School facilities: plan review.

The Department of General Services is required to supervise the design and construction of school buildings to ensure that plans and specifications comply with various structural safety standards, and requires the department to pass upon and approve or reject all plans for the construction or modernization of any school building. A local educational agency that submits a plan is required to pay a filing fee to the department, which is paid into the State Treasury and credited to the Public School Planning, Design, and Construction Review Revolving Fund, a continuously appropriated fund. This bill would specify that an employee funded by those fees is exempt from any furlough implemented by any state agency, board, or commission. The bill would require the department to complete and return its initial review of a school construction or modernization plan within a specified number of days, depending on the estimated cost of the project, from the date the local educational agency submitted the plan. The bill would require the department to submit a report containing specified information to the Senate and Assembly Committees on Education by January 1, 2016. The bill would repeal those provisions on January 1, 2017.