Turnover at Contractors Board causes licensing delays

High turnover at the State Contractors Board has caused a backlog of contractor license applications, meaning people are waiting longer to get their licenses approved.

Director Margi Grien, who has headed the agency for about six months, said turnover has led to the backlog as the agency trains new people who process and investigate applications.

Grien estimated that about 70 percent of the personnel in the board's Las Vegas office are new. About 870 applications are pending.

"Some people have left," said Grien. "They didn't like the new regime."

Some applicants aren't buying the backlog explanation, though. Applicants pay a $430 fee.

"They cash the applicant's check, then he has to wait five, six months while they work through their backlog," said Joseph Maviglia, who applied for a license in July.

Maviglia said he was told the application would take three to six months to process. He said the investigations should be expedited and the board should be convened more often to work through the backlog.

Yet while the turnover may be causing prospective contractors headaches as they try to get licensed, Grien hopes it's a temporary problem and that the new hires will eventually make the agency more efficient.

And Grien has sought to stabilize turnover by revamping salaries, writing job descriptions for each position and increasing staff. An additional 16 people have been hired since she took over as head of the agency. She has also instituted new hiring procedures to ensure qualified people are hired.

"We possibly had some people who weren't qualified for their position," Grien said.

Grien hopes the ultimate result of that and other changes will be an agency more responsive to the public, both contractors and consumers. The beleaguered agency has been the source of many a legislator's ire, the target of an investigation by the Attorney General's office and the object of criticism by consumers who say the agency took too long to resolve complaints.

It's Grien's task to change that image.

"I think in six months you'll see a big change," she said.

One change, stemming from legislation, divided the board's investigative unit into two divisions, criminal and compliance.

The criminal division will perform background checks to weed out unseemly contractors.

"We're really trying to attack problems at the front end," Grien said. "If you catch it then, you'll see a better quality of contractor down the road."

There are seven investigators in the criminal division, two of them in Reno and the others in Las Vegas. Previously, there were two investigators in Las Vegas as the construction industry boomed in Southern Nevada.

The criminal unit, now manned by people with police backgrounds, will focus on screening applicants and finding contractors operating without a license.

For the fiscal year ending in June 1997, the board's investigators received 2,058 applications, 1,175 of which were approved. For fiscal year 1998, 2,219 applicants were processed and 1,897 were approved.

In performing background checks, the investigators look for criminal convictions, liens and bankruptcies. Officials say there is a great need for the checks. Special Investigations Director George Lyford recently sampled 100 applications and found a 30 percent inaccuracy rate.

The department will ask the Legislature next session to approve a measure requiring fingerprinting of applicants, a move aimed at more thorough background investigations. The roughly 15,000 current licensed contractors in the state would be excluded from the requirement.

Another target of the new division will be unlicensed contractors. Before the new department was in place, the agency investigated about 1,200 cases of unlicensed contractors each year.

"That was before the new department. We expect that number to double," Grien said.

Grien has also sought to expedite compliance investigations -- those that deal with workmanship. The agency has developed a manual of acceptable building standards to serve as a quick reference to the 15 investigators that work in that division statewide.

The ultimate goal of all those changes is to protect Nevada consumers. "It's a huge task and it's very important to the people of the state that we get it done right," Grien said.

Other changes include two new employees now in training who will be devoted to customer service. That will raise the number of employees handling customer service calls in Las Vegas to four, with two more in Reno.

And the changes will continue. Grien will seek funding during the next legislative session for a computerized tracking system to keep tabs on the progress of investigations. The agency will also seek to change wording in existing legislation to explicitly give the agency access to criminal records.

archive