San Clemente, CA Building Safety: Building Inspections (2026)

When the City adopted the 2025 California Building Code on November 4, 2025 (Ordinance No. 1796), it added a new Subsection 110.7, Re-inspections, to Chapter 1's administrative provisions. The rule lets the Building Official assess a re-inspection fee any time a contractor or owner calls for an inspection but the relevant portion of the work is not actually finished, or a previously flagged correction still has not been made. It is not meant to punish a project's first failed inspection: the code specifically says the fee is not for the first time a job is rejected for noncompliance, but exists to stop the practice of calling for inspections before work is genuinely ready.

Beyond incomplete work, the fee can also be triggered by paperwork and access problems: the inspection record card is not posted or available on site, the approved plans are not on hand for the inspector to check against, or nobody provides access to the property on the date the inspection was requested. Once a re-inspection fee is assessed, the applicant has to pay the amount set in the City Council's Fee Resolution before scheduling the next visit, and the code is explicit that the City will perform no additional inspection of the work until that fee is paid. This sits alongside a separate, older enforcement tool at Section 15.04.050, which lets a Code Enforcement Officer issue a correction notice with its own 30-day grace period and reinspection fee for property found out of compliance with the Building, Electrical, Plumbing, Mechanical or wildfire fuel-modification chapters, backed by the City's delinquent-accounts-receivable collection process for unpaid invoices.