How to Respond to Review Comments
What Is It?
SDCI uses an electronic plan review process for our corrections cycles to directly link the review comment to where it is within the plans. When we complete a review, we create a summary report of those markups at the end of a review cycle. Applicants document responses to our comments directly in the plan set provided by SDCI at the end of each review cycle. This corrections process helps ensure we are accurately conveying review comments to our customers.
Here is a step-by-step video guide on how to best respond to review comments.
How to Respond to Review Comments
1. Wait for All Reviews to be Completed
- You may check the status of any review through the Seattle Services Portal.
- All reviews with an hourglass in front of them are assigned to your permit. Click on the triangle/arrow for more information about the review. Reviews are assigned in the order they are submitted, based on review resources.
- All reviews must be completed before you can respond, upload, or submit any correction responses. The project status must be “Corrections Required.”
- We will send correction reports to the Seattle Services Portal. We will notify the primary contact for the project when all reviews in the review cycle are complete.
2. Make Corrections
Document a response for each item cited in the Consolidated Summary Report Plan Set. This can be accomplished by using the “Reply” function in Bluebeam or in the Comment panel of Adobe Acrobat. Include the following information for each item:
- Describe the change.
- If you have not made a requested change, give a code citation or documentation to explain why you didn't make the change.
- If you make voluntary changes to your plans, describe the changes you made in your response letter.
- Consolidate all responses to correction items among all designers, architects, engineers, and owners onto the Consolidated Summary Report Plan Set.
Correct your plans:
- Cloud or circle all changes.
- You may add new sheets to the plan set if you have new information to show.
- Combine all plan sheets into a single pdf file. Only photographs can be uploaded as .jpg files.
Your plans won’t be accepted for review if they are:- Not oriented correctly (landscape)
- On the wrong sheet size (so they don’t “scale” correctly)
- Missing sheets
- Missing correction responses
- Other issues
3. Submit Corrected Plans
Upload your plans using the Make Changes function:
- Submit the plan set with your responses embedded (Correction Response Plan Set or Correction Response Plan Set – Land Use) along with your clean updated plan set reflecting those changes to the portal (Plan Set or Plan Set – Land Use).
- For instructions on how to upload documents, see How to View and Respond to Corrections.
- Always upload a complete plan set. We will not review individual sheets that only respond to the requested corrections. For example, if we ask for a site plan, we will not review it if you upload it as a single sheet. You need to upload your corrected site plan as part of a plan set.
- Be careful to name your documents accurately when uploaded. We cannot correct document names for you.
- Be careful to upload the correct documents. We cannot delete incorrect documents for you.
- Be sure to click on Continue Application until you see the Thank You screen, or your plans will not be uploaded.
- The target review time for your corrected plans is 2 weeks.
If you don’t follow these instructions:
- We may be delayed in starting the corrected plan review, which can delay your permit issuance.
- We may charge a penalty fee.