Hundreds of Lawrence residents could be living in homes that never received final inspections from city building-code inspectors.

Neighborhood Resources Director Victor Torres said Wednesday that in 2001 alone, the city had issued almost 900 building permits for which no final inspection was performed. Officials said they didn’t know how many inspections remained undone from earlier years.

“We have open permits that are very old,” Torres told the Lawrence City Commission during a Wednesday budget hearing. “We have some that are five, 10 years old.”

Torres told the Journal-World that 892 permits issued in 2001 hadn’t been closed with a final inspection and hadn’t had any inspection activity for six months  a sign under the Uniform Housing Code, he said, that the permits have expired with work incomplete or that work was finished without final inspection.

The city issued 3,343 permits the entire year.

Commissioner Mike Rundle, a frequent behind-the-scenes critic of the city inspections process, said the disclosure raised health and safety issues for people who had paid for jobs to be done and lived or worked in the buildings that had never received final inspections.

“It opens up the city to potential major liabilities,” Rundle told the Journal-World. “I found the comments alarming.”

The final inspections are required before a new building can be occupied or new equipment such as plumbing can be put into use. Officials said that in many cases, occupation apparently had taken place without those inspections.

The permit process seemingly is simple. A contractor gets a permit from the city to do construction or remodeling work  build a house, say, or install a water heater. When the contractor is finished, he calls the city to send an inspector to make sure the work is up to code.

“Some large-scale projects may still be under construction,” Torres said of the 892 open permits. Such projects, he said, usually require multiple permits.

Torres blamed the situation on poor record-keeping software in his department. He asked commissioners for $40,450 in the 2003 budget to buy new software that would automatically alert inspectors to aging building permits.

Meanwhile, Torres, who has run the department since early 2001, said he had begun a new program to query the old software about open permits that haven’t had inspection activity in more than six months. There may not be much the city can do about older permits, he said.

“Do you go into somebody’s house to check a water heater that was installed 10 years ago?” he said.

City inspectors are following up, Torres said, to check the status of the recent permits with the contractors who received them.

“There’s more work that needs to be done,” Torres said. “But we’re heading in the right direction.”