Took the SwampMonster Dodge in to get its oil changed, forgetting that I intended to do that ASAP and neglecting to realize that going up and getting my NEXUS interview would incur 260 miles two quarts low. Asked the local guys - who have been taking care of the SwampMonster Dodge from 2002-2009 - to check and see if it's worth fixing up or kicking to the curb. Got the $100 service and asked for an alignment check. Was told that prior to checking the alignment, it needed a $1200 steering rack and a $400 power steering pump. Also my valve cover is leaking and they want $300 for that. Add that to the new headliner, rear wiper switch and battery and suddenly it's time to put Old Yeller down. Had just wrapped my head around limping the poor beastie along a little while longer but that seeking thing it did with ruts on the way up to Canada and back was apparently not tire-related. So. But I mean hey. Dropped my mother-in-law off at surgery yesterday and she's got 9 months of PT to look forward to. Got a call in Canada on Friday. Building inspector was withholding our Certificate of Occupancy until the hot water heater that doesn't serve our space that isn't in our space that isn't connected to our water supply that doesn't involve our space in the slightest and was installed ten years ago is brought up to current code. When the previous litany was recited to the building inspector he said "I'd hate to have to turn off the water to the entire building to prove you wrong." Informed my contractor that he could let the building inspector know on Monday that if we didn't have a Certificate of Occupancy by Tuesday we'd sue. Inspector said we'd have one by Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday the inspector discovered that they'd "forgotten" to enter in all of our individual inspection reports (water, sewer, gas, electrical, HVAC, ADA, and on and on and on) so could we please bring those buy again. Tuesday night the computer crashed. Yeah.
So in my initial consultation with the permit people they told me that I could just build a little chain link enclosure for my garbage area and that was that. I filled out the initial paperwork accordingly. As we ground through the permit process I was forced to build a little garbage palace with fire proof walls, in which water that hit the roof would go into the garbage area, washing garbage down the sanitary sewer connection that I had to have dug, that was in the bottom of the little concrete pan that I had to have poured. It was an unexpected expense that came up way further int he permitting process than I would have liked. After months of bullshit with the permit office, build out is done, waiting for them to give the go ahead for final inspection, which they tell me will be green lit in a day or two. Two days go by and the permit doesn't go up. I wait a few more days, leave a few messages, no call back. A week has gone by, I call more, they tell me it should already have already posted and they'll check on it. Wait two days, nothing, call again and leave a message, no one calls for a few days. Finally get a hold of someone and they tell me that because in my initial application I didn't check the box for external structural work (the garbage area that they said I didn't need) I was going to have to go back through the entire permitting process allover again. I lost it a little bit... After a few days of fighting the system they let me pay $500 more bucks for the right to go back in time and check the exterior structural box that I had already paid for the structural and sewer permitting on. I looked at this a deal. I don't know how no one goes and shoots up the permit office after it has killed their dreams. They are so stupid and uncaring about what fucking assholes they are. My shop would have been much nicer if they hadn't caused me to shell out so much money in rent and garbage areas and other bullshit. There is a club you enter into when you become a small business person that you heard about but never understood until you've tried to do a build out.
Did you know that our recessed lighting in the birth suites is on a GFI breaker? Because we have a fixture over each tub. A sealed fixture, to be sure. 10 feet up, to be sure. But you never know - we might take on the water tentacle creature from The Abyss as a client and in the throes of labor it might shoot up and break through the glass and smash the LED bulb and we wouldn't want it to be electrocuted in the process. Our HVAC was designed and installed by the inspector for the city of Bellevue, population 133k. Our HVAC system was shut down by the inspector of our little berg, population 20k. The state required our shower to have zero handles because it isn't ADA. The city required our shower to have five handles because fuck you, that's why. Got a friend. He's got a brother-in-law. Brother in law signed a lease on a restaurant space in LA in 2010. It still hasn't been permitted.
