Terms we see less often in recent records

Irrigation, soffit work and reclaimed water connections appear in fewer recent records than in older ones. Solar belongs in the same list, and it is the most interesting member of it, because the work itself has plainly not gone away.

Read each of these as a statement about wording in the records we hold, not as a statement about how much of the work is happening.

Permit descriptions are written by applicants and clerks, and the vocabulary moves. A system may be filed under a different term, folded into a larger scope, or handled outside permitting altogether in some jurisdictions.

When a term becomes rarer, the safe reading is that the wording changed, until the records show something else. Coverage moves in the other direction as well: a jurisdiction that stops publishing removes its records from recent years and lowers a count without anything changing on the ground.

Solar is the clearest example here of a term whose count fell while the underlying work stayed visible. Storage and charging have risen over the same period, and the two are often filed as one scope now.

The lesson generalises. A term page measures a description, and a description is a proxy for the work rather than the work itself. Where the proxy matters, the drawings still have to describe the installation in full.