The JC has suffered cutbacks primarily due to budget cuts at the state level. The fall 2011 class schedule was reportedly reduced 11 percent from a year earlier. The 11 percent figure comes from a newspaper article, because I wasn’t able to obtain a precise figure from the college—despite several calls. (I started with the public relations office, but it couldn’t tell me the percentage. Instead, I was referred to the director of admissions. I left three voicemail messages over a two-week period, stating what I needed, but she didn’t respond.)
Budget problems at SRJC just highlight the importance of spending taxpayer money wisely. Here are two other issues that come to mind: First, I’m told mail that arrives on campus for the SRJC board of trustees is hand-delivered weekly to the eight trustees’ homes by a uniformed SRJC police officer or a community service officer in a patrol car. This practice leads to an obvious question: Should the trustees visit the campus to pick up their own mail, or do they find parking a problem?
Second, I’m told SRJC spent $30,000 each—$60,000 total—for two prefabricated parking lot guard shacks, each measuring about 36 square feet. That’s about $833 per square foot, not including the cost of preparing concrete pads and installing the shacks. Yes, they’re nicely finished, with brick accents, metal roofs and small heating/air conditioning units. But SRJC spent $60,000 on two small structures that could have been built “in-house” for about $10,000 total, according to one estimate.
Squeeze more money out of homebuilders?
The County of Sonoma imposes a potentially painful fee, called the “affordable housing in-lieu fee,” on those who build a new home without including an affordable housing alternative in the construction plans. Let’s say you buy land and develop plans for a 3,000-square-foot home without one of the affordable housing alternatives (such as a “granny” unit). You’ll need to pay an “in-lieu” fee of $30,064 to the county.
No end of regulations?
Chris D. Craiker, AIA/NCARB, a Napa architect, kindly offered his take on regulatory nuttiness: “According to the California Swimming Pool Safety Act, every pool must be protected with a five-foot-high fence with gates. Some years ago, I designed a condominium project in the city of Benicia. The recreation center and swimming pool were on an island, accessed only by two bridges with secure gates. I designed the island pool and purposefully omitted a perimeter fence only to be told by the State Department of Health that we had to install a five-foot-high security fence and gates. This would prevent a child from swimming across the lake, climbing up the bank, slipping into the pool area and accidentally drowning. There was no other way to access the pool but by swimming across the lake.”
He thought wrong
I spoke with a winery owner who thought it would be simple to get a permit for bare-bones tenant improvements for a wine tasting room in a Sonoma County city. He thought the process would be quick, because the improvements consisted of just a dividing wall and tasting bar. He thought wrong.
There was no problem with zoning or alcohol permits, and the space he rented was in an arcade that already had another tasting room with the same tenant improvements. So he hired an architect, who quickly produced a set of plans, which were submitted to the city. Our winery owner thought he might get a favorable answer in a few days.
Four weeks later, the city returned the plans with redlined changes. The owner had the architect make the changes in one day and resubmitted, expecting once again to have an almost immediate approval.
It was at that point he learned that the county of Sonoma must be involved. In other words, certain county approvals were necessary for the city to issue the permit for tenant improvements. The owner immediately went to the county offices in Santa Rosa, thinking there’d be a person who could tell him the steps to take and who needed to sign off on what. He thought wrong.
The winery owner was sent “hither and yon” at the county—to the Water Agency, the Permit and Resource Management Department (PRMD), back to the Water Agency, back to the PRMD and, ultimately, to the Environmental Health Department. A very effective person at the Water Agency helped him get on the right path. Unfortunately, Environmental Health said there’d be a 21-day delay before the plans were even looked at and a more than $600 charge to pay for five hours of plan review time.
How did this end? As of this writing, it hasn’t. Through a process of begging and pleading, and only after more adventures involving architect signatures on every scrap of paper, payment of significant fees, city demands for a signed “Public Improvement Agreement,” and a Title 24 energy survey, the winery owner got a conditional building permit without a final Environmental Health sign-off. The owner knows there will be other issues with Environmental Health involving sinks, a dishwasher and even the size of the water heater. The owner said, “I’m just trying to get a business up and running. Is there any sense that government is here to help us, or is it just here to stand in our way? No business can thrive if we’re just at the very end of a subjective pile of regulatory interpretations. There’s no one to complain to, and no comeuppance if the regulators and inspectors are arbitrary or wrong.” He thinks right.