I can understand that viewpoint. Here's the basic problem: The regulations are 100% subject to whatever appointed tyrant gets to run the municipality. I used to be an audiovisual and acoustical consultant. I helped design a $50m high school out in the boonies. The local inspector really wanted his local buddies to build that there $50m high school because boy howdy - 10% of a $250k audiovisual budget is a shit-ton of money! But they bid and not only were their prices completely out of whack but their bid proposals were so incompetently shitty that the entire design team recommended to the City that The Usual Suspects be hired to build the high school as Bubba, Gomer & Cletus LLC were clearly incapable of terminating an XLR cable. And things were all well and good until it came time for the local inspector to come out and sign off. And see - we'd put in an audio snake between the stage of the auditorium and the front of house position. As one does. And we used multipair snake cable. As one does. And we put it in conduit. As one does. And that conduit was in the slab. 100% by the book, absolutely in compliance with section 16xxx of the NEC, yadda yadda yadda. But the local inspector has the authority to interpret the code as he feels best suits the conditions. So the local inspector decided that since we were in slab, we needed direct burial cable. Which is the stuff you use for electric fences and shit. If you need to run a signal in a trench through dirt, and you have distances so ridiculous that you wouldn't put in conduit, you use direct burial cable. But we weren't even at grade. This particular slab was above a basement. But he's the local inspector. So rather than using a 1" diameter multipair audio cable In a run of 2" conduit We had to have our conduit jackhammered up and 40 runs of this shit put into the slab and then re-poured. That's not a problem of regulation. It's a problem of Mayberry Machiavellis with too little regulation to prevent them from interpreting regulations however suits their mood.
I didn't run the speaker cable for the stereo until after inspection for exactly this type of reason. I have no idea what the code is for it but if it wasn't there when they were I didn't need to find out. It turned out the inspector was about the coolest guy I dealt with during the entire process. He had three of four problems that took my less than $100 and a few hours to fix, each of which were entirely grounded in health and safety reality.
Okay. So my questions are . . . If we take away some regulatory laws, doesn't that mean municipal inspectors have less laws to enforce wrongly, thereby making it easier on you? Are there case laws that affect how regulations are interpreted, thereby making these people follow a stricter, more literal interpretation of these laws? If appeals don't work because the inspectors are corrupt, incompetent, whatever, what course of action do you take? Do the courts even hear situations like this? Lastly, I'm getting the feeling from you and cgod that half the time these people say one thing one day, and another the next. How normal is that and why does it happen in the first place. If you ask me, rules are rules. There shouldn't be so much uncertainty.
I'm just gonna pitch in my "me too!" story as well, because I was responsible for turning this crappy old storefront in a protected historical building in Seattle's Pioneer Square area, into this two-story monstrosity, and working not only with the City of Seattle's DPD, but also the Pioneer Square Community Association, and other historic organizations. It was simply an 18-month nightmare. The 2-story glass window was eventually installed in a snowstorm during the Christmas holidays, when it was well below freezing. kleinbl00 and cgod's stories are not unique in any way, shape, or form. Yes, there are. But to litigate in court, you need to have roughly a quarter million dollars sitting idle in a bank account somewhere, and be able to put your store opening on hold (while still paying the landlord the rent) for a couple of years while the case(s) work through the court system... ... and during that whole process, money is going out, and no money is coming in, because your fucking store isn't open yet!! So yeah. Inspectors have you by the balls, they know they have you by the balls, and they have absolutely no oversight or management or process in place to contest their rulings to a higher level of management. What they say, goes. Period. So you deal with it, because you have to get the store open and start making some money. Some day... Are there case laws that affect how regulations are interpreted...
