Who Issues Your Remodel Permit in Contra Costa

There is a question underneath "do I need a permit?" that almost nobody thinks to ask first, and getting it wrong costs people weeks: does your address have a city hall at all?

Contra Costa County contains nineteen incorporated cities. It also contains a long list of communities that are not cities — places with a name, a post office, a school and a main street, but no municipal government. If your house is in one of those, there is no city building department to call, because there is no city. Your permit comes from the county, in Martinez.

This matters more locally than you would expect. Three of the towns we work in most — Crockett, Rodeo and El Sobrante — are unincorporated. People living there spend real time looking for a city permit counter that has never existed.

The nineteen cities

If your town is on this list, you have a city building department and that is where your permit comes from:

Antioch · Danville · Martinez · Pinole · San Pablo · Brentwood · El Cerrito · Moraga · Pittsburg · San Ramon · Clayton · Hercules · Oakley · Pleasant Hill · Walnut Creek · Concord · Lafayette · Orinda · Richmond

Note that Danville and Moraga are formally towns rather than cities. For permit purposes the distinction makes no difference — both are incorporated and both run their own permitting.

Everywhere else in the county is unincorporated: Alamo, Bay Point, Blackhawk, Briones, Byron, Clyde, Crockett, Diablo, Discovery Bay, El Sobrante, Kensington, Knightsen, North Richmond, Pacheco, Port Costa, Rodeo, Tara Hills, Vine Hill and a good many more. Those addresses are the county's.

Where your permit comes from, for the towns we serve

Our own service area splits across both sides of that line, which is a large part of why this page exists:

We have not printed a phone number for every city on purpose. Direct numbers and counter hours change without announcement, and a stale number on a contractor's website is worse than no number — it sends somebody on an errand. Search for your city's name plus "building department", or ring the main city switchboard and ask for permits. Two numbers we have read off the issuing authority's own site, and will keep current, are below.

If you are in unincorporated county territory

Your permit comes from Contra Costa County's Building Inspection office, at30 Muir Road, Martinez, CA 94553. The general number is(925) 655-2704.

Building inspections are booked separately from the permit itself, through an automated line on (925) 646-4108 or online through the county's ePermits centre. Two details on that worth knowing, because they catch people out:

• Same-day building inspection requests are taken until 5:30 AM, Monday to Friday. After that you are booking for another day.
• A same-day request left on voicemail will not be scheduled. It has to go through the system.
• Cancellations and reschedules can be made online up to 6:00 AMon the day of the building inspection.

Those are not trivia. A missed building inspection window on a job with an open wall is a day of nothing happening, and on a bathroom that is a day you do not have a bathroom.

If you are in a city — the Hercules example

City permitting is straightforward in principle and occasionally confusing in practice. Hercules is a good illustration, and we had to correct our own page about it.

Hercules is an incorporated city — since 1900 — and runs its own Building Division at City Hall, 111 Civic Drive, on (510) 799-8244. But if you go reading the city's own building page and its municipal code, you will find references to the "county building official". The code names the Contra Costa County building official for any period during which the county is providing building inspection services for the city. That is a conditional clause covering an arrangement that may or may not be in effect — not a statement that permits bypass City Hall.

It reads as though they do. We read it that way ourselves and published it, and had to go back and fix it. The lesson generalises: municipal code language is not a description of today's counter. Call the city and ask how your particular job is routed. You will get a better answer in ninety seconds than you will from an hour of reading.

What actually needs a permit

The specific list is your jurisdiction's, but the shape of it is the same everywhere in California, because every jurisdiction adopts the state building standards code and works from the same framework:

• Generally exempt: painting, wallpapering, floor coverings and similar finish work. Small detached accessory structures, under a size limit your jurisdiction sets.
• Generally required: electrical, plumbing and mechanical work. Anything that erects, alters, repairs, moves or demolishes a regulated structure.

Read those two lists next to each other and you can see where almost every real remodel lands. A kitchen remodel that is genuinely only new cabinet doors and paint may stay exempt. A kitchen remodel where one circuit moves, or a sink shifts eighteen inches, or a wall opens up, has crossed the line — usually at the electrical, usually earlier than the homeowner expected.

This is why jurisdictions ask people to call before starting a cabinet job or a remodel rather than after. The line is narrower than it looks from the outside.

Repairs after a leak are the case people get wrong most often, because it did not feel like a remodel when it started. Opening a wall to get at wet framing, replacing studs and redoing the plumbing behind them is not finish work.A Richmond kitchen we documentedshows the scale of what a "small leak" turns into once it is opened up.

Who pulls the permit — you or your contractor

This has to be settled in writing before work starts, and that is not our preference, it is a requirement. California's rules for home improvement contracts say the contract must give written direction on who will obtain the permits, alongside a completion date and a payment schedule.

So if you are holding an estimate or a contract that does not say, that is a gap worth raising before you sign — and a reasonable question to ask any contractor is simply: "Who pulls it, and is that written down?"

On our jobs we make the application and chase the sign-offs as part of the work, and we close the permit out at the end. More on what else that contract is supposed to contain — down payment limits, change orders, your right to cancel — inhow to check a California contractor license.

The open permit nobody thinks about

A permit is not finished when the work is finished. It is finished when the final inspection is signed off and the permit is closed. Those are different days, and the gap between them is where a quiet, expensive problem lives.

An open permit sits on the property record. Nobody notices it while you live there. It surfaces when the house is being sold or refinanced, at which point it is somebody else's deadline and it becomes urgent — and resolving it years later can mean opening up finished work so a building inspector can see what is behind it.

If you are unsure whether past work on your house was permitted and closed, you can ask the issuing authority for the permit history on your address. It is worth doing before you start new work, because new work sometimes cannot be signed off while an old permit is still hanging open.

The short version

• Nineteen incorporated cities issue their own permits. Everywhere else in Contra Costa County is the county's, at 30 Muir Road, Martinez, (925) 655-2704.
• Crockett, Rodeo and El Sobrante are unincorporated. There is no city hall to find.
• Finish work is generally exempt; electrical, plumbing and mechanical work is generally not. Most real remodels cross the line at the electrical.
• Describe the job to the issuing authority before you start.
• Your contract must say in writing who obtains the permits.
• Make sure the permit is closed, not just the job.

If you want someone to handle the application and the sign-offs as part of the job, that is what we do — California CSLB #1123274, Class B general building contractor, based in Rodeo. Ask us for a walkthrough or call(510) 407-3343.