Thanks to reader Bob Dempel, I received fascinating Open Trench news from the January 26, 2011 edition of Ag Alert: In California, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service obligated more than $3.2 million to work with ranchers on a variety of practices that improve sage grouse habitat. Quoting exactly, “Producers marked or removed 180 miles of wire fencing near leks where sage grouse carry out display and courtship behavior. This prevented between 800 and 1,000 sage grouse collisions, which is equal to all male sage grouse counted on leks annually in California, South Dakota and Washington, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada.”
The price of compliance
Do you know the technical name for those bright yellow pads embedded in concrete just before a wheelchair ramp reaches the roadway, the ones with hard bumps that mildly hurt the bottom of your feet? Those are “detectable warning surface pads with truncated domes.” By the way, the pads need not be bright yellow. They must just present a color contrast with the concrete around them. For instance, the pads outside Target stores are red.
Recently, I saw that city of Santa Rosa workers were enlarging the wheelchair ramp just outside the human resources office at City Hall. The curb had a ramp before, but it didn’t meet specifications of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So the workers drilled out concrete in the shape of a trapezoid, about five feet on the high side to almost 15 feet on the curb side. The connecting, angled sides are about eight feet long. What was the cost, you ask, to make one new ramp featuring a detectable warning surface pad with truncated domes? $10,000—and that’s with city workers doing the job. If outside contractors had been used, the cost would have been much higher.
But this is only one small part of a huge expense for the city of Santa Rosa. The city will spend $2.5 million over five years to correct more than 100 ADA violations. This comes as a result of a 2009 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice after a team of federal investigators targeted Santa Rosa for ADA compliance. The corrections will include curb cuts on street corners; curb ramps in parking lots; repositioned sinks, fountains and toilets in public bathrooms; and wider shower stalls at Finley Aquatic Center. The ADA standards are very precise; some of the changes are just an inch or two. In the last 10 years, the Department of Justice reached settlements with 161 public entities to force compliance with the ADA.
The saga of 555 South E Street
There’s a sad-looking, one-story commercial building at 555 South E Street in Santa Rosa, at the corner of Maple Avenue, just before South E Street goes under Highway 12. I’ve driven past the building hundreds of times. To me, it looked as if the building sat unoccupied for various periods of time. Every time I drove by, I thought, “The owner must be dying for a tenant of any sort.”
I spoke with a commercial real estate broker who had an unfortunate experience with this particular property and the city of Santa Rosa. He had a client, a chiropractor, who wanted to occupy the building. The deal hinged on whether the chiropractor could get a use permit from the city. The city charges $2,500 to review a “minor” application for a use permit. No, you don’t get your money back if the permit is denied.
The chiropractor couldn’t get a use permit. From a practical point of view, the building looks perfect for a chiropractor, including enough parking (19 spaces) for clients and employees. The building was originally a dentist’s office, and later a business office. But everything depends on zoning, which is site-specific in Santa Rosa. During a modification to the General Plan, the zoning for this parcel was changed to R-3-18, meaning “high-density residential, up to 18 units per acre.” A chiropractor’s office is not consistent with R-3-18 zoning. Although the site had been used as an office previously, the nonconforming use lost “grandfather” status after six months of vacancy.
So what is consistent? I spoke to an employee of the Community Development Department (open 9:30 to 3:30, four days per week). A health and fitness business is OK, as long as it isn’t an “office.” A school is OK, as is a childcare center, emergency shelter, or urgent care center (as long as it isn’t an “office”). Even a bed and breakfast is consistent, as is a “private meeting facility.” But not a chiropractor. How much time and money was wasted, and how much money did the property owner lose, because of the razor-thin distinction between a health and fitness center or urgent care center on the one hand, and a chiropractor’s office? The building was used as an “office” for years, but couldn’t be an “office” again because it sat vacant for more than six months. Does this make sense in the midst of a disastrous real estate market?
There may be a happy ending for 555 South E Street. The Santa Rosa Firefighters Association has now taken over the building with a use permit as a private meeting facility.
Plan review and building inspection fiasco number one
I met a gentleman who, within the last seven years, purchased a historic, two-story house in Santa Rosa. The zoning allowed for business offices. Some remodeling was necessary, so he hired an architect to develop plans and submitted the plans to the city for approval.
The plans were approved, but a big problem with the city inspector developed during the remodeling process. The bathroom on the second floor, as designed by the architect, didn’t provide for wheelchair access. The building inspector said the plans needed to be redrawn to provide for wheelchairs.
The owner pointed out that the building didn’t have an elevator and was not required to have an elevator. Therefore, it made no sense to take square feet from an office to provide wheelchair access in a second-floor bathroom, when there was already access in the first floor bathroom.
The inspector responded: Building codes would allow the house to be expanded by adding a third floor; if the owner added a third floor, he would be required to put in an elevator; with an elevator there would be wheelchair access to the second floor and the entirely theoretical third floor; therefore, the second floor bathroom needed to be expanded now, even though the owner had no intention of adding a third floor to the building. The owner was floored, so to speak, by this logic. This was an argument he couldn’t win.
And now we should leave this story before mentioning the monster counterbalanced steel metal ladder the inspector required as a fire escape from the second floor of the small historic house. Not very Victorian!