Okay. So my guesses and opinions are . . . I don't see why it would. I mean, the laws for grab bars are unambiguous. Doesn't mean we weren't required to put in five, rather than one. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. What you're not understanding is the laws, as written, often say "to the maximum extent practicable." That's a judgement call. The local guy gets to make that judgement. And fuck you. Why yes. Yes there are. In fact, I had a boss who used to work with one of the guys who drafted the Americans with Disabilities Act. This guy was very proud of how spare and sparse the ADA was when it was initially adopted because that meant that the particulars could be established by caselaw. Basically, the mechanism for determining what was or wasn't law was "lawsuits against business owners." Fuckin' libertarian paradise right there. To the lawyered go the spoils. Here's a great example. There used to be a strip club in Bellevue, WA. And while you can pass ordinances that prohibit strip clubs from opening up, you can't regulate an existing strip club out of business. Which galled the shit out of the Bellevue City Council. However, one of the things offered at this strip club was a "shower dance." Yeah. Up on stage there was running water. So the City of Bellevue charged the strip club with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because, you know, it was a shower and it wasn't ADA compliant. Because, you know, you can't prevent paraplegic strippers from working at your strip club under law and just in case one decides to work there, you need a ramp and grab bars. Oh, what's that? You can't put up a ramp or grab bars? Well, then you're in violation to the tune of thousands of dollars a day until you remedy your noncompliance. No, you can't take the shower out because that's just an attempt to skirt the law another way! BAM. Out of business. Truth Justice and the litigious way. No more strip clubs in Bellevue. What appeal are we talking about here? The inspector is the alpha and the omega. He judges compliance, he judges "maximum extent practicable." I mean, we threatened to sue. Sue for what? Doing his job? Fortunately for us he's so incompetent he doesn't know we can't. but not so incompetent that he knows he can drag his feet by claiming his computer is broken. We literally had a "yeah, I reconsidered about that permit I issued last week and you don't get your work permit on the HVAC and electrical. Go get them signed off by a medical HVAC engineering firm." I've only done this once. From what I understand, there are four municipalities with building inspectors who think our building inspector is off the rez. One of our contractors told us that ten years ago, in our municipality, he put a third story on a home without so much as a permit. It happens because oh holy fuck if something goes wrong THE WORLD MIGHT KNOW YOU'RE AT FAULT. And despite the fact that we've got about a page and a half more regs than, say, a real estate office, the inspector has convinced himself we're a Tier 1 trauma facility. And also because fuck you, that's why. Buddy of mine with a restaurant in Santa Monica was required by the City of Santa Monica to pay an architect $2000 to create architectural drawings of the tree outside his building. Which belongs to the city. Which he has no responsibility for. Because fuck you, that's why. And also because that architect is probably somebody's friend. cgod has his Garbage Palace. I've got fuckin' 1.5" hot water feed lines. And a $10,000 fire alarm system. And medical grade conduit. And and and. There is no uncertainty. They have 100% authority, they give two shits what you think, you'll do it their way and fuck you.If we take away some regulatory laws, doesn't that mean municipal inspectors have less laws to enforce wrongly, thereby making it easier on you?
Are there case laws that affect how regulations are interpreted, thereby making these people follow a stricter, more literal interpretation of these laws?
If appeals don't work because the inspectors are corrupt, incompetent, whatever, what course of action do you take? Do the courts even hear situations like this?
Lastly, I'm getting the feeling from you and cgod that half the time these people say one thing one day, and another the next.
How normal is that and why does it happen in the first place.
If you ask me, rules are rules. There shouldn't be so much uncertainty.
Oh my god. I'd have loved to sit in on the meetings that came up with that one. "So late Friday night I was at, um, church and they had this shower stripper, I mean I overheard a sinner talk about seeing a shower stripper, and I think we could nail them on ADA."So the City of Bellevue charged the strip club with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act
Matthew 7:3And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?
You mean, you think the natural reaction to having a self-important 75-year-old with no experience in the building trades costing me fifty thousand dollars in revenue needlessly should be, what? Outrage? Oh yeah. But here's the thing. You learn, after you've been through this clusterfuck, that pretty much everyone else has to get through this clusterfuck in order to compete with you. And if they don't, it means competition can spring up from anywhere. There are only like 12 birth centers in the entire state of Washington. And granted - the other 11 didn't have to deal with nearly this much bullshit. And granted - the ones that follow probably won't either. But they'll have to deal with a portion of it. I mean - it's been a fucking year since we signed the lease. More. It's been more than a fucking year since we demo'd the old space. And maybe, just maybe, we'll have furniture in there before the end of the year. But the whole fucking reason we started down this road is one of my wife's best friends went from "I think I should open a birth center" to grand opening in less than six weeks down in California. And now she's got a competitor a quarter mile down the street. Sending basket-case transports to the local hospital. Turning the EMTs against midwives in the whole community. Getting angry letters to the local paper written. One of the reasons we came up to Seattle is down where we lived, we were a 15-minute drive (without traffic) from eight birth centers. Five have since closed. Know why there are so many food trucks in LA? Because there are no barriers to starting a food truck in LA. Know why everyone in LA loses their shit over every new restaurant? Because turning one restaurant into another restaurant takes between 18 and 24 months, assuming everything goes off without a hitch. Commercial real estate in Venice, CA runs $120-$240 per square foot per year, triple net. A decent restaurant is 2000sqft minimum. And you're going to suck down 2 years of that before you get to start making any money back. You aren't opening a restaurant unless you mean it. And now you know why that burger costs $18.
