Posted on 08/05/2015 9:05:04 PM PDT by TMD
Why are we being punished?
Because that is what regulators live for.
Reminds me of battered wife syndrome. Move and get your freedom back.
I hate planners.
Beg permission to pay money to improve the King's House, peasant. And don't forget to pay for upkeep, insurance, and The King's Rent, lest The King take his property back.
Groveling would be good, but I wonder if touching your forelock might gain you favor...
My research focus is on this very thing. How design professionals and planners are ruining people’s lives. Or something like that. There’s a growing philosophy in the design profession that we and our government friends need to get out of the way and let people build.
But you really should move. California doesn’t deserve you.
Always good to pack your own bucket of dirt in which to grovel, if the need arises.
Sounds like your little slice of Europe.
A subservient peasant ALWAYS anticipates the desires of his Gruberment Masters...
To those telling you to “just move”:
H.L. Menckens classic one-liner: For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
ptb wanted to make it difficult.
I was in no hurry
Found out all I needed was one inspection request and inspection every 180 days to keep the permit alive.
Took three years...had to be just right.
There is no such thing anymore as home “ownership”. “Private property” no longer exists. Not only do you pay for your habitation, you also pay for the people who dictate what you can and cannot do with it.
I would not live in Cali ... even if the state paid me to live there.
Sell the house and move to Alabama. The county might charge a hundred bucks for some building license fee and there’s virtually no inspection of anything. Your neighbors might chat excessively over NCAA football but they’d be there when grassfires occur, or some help is needed. I can’t think of a single reason why anyone would be thinking long-term to stay in California.
Wow, that’s incredible. A friend in South Los Altos not far from you did some remodeling and added some square footage. He tripped the requirement for a residential fire sprinkler system which was several thousands of dollars. Adding insult to injury, his original 3/4 inch water connection was deemed to be too small to operate the sprinklers, so it cost him a bundle more to upgrade to a 1 inch line fro pm the street to his house. Then, the water company hit him with hundreds of dollars of fees to change from a 3/4 tap off the main to a 1 inch tap. The last insult is he has to pay a monthly “capacity charge” to the water company just in case he should ever need to use the higher volume of water to save his house from burning down. That’s another $600 per year just for the privilege of MAYBE once in a lifetime needing to use the full capacity of his new pipe.
We did a modest kitchen upgrade and paid thousands of dollars to install unwanted LED lighting and run AC to all of our smoke alarms.
Now, to top it all off, the FAAs “NextGen” flight plan system for the South Bay has nonstop aircraft flying down one single corridor over Los Altos and Palo Alto. The planes are below 2,000 feet ( not above 4,000 ft) 30 miles away from SFO. One plane gets just about out of earshot when another enters...it is nonstop jet noise from 5 AM to midnight every day the past few months.
Your permit questionnaire asked if you were going to increase noise in your town. That is a stupid question for a homeowner. But here we have the FAA blanketing a good chunk of the Peninsula with nonstop jet noise in a very narrow corridor and the bastards had a “negative finding” for noise in their environmental report.
Government really, really sucks.
Idaho looks better all the time.
I live right near you and went through this too... lets just say I lost big time... even with a good lawyer.
Move to the santa cruz mtns in LG and you can do what you want (permits optional).
#@%%# control freaks just want to see how many hoops you’ll jump thru like a trained monkey to obey your masters. Then maybe you get a treat. If you really can’t deal with the room as it is, moving seems like the best option. California in the rearview mirror isn’t so bad. There are a lot of alternatives.
We’ve never attempted to add an addition before so, yes the extent of the noses up your skirt and the breadth of what they can “force” you to do outside the scope of the four walls is jaw-dropping. After having gone through a kitchen remodel last year (which did not require the additional design scrutiny) we thought we were prepared. Our remodel was done under 2012 rules, these are 2013 rules.....The requirement to prove you aren’t disrupting the tidelands or bays or hills in a landlocked, flat community is ridiculous. A kindergartner could tell you that’s not an issue.
I have no idea what that means and a precursory look at the City of Campbell website had no added information. That strikes as odd, as it seems the City would have information on an exact definition of this zone.
I mention this because I lived a bit north east of you in Benicia. A friend was going to do a remodel and was complaining of the 'red tape' as he lived in a "historical district". His issues were similar to yours (though not as in depth).
Long story short, he asked for and received a map defining the district's legal boundaries. His street was on the edge and the line was drawn down the middle of the street, he was thus not in the district itself.
If you have not investigated that aspect, or similar classification requirements, it may be worth doing so.
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