area. They are reasonably intelligent people, but couldn’t understand why the city would send them a letter in care of their dishwasher, which suddenly had to be inspected six years after they bought it. And reading the letter didn’t exactly clear up the confusion.

“It is the policy of this Department that a permit, other than a limited time permit, shall be expired whenever the Department determines that the work authorized by any permit has not been completed within 2 years of the permit issuance date.”

I’ve got a 3-year-old who organizes more coherent sentences, if the city is looking for help.

“It is incumbent upon you to schedule an inspection within 15 days

In the heading were the names of five Building and Safety commissioners, two department bosses and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. It was quite a posse for one dishwasher, and Kaplan, no desperado, called as instructed to schedule an inspection.

“I thought, ‘Who knows? If I don’t take care of it, maybe they’ll come find me.’ ”

Kaplan says a clerk told her a permit had been pulled for the dishwasher back in 2001 -- this was news to Kaplan, who says Sears installed the appliance -- and the required inspection still had to be done.

Six years later?

“She said, ‘Oh, we have thousands of these that we have to go through.’ ”

On the appointed day, the inspector showed up as scheduled.

“He came into the house, walked into the kitchen, did not open the dishwasher, looked underneath the cabinet where the pipes are, didn’t turn anything on, didn’t shine a light. He was bent over for 15 seconds, said, ‘OK,’ scribbled something on his pad and left.”

Kaplan was relieved that she wasn’t in violation of anything, but she was too stunned to speak.

“I stood there with my mouth open.”

She was wondering how much time and gas are burned on such “inspections,” how much productivity is lost when people juggle their schedules to accommodate an inspector, and whether city resources could be put to better use.

So she got hold of me.

Bob Steinbach of Building and Safety told me the department began rooting through old cases after an audit last year by City Controller Laura Chick. “Her point was that we had a lot of permits that were still in our database that had never been signed off on.”

How many?

“Close to 100,000.”

Nice going. And how long will it take to clear that up?

Steinbach said 5,000 to 6,000 letters like the one Judi Kaplan got are being sent out each week, and 120 inspectors are trying to chip away at the backlog while scrambling to keep up with new work at the same time.

I got a mental picture of dozens of switchboard operators taking calls from people who bought dishwashers years ago. But a lot of people just ignore the letters, Steinbach said, and no, we’re not talking about 100,000 dishwasher inspections. The unresolved permits were also taken out for water heaters, room additions, water line and sewer repairs, etc.

But why is Los Angeles, home to 3.8 million people, inspecting dishwashers at all? We must have at least 750,000 of them in the naked city.

A dishwasher might not be wired properly at installation, Steinbach said. Or the hoses might be crossed, so that dirty dishwater gets into the drinking supply. So the city requires people to pull permits -- $16 for first-time installation and $7 for a replacement.

There’s no way those fees can cover the cost of inspections, so I’m wondering if this was only intended as a nuisance tax. And I’m no expert, but it seems to me that since the Kaplans hadn’t drowned in their kitchen, been electrocuted, or tasted Cascade detergent in the last six years, the dishwasher was probably safe.

I also checked in with Chick to see whether, among other things, her dishwasher has been inspected. She said she didn’t know. It was there when she bought the house.

Chick offered no apologies for prodding the Building and Safety Department to close out its outstanding permits. When Sears took out a permit to install the Kaplans’ dishwasher, she said, the fee was probably added to their bill. In their case and 100,000 others, the city took fees for services it didn’t render, leaving the city liable if, say, a dishwasher overflowed and turned Laurel Canyon into a lake.

“Why did they wait for an audit to find out that -- whoops! -- we’re a code enforcement agency?” said Chick, who claimed the Building and Safety Department deemphasized public safety to focus on issuing new construction permits.

“But there’s a way to prioritize these backlogged inspections,” she said, suggesting that dishwashers ought to be near the bottom of the list, and maybe should be crossed off the list altogether in the future.

“This is a call for a complete review” of such code requirements, she said. “And with the ones that don’t make sense, let’s just stop it.”

I’m assigning City Councilman Jack Weiss to get on top of this, since the Kaplans live in his district and because he didn’t return my call. He probably has an unpermitted dishwasher.

To make his job easier, I called San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco. None of them require permits or inspections for dishwashers unless new plumbing is involved, which was not the case at the Kaplan residence.

“A permit just for a dishwasher?” asked a clerk in San Francisco.

Yeah, but nobody here gets a letter in care of their toaster.

As far as I know.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com