Well sure... I mean, that's the point of us detailing our horror stories. The problem is that the existing system "works" (for a certain definition of "works") and there are other problems to solve. The inspector forcing cgod to build his trash shrine is never going to be reprimanded for his moronic idea, because he doesn't report to anyone, and - after all - nobody has died / been maimed / or been given cancer by cgod's trash area. So the inspector did his job well. How do YOU know that all those things weren't absolutely necessary to keep the public safe? After all, YOU aren't an inspector! What do YOU know, little man?!? sarcasm, of course But you get the point... Politicians are graded on the amount of legislation they introduce. If a commissioner, legislator, or senator doesn't introduce any new legislation, then they aren't doing their job, right? So they create endless pages of pointless shit regulation that doesn't affect anybody ... except your local coffee shop owner, who - instead of opening her shop for $60k, wound up paying $150k, with all the bullshit the inspector made up to whine about - and now it is two years later, and the big loan payments are coming due, and Starbucks opened up with a drive-thru two blocks away, and her business has tanked, and some punk broke the $3500 front window, but she can't afford to make a claim against her insurance because they'd raise her rates, and she had to start working the evening shift, because she lost another barista to night school and she can't take the time to interview/hire/train someone new, because the glass guy is going to be here tomorrow to fix the window, but she has to stay late for the contractor to come and build some sort of wood over the broken window, so people don't loot the place at night, and... And NONE of this is made up. This is my friend's coffee shop. I guess people just need to walk into privately run, mom and pop shops, and stop... take a look around ... and appreciate just what it takes to make ANY of this shit happen. "But OMG, it's, like, $1.50 more than Starbucks! Total fucking ripoff..."
It was super-hilarious in my home town because in order to advance up the hierarchy at Los Alamos National Labs you had to demonstrate "civic participation." Which basically meant running for county council. And then introducing legislation so that you can prove that you were participating civically. Nerdy-ass theoretical physicists attempting civic participation came up with legislation including (but not limited to) - A cat leash law. Yep. Tried to pass a law requiring leashes for all cats. - A dogshit law. Thou shalt not have more than 5lbs of fecal matter on your lawn or thou shalt face a $40 a day fine. This one ran aground when the subject of enforcement came up - nobody wanted to budget for an official dogshit weigher. - A weed law. Thou shalt not permit any volunteer species of vegetation to grow taller than 18" under penalty of a $50 a day fine. This one actually passed - and then they tried to fine someone for "weeds" and he argued that "volunteer species" includes trees and that he was being singled out unfairly. It pretty much blew up and was never mentioned again when a rival councilman pointed out that the Lab's million dollars' worth of native plantings qualified as weeds.Politicians are graded on the amount of legislation they introduce. If a commissioner, legislator, or senator doesn't introduce any new legislation, then they aren't doing their job, right?
Tell your friend this. She sells coffee. Starbucks sells a lifestyle. They are in two different businesses as long as she has a good product. It doesn't hurt to love your coustimers as people. It shines through, especially when the other guys are there for profit an wages.
Lol, a Starbucks is moving right down the street from me, I have to walk in the street on my way to work because the construction is blocking the side walk. I'm not worried about Starbucks. I'm finally making some of the improvements I wanted to do in the beginning that didn't happen when I opened because the permit office soaked me so bad. If there is one change I'd like to see in the process is not getting different messages every round of review. If I had known what they wanted right off the bat it would have been much easier.
Around here, it's a balance of what you introduce and what you block. Unfortunately, it seems sometimes voters lack scrutiny.Politicians are graded on the amount of legislation they introduce. If a commissioner, legislator, or senator doesn't introduce any new legislation, then they aren't doing their job, right?
