On 2/21/14 6:13 AM, KC2TN wrote:
I live in Southern NJ and just put up a 2nd tower! Both towers were
commercially manufactured.
The first tower was put up in 1982 with only a building permit for $30!
The 2nd tower required a building permit, 2 variances, one for height and the
other for side yard clearance! I also need to obtain a NJ Engineering stamp of
approval since the tower was speced in Calif. Specs also had to be brought up
to date for NJ wind loading requirements. One requested approval from our local
zoning board cost me $500 for a single phone call to confirm information that I
had already provided in my brief.
The whole permit process cost me a ton before I even put a shovel in the ground!
Times sure changed from1982 to 2012!
It seems to me local townships follow the lead of neighboring townships and
also national trends.
We just keep getting more restrictive and/or money hungry!
a combination of the two and some other factors
An increase in litigation against cities by one party who doesn't think
the city should have approved something for another party. So there's
an increase in the documentation and more rigorous processes to follow,
so that the city can stand up and say: we did exactly what the published
rules require.
An increased cleverness and sophistication on the part of various
parties in dressing up what are fundamentally aesthetic concerns as ones
of health and safety. Don't want antenna tower because you think
they're ugly? That won't fly. But, require engineering analysis and
setbacks that radically increase the cost and inconvenience of putting
up a tower (or sign, or tacky paint job, or fixing a car in your
driveway). That will have the same net effect.
Property taxes (the traditional source of operating cash for local
government) are falling because of falling land values, or they're being
scooped up at the state level? Institute user fees for services.
Hundreds of dollars would not surprise me as an actual cost to handle a
building permit, plan check, filing, archiving, etc. I doubt that most
cities make their fees unreasonably high (viz, the litigation threat,
above). Stuff that used to be done, and paid for, out of the general
fund as "just something we have to do anyway", is now parcelled out and
costed, and paid for by the each.
Back in the old days, the city had a warehouse somewhere, and your plans
were rolled up with a rubber band, and filed in a cubby or shelf,
probably by "filing date". These days, they're probably scanned, stored
in a database, archived off-site, with metadata allowing them to
retrieve them by address, or parcel number, or owner's name, etc.
That's great when you want to get old plans, but costs more up-front.
When I moved into my house in 1998, you could request a copy of the
filed plans from the city, and they'd go hunt down the original
drawings, contract with a copying firm, who would run off diazo prints
at about $1/square foot (of the drawing), so getting a complete set of
prints ran me about $150, all told, and took 3 weeks. A couple years
ago, I did the same thing, and it was free, and a pdf file showed up in
my email in box the same day. If I want to print them full scale, I
have to find a D sized printer, on my own time and money, but in
reality, I don't need that anyway.
I'm sure that part of the fees one pays for a building permit today
helps defray the cost of the scanning and filing, which makes later
retrieval cheap and easy. Back in the day, you were basically paying
for someone to take a box full of rolled up drawings to the warehouse
once a week.
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