Santa Ana, CA Building Safety: Building Inspections (2026)

Santa Ana's local amendment to the California Building Code, Sec. 6), puts the burden on the property owner or occupant: whenever their action "makes necessary the issuance of a certificate of occupancy," they must apply to the building official for inspection of the building, structure, or relevant portion of it. That application has to come with a nonrefundable application processing fee and a separate inspection fee, both set by city council resolution, though the inspection fee is refunded if the inspection turns out to be unnecessary.

The building official and the executive director of finance and management services jointly establish the procedures and forms used to carry this out. This inspection duty is tied directly to the certificate-of-occupancy scheme in the surrounding sections: Sec. 8-95 bars occupying or changing the occupancy of a building until a certificate of occupancy issues, and bars reconnecting utilities after a code-violation disconnection until the building official inspects and confirms compliance. Sec. 8-114 requires the resulting certificate to be posted in a conspicuous place on the premises and not removed except by the building official, and Sec.

8-116 separately bars anyone from altering or reproducing a certificate of occupancy to get around these inspection requirements. Together these sections describe a two-step local process layered on top of the adopted California Building Code: the applicant requests and pays for inspection, the building official inspects and determines code compliance, and only then does occupancy become lawful.