Terry Berk had a goal when he started his work career in 1991: Retire at age 56.

This week, Berk, plans examiner for the city of Des Moines, is retiring from the job he’s held since 1998. His age? 57.

“I pushed [retiring] off a year because I truly, truly love what I do,” Berk said. “I was asked if I’d stick around long enough to review the airport terminal plans and I did and I’m glad I did.”

During his career with Des Moines, Berk has reviewed building plans for many of the city’s biggest projects: the Iowa Events Center, Wells Fargo Arena, Science Center of Iowa, Blank Children’s Hospital, Krause Gateway Center building, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield office building, Des Moines Public Library and redevelopment projects in the East Village.

Since 1998, the city of Des Moines has issued nearly 16,500 commercial building permits whose construction value totaled over $8.7 billion. While Berk may not have reviewed all 16,500 plans, he likely had a role in a majority of the projects, said Cody Christensen, Des Moines’ director of development services.

“Terry has really been instrumental in finding numerous solutions to an uncountable number of unique building-code challenges during his career with the city,” Christensen said. “If you talk with any architect, any contractor, they will tell you that Terry is very solution-minded and that there is no challenge that’s too complex for him to find a building code solution to.

“That approach has really been beneficial for the city of Des Moines over the past 2½ decades that he’s spent here.”

Berk’s last day with the city is Thursday. During retirement, Berk plans to travel with his wife, Jenay. The two also plan to spend time with their three adult children and 10 grandchildren, he said. Berk, who has experienced health issues over the past 18 months, said he also will focus on getting healthy.

The Business Record recently caught up with Berk.

His answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Why are plan reviews important?
It helps the developer, architect, contractor, [project] owner — whoever it may be — save money. If there are any deficiencies, we outline those deficiencies right up front so that they can take care of it before they start construction. If we see the deficiency out in the field, when they’ve already started the project, they would have to stop and fix it before moving forward.

You’ve done hundreds of plan reviews over the years. What was the most challenging project to do?
I’ve had a lot of challenging ones. A couple years after I got here, we reviewed the plans for Wells Fargo Arena and Hy-Vee Hall. It was a really large structure, and we hadn’t seen something like that in Des Moines for a really long time. It was challenging from everybody’s perspective because of the sheer size of the project.

One of the things we look at relates to health-safety and getting in and out of buildings quickly [if a fire or other] event occurs. They had a fire protection engineer that proposed a lot of different alternative designs or modifications from what the code said. … The project took about two years to review — from the time the preliminary designs came in to when [building permits were] issued. Most of the bigger projects are like that.

What projects were the most rewarding to review?
The ones that really stand out to me are the smaller projects, what I call “mom-and-pop.” When they come to our counter, we can hand-hold them all the way through the project. Years and years ago, I really grabbed hold of those people to try to help them get through their small projects and see them open up for business. That means a lot. The big projects are challenging and tough and they’re fun and exciting. But the ones that you can help the smaller business people really get their project up and going, those are really rewarding.

How has reviewing building plans changed over the years?
Everything used to be all paper. We had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of paper plans that we reviewed. When COVID hit, we had to develop a way to continue doing reviews. In pretty short order, with our IT department, we developed a way to review plans electronically. We continued to develop that so that it got better and better and we continue to review plans that way.  … After reviewing paper plans for 34 years, I didn’t think I was going to be able to transform over to electronic but I did. I like it so much better than the paper plans.

How do you see the job of plan reviewer changing over the next five years?
I think with all the technology that is continually coming out and the new software, [plan review] is going to continue to get easier.