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Posted by Tim Holloway [69.54.28.229] on Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 19:00:24 :
I live in a small town in rural Vermont, population 1800 or so. As I grow my Power Wagon parts business, I am constantly evolving and improving my storage of the parts. I have a section of my shop that is 16x24 that I decided to widen by 8 feet, to 24x24 to allow more racking and better parts storage. I also wanted to put a shed off the other side to park trailers under. I went to the Town Hall to get my permit. I explained to the Zoning Administrator what I wanted to do, and he said fine and gave me the application. I sat down and filled it out while he was filling out the permit itself. I got done, handed it to him and he read it over. He asked how far down Mountain Road I lived and I told him a half mile. Whoa, he says, we might have a problem. He pulls out the town map, and there is my property, in a Forest District, (my shop sits in the middle of a 5 acre field) in a Conservation District, a flood plain and a Ridge District further up my property. Adding onto my properly permitted building would have no effect on the forest, is nowhere near the wetlands, nowhere near the ridge, and if we have a flood, the shop will flood whether or not I have added onto it or not. He dug out the regulations which only stated I could NOT build a "Dwelling" I told him it looked to me like what I wanted to do was allowed, but he wasnt willing to make that leap, and said I would have to go before the zoning board. I asked when they met, and he said the earliest I could get on their schedule was late November. He them handed me 5 pages of forms to fill out and submit to get on the docket. After discussing it (politely and not losing my temper) he said that the chair of the zoning board was coming in later and he would ask him if he thought my request was valid. He would call me later that day with an answer. I left and then the more I thought about it the madder I got. After a week not hearing back from him I threw out their 5 sheets of forms and decided on another route. I bought a 20 foot sea container today and will park it next to my shop. I will line it with racking and put in lights. No additional property tax on my shop, no permit fees, and it cost me a lot less than the shop addition would have. It does not get my trailers in under cover but they have spent ther whole lives outside, and can continue for a while longer.
The part of this that bothers me is that the zoning board is constantly re-writing the rules and have made them so complex and convoluted that even the administrator cant (or wont) interpret them. Therefore, everything gets sent to the board and the board is swamped and backlogged. I could understand it if I was trying to put in a subdivision or something but for what I wanted to do it should have been a quick rubberstamp. The Zoning Administrator has been there forever and enjoys his power over other people.
Tim
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