NEW HAVEN — Come Jan. 1, longtime city Building Official Jim Turcio still will be inspecting buildings, approving plans and making sure construction sites are safe.
But for the first time in 27 years, it won’t be in New Haven.
Turcio, 63, who has been with the Building Department for nearly three decades and the city’s building official since 2015, during a time of new unprecedented building construction, is moving on. He will retire at the end of the month, collect his city pension and at the same time go to work as building official in Meriden.
“The opportunity came up. It’s time,” Turcio said during an interview Thursday in his office on the fifth floor of the city’s Kennedy Mitchell Hall of Records, overlooking Orange Street. “The last couple of years have been crazy. It’s time to start thinking about my wife and myself.”
He said he saw the Meriden job listed “and I put my name in.” The pay is “close” to the $111,000 a year he makes in his current job, he said.
After his time with the Building Department, “hopefully I left the city better than it was when I started,” said Turcio, who is married to Elaine Zawadzki Turcio (formerly Elaine Braffman), a former city alder.
During all that time, Turcio — who grew up on the city’s East Shore and still lives there — has only had two jobs: initially working as technical compliance officer, which included acting as the city’s zoning enforcement officer and on its demolition crews, and then as building official.
The job in Meriden will be similar to the one in New Haven, but Turcio will not have to worry about zoning enforcement, he said.
New Haven Deputy Building Official Bob Walsh will step in on an interim basis to run the department until the city hires a permanent replacement for Turcio, Turcio said.
Among his many accomplishments over the years, Turcio is most proud of getting the department’s building permit application and issuing process digitized — something that happened just before COVID-19 showed up and, according to Turcio, saved the office during the heart of the pandemic.
“We never missed a day during COVID,” Turcio said. “Everyone just went online to get their permits.”
The last few years, construction has been soaring in New Haven, and Turcio and his staff have been busy.
“I’ve got the best staff in the city,” he said. “That’s going to help with the transition.”
Over the past couple of years, the city has seen construction totaling close to $3 billion, he said. “We added probably 3,000 (residential) units the last couple of years, not to mention biotech,” Turcio said.
In recent years, both the number of building permits and the revenue the city gets from them have shot up, Turcio said.
Where the city used to used to issue about 3,000 permits per year, they climbed to 4,142 last year and Turcio expects them to reach about 4,500 this year. The revenue those permits generate were about $10.5 million Turcio’s first year in the job. Last year, it was about $15 million, he said.
Overall, “the city has become, I think, better off in the last couple of years — with the tax base,” Turcio said.
As for the high point of Turcio’s career as New Haven building official, he said it was “taking down Church Street South — getting the people out of that hellhole,” Turcio said,
While Turcio has taken the job in Meriden, he told them he couldn’t start until Jan. 1 because “I want to see completion of the Peabody” Museum, which is getting a major makeover. “I’ve been there every Friday for 2-1/2 years,” he said.
Beyond that, “part of what I’ll miss is helping people in the neighborhoods,” he said. But “I still live here.”
mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com