I disagree with nothing kleinbl00 said but here is my take on it here in Portland. The city laid off a ton of the permit office people during the downturn and than when things got good again construction took off. Many of the people they laid off didn't return and so they hired a bunch of people who didn't have much time to sit around and get mentored and educated on every nook and cranny of the building codes. They aren't good all that good at their job yet. All these employees have a slightly different understanding of the codes. The codes have undergone significant changes in the last few years as well, some people know the old codes, some know the new codes better. This causes a giant clusterfuck. Every time you go through an approval and get rejected a new person takes a look at your plans and sees some new thing. You end up goign through another two week turnaround. You hope your architect has time to revise the plans and that the contractors you are working with have an open scheduled as you push them back another two weeks. You want to file an appeal? Fork over $500 bucks to file and they will get to your appeal in two weeks. Hope the appeal doesn't piss someone off because if they want to find another thing wrong with your plans they can. Maybe you need a seismic review? Want to sue them? That costs a shit ton of time and money, it couldn't be worth winning. Here's another nice one. My plumber was doing another build out for a tap room a block away from my shop around the same time I was doing my build out. I had one kind of drain for my three part sink and a different type for my espresso machine in what I had believed was the code. Planning told me that it was all wrong, the drain on the espresso machine needed to be the type I had for the three part and the drain for the three part needed to be the type I had for the espresso machine. The plumbers were astonished. They had just installed the exact drain in my plans on a three part that month in the tap room. They went back and looked at the code and sure enough code had changed in the last year and requirements had been reversed but the planning people didn't notice for the tap room. Health came in, looked at my drains and said that they were wrong and I was going to have to fix them. I got my plumber to send the new code over and my health inspector said "well I be darned..." No one could tell me why and there is probably only a few people in the world that could tell you why.
Goddamn that's ridiculous. I didn't realize how bad this kind of shit was until my wife wanted to get a new sign on the front of her business. She sublets part of a space and the larger business already has a sign out front, hanging above the sidewalk so in order for her to have a hanging sign, it would have to hang from the existing sign. Obviously lots of safety concerns there. But the process is so insanely opaque and arduous. First she has to get approval from the local historic district council because they wouldn't want anything to ruin the charm of the neighborhood. And that's understandable, but they have no clearly defined guidelines and meet at 1PM on Wednesday once a month and when you run a business yourself and have no employees that means closing up. Oh and they'll overbook their agenda for these meetings so they might run out of time and fuck you, wait til next month. So she fills out the application and goes to the meeting and they tell her she needs a full artist rendering of the completed project from multiple angles and closeups of the sign itself and because she didn't already have it she'll have to pay an extra fee and "oh whoops, you didn't know you needed that? so sorry we didn't inform you sooner." So she gets all of that done and goes back and it takes 2 meetings to get her approval but then its contingent on the city's DOT approving it because it hangs above a sidewalk and of course they didn't bother to tell her that before and she should have known. But of course the DOT has its own list of guidelines and requirements and only meets once or twice a month also during the day on a weekday and they won't approve anything on the first try just to make you squirm and even once you do you have to go back and talk to the historic district assholes again and at this point you're already almost $1000 in the hole for a sign that hasn't even been made yet and fuck it the sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk is good enough.
You need to document this entire process - with names and actual dollar amounts - in scrapbook format, and leave it as reading material in the lobby along with all the 10-year old copies of Glamour magazine and Highlights for Kids. When some stressed out Dad is having to wait for a while, and they need something to take their mind off the problematic birth, they can leaf through your scrapbook and realize what incredible angels and gods you people are, that you went through such trials and tribulations to make your service available to their little family. I expect that would diffuse Dad's frustration quite a bit. ... just a thought ...
Wow. Now there's a perspective. We signed a lease last December. We were told we could open in April. We're now hopefully going to soft open in January. Based on the projections within the business plan, the first six months of business should have gotten us $60k in revenue. Instead we got zero. So I got that Corvette. I just had to give it to the building inspector.
Want another perspective? I think the fact that you're out that much and you're not freaking out shows just how good of a shape you are in. I think 2017 is gonna be your year. I really do. I can't wait to read about your great successes on here. While we're talking money, I was trying to explain how crummy minimum wage is to a friend of mine yesterday. I did some back of the envelope math while talking on the phone and found out that a married couple of two working 35 hours a week each at federal minimum wage, for 52 weeks, will earn just a bit north of $25k. It blew both of us away and after I got off the phone I sat back and thought about things and realized just how lucky I really am in life right now.