Dealing with Washington County is a process of confusion, delay, and confounding of plans. The employees at the County are always cheerful, always helpful, but at the same time they are slaves to the process and can't do very much for you. They answer specific questions specifically, but general questions are impossible for them to handle. I have been trying to get some sort of traction on the building permits thing, but the whole process is Byzantine, to say the least.
To build a house is simple. To get permission to build a house is not. The cost of permit applications is relatively low, but the number of permits is relatively high. Electrical, Plumbing, Septic, and building permits are all required. Land use actions, site evaluations, and the people required to provide data used for these decisions are expensive, time consuming, and hard to find.
I have had one County person out to authorize the repair of my septic system. He was very helpful, but the resulting letter needed for me to get a repair permit is weeks in coming, so the septic system permit awaits a letter.
I have a temporary electrical service permit which allows electricity to our tiny home cabin. I never got a permit for the cabin since I think of it as a type of RV and I figured I'd be building once I got the money to do so. Since the County probably won't agree with my living in the house this will eventually give us trouble. The eventual nature of the trouble means that beginning to build, sooner rather than later, might keep our plans in place. But this doesn't seem to be happening so our plans might be rendered moot by the law.
The hang up is in getting surveys and plans, as well as in getting through the County process.
We are allowed to build a house, this is certain; but when we will be allowed is not certain at all, at this point in time. The process is something akin to the bank loan process where it seems that need complicates things. In a bank loan: the requirement is that you really don't need the money. In a legal house building process: the requirement seems to be that you already have a legal house. Right now I have an illegal house, so the project may have an expiration date which is fast approaching.
Today I looked at rental housing in the area, just in case I have to close up our tiny home until we can build a house to live in. We might be able to buy a legally built trailer to live in while we build, but the County isn't saying anything at this point so all is uncertain.
Yet more delay and expense on the road to building the plan we all agree ought to be built.
For two days I have been fighting a psychological depression about this. But I'm a fighter so I handle things differently than a more passive personality type. . . I went back into the County website to look for some way to move this project forward.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found was interesting, so I'm going down a different road which will probably lead to where I thought I had already been: There is such a thing as a pre-application conference. My guess is that this is a missing piece in the puzzle we have been trying to solve for three years. While I don't know exactly what the conference does, my hope is that it will light the way to getting through the permitting process. But this isn't all that I am doing, or all that might be done to us either.
Reading regulations is tedious work, but I have been slogging through the voluminous tombs of interconnected, redundant, and often confusing documentation which is intended to describe the process. In these I have found that, while I certainly will be able to build a house, and a farm on this property, it will take some extraordinary steps to be able to operate a farm business due to red tape. The type three permit process (the sort one must file to allow more than nine customer per day to enter the business) must be re-submitted annually, a lengthy and expensive process which seems designed to mask the fact that home occupations sell to the public. The permit requirements include public meetings and off street parking places, and they include not being able to hire enough people to help on the Farm. So the business plan we have been working toward might not be able to be built at all.
As for what might be done: We might be made homeless by the County, since our temporary home cabin isn't a permitted thing to have on our Farm. The County, in service of the law, might order us off of our Farm, despite the animals and plants we have there, until a house can be built legally. Depending on the County's flexibility in this we are thinking of alternatives to being forced to leave.
I had read the County's development codes a few years ago, and in there was the idea that I could live in an R.V. type trailer while we build. Unfortunately, this code might have been read incompletely, or changed since my reading of it, to include the idea that the trailer had to have a data plate. My cabin does not. We had assumed that when we got the building permit we would have, as a condition of approval, the requirement that we remove the Cabin once we had built the house. There simply is no way of telling what the results will eventually become, but the idea of having to either move to another property in order to get a permit, or waste resources (money) on another living quarters, is depressing. The Cabin is spacious and comfortable, if not opulent, and it allows us to work the project efficiently and without losing ground to the weeds while taking care of the livestock.
The whole notion of homesteading seems dead in Washington County, perhaps in the whole State of Oregon. The Thousand Friends of Oregon, the outfit which brought so much protection to farmland and forced an urban planning process on us all, may have in fact killed small farm homesteading by making it economically impossible.
For now we are where we were, not having received any letter or citation telling us anything else. I have applied for the Pre-application Conference in hopes of getting the thing started down a road which will eventually lead to success. I have an appointment with an architect tomorrow, and a more complete survey of the land is on its way. The test pits for the replacement septic system are dug but the permit cannot be issued without the letter from the County and this is taking a lot more time than it might.
So we work the land, make contingency plans, and hope for the best knowing that the worst might happen.
The above entries might all seem unfair, if you are rooting for us. But unfair isn't the right word.
ReplyDeleteThe right concept is best described by the word "confounding".
The process is equally distributed upon all people in the process. The employees of the County are simply not able to wriggle the law around so that things fit individual persons. They cannot say things which might make the process easier and have no time for commiseration. They are simply following the law, as it is written. So the process is "fair", but this doesn't make it right and is likely producing some very bad outcomes, while insuring the health and safety of the society it serves. One of the bad outcomes is that the process secures rights only for those who can pay for them.
As I said (above): I have the right to build a house. But this comes at a high price, for things which have little to do with house building, more to do with insurance for banks and County officials. When some disaster hits, people in the United States look for someone to blame and so government writes all sorts of caution into their building code so that they can hold their hands high as say "not it" with good reason to say it. The code is just, in the legal sense, but justice isn't only a legal idea.
If a society makes it so that only those who can pay expensive lawyers, accountants, and trades people, to accomplish things, then society puts those thing which have these costs out of the reach of those who cannot pay. (If A=$ then ~A=~$)
At present I am faced with a situation which I could not be in without my having the money. I live in an illegally built house which I had to build in order than I could get the money to build a legal house to live in. These two home need not conflict, but the law (which insured fairness) might force the conflict. In short, I may not have the money to build if I cannot live in the illegally built house. A sort of Catch 22 condition where The need trumps availability and the availability confounds satisfaction of need.
After putting down the $268 for a Pre-application Conference I got a call from Genny at the Planning Office, wondering if I had any questions. I had some, but her response wasn't what I expected.
ReplyDeleteBottom line, we are going forward with a Type One permit application (much simpler), and they returned the $268 dollars. As it turns out the others that I talked to were doing their job, but not asking the right questions. So we are now on hold for plans and calculations, then the permit might be issued.
Also, she put my fears about being dispossessed from the Farm to rest, saying that if nobody complains, then no action is usually taken. We will maintain a watchful eye, just in case.
But, for now, at least, progress might be made. tomorrow we meet with a prospective architect.