A
Tale of Harrowing Bureaucratic Hell, by John Steinreich, 12/22/18.
America has been considered the "land of the free"
because of the liberties secured for us by our forefathers, from the Revolution
to the Civil War to the World Wars of the 20th century. But these
freedoms have been undermined internally by the soft tyrants who populate our
civil service workforce.
The great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis observed:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny
sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than
under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who
torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the
approval of their own conscience.
The terrible reality of how un-free our nation has become was
painfully impressed upon me in dealing with the "omnipotent moral
busybodies" of my city's public administration, whose charge it is to
enforce the legal requirements for home remodeling projects.
Although I pay the mortgage, cover the cost of upkeep, buy
homeowner's insurance, and send in my annual property taxes, the little Caesars
in the Planning, Building, and Public Works divisions made quite sure that I
knew who actually owns my home and gets to dictate what can be done with it.
In July 2017, my building planner submitted drawings of my
proposed garage conversion project to the Planning Division in our city's
beautiful, modern administrative office. The clerk charged him a
submission fee of $240, which he immediately paid. He was told that
the drawings would go to a planning review committee. Six weeks
passed with no response from the Planning Division, so in September 2017, I
asked him to go to the beautiful, modern administrative office building to find
out what our intrepid public servants were doing with the
drawings. On this second visit, a different clerk told him,
"I'm sorry, the previous clerk charged you $240. The actual fee
for plan submissions is $249, so your account is $9 short. That's
why we didn't move forward with it."
The Planning Division personnel – who are paid by my tax dollars
to know the fees associated with plan submissions – misstated the initial fee,
yet their department collected and cashed the check with the incorrect amount
anyway. They did not call, text, email, fax, or send smoke signals
to either my planner or me to inform us of the error; the submitted drawings
would probably still be languishing in bureaucratic purgatory if my guy did not
go back in person to ask what in the world was going on. Dumbstruck,
my planner could only shake his head and pay the $9 outstanding balance to move
the planning process forward.
It took another six weeks before the Planning Division approved
the drawings so we could move on for more bureaucratic oversight. Just
before Thanksgiving 2017, after multiple follow-up calls and emails, my planner
learned that the Building Division would be reviewing the drawings forwarded to
them by their colleagues in Planning. As this was the holiday
season, they could not provide a timeline for when their department would
finalize its review.
So the 2017 holidays came and went, and 2018 became the calendar
year, but no feedback from the Building Division was
forthcoming. With some telephonic sleuthing, I managed to get a
Building Division supervisor on the phone in late January 2018. From
his perch in the beautiful, modern administrative office building, he told me
that our plans had been sent to an outside contractor for
review. Apparently, the Building Division was short-staffed and did
not have enough qualified safety inspectors in its beautiful, modern
administrative office to handle the review internally.
In February 2018, the outside consultant told the Building
Division that it was a groovy thing for me to want to convert my garage into a
bedroom and that the plans were up to snuff; of course, my planner and I had to
hound the staff in the beautiful, modern administrative office in order to
secure this information. Once we did, we learned that the plans had
to be approved by the fire department, police department, and school district
along with fees paid to each entity, because a garage conversion clearly
presents a grave fire hazard, an increased risk of criminal activity, and an
immediate need for more classrooms in our local elementary school.
It was in April 2018 that we were able to get through the
remaining city departments to secure their "A-OK" on our
plans. With some additional running around to finalize some missing
paperwork from the school district that the Building Division had failed to
inform us in February to complete, I was finally approved in May 2018 to pull
the actual building permit for the garage conversion. Over the
course of ten months of processing, the total permit fees that I paid to the
city (to cover the cost of their beautiful, modern administrative office)
exceeded $4,500.
By way of comparison, it took my contractor three months to
complete the full demolition and conversion of the garage, carport
construction, and new driveway. All that work was done in less than
half of the time of the permitting process, even with additional modifications
to our plans that were mandated by the building inspectors who were sent out
from the beautiful, modern administrative office to tell the contractor how to
do his job after the construction project had begun.
These mandates increased the contracting costs above the initial
price quote for construction by more than fifty percent. For the
portion of the project that required us to break concrete owned by the city for
a new driveway apron, the Public Works Division charged me $240 for a permit to
move the driveway five feet east of its original location, as mandated by their
brethren in the Planning and Building Divisions. In the process of
demolishing the old driveway and pouring the new one, over the course of three
days, five roaming inspectors stopped at my home to threaten our masons with
arrest if they did not stop their work. This was done, of course, in
the name of public safety. When shown a copy of the Public Works
permit, each of these inspectors apologized for the inconvenience, all
mentioning that nobody in the beautiful, modern administrative office had
alerted them that I had paid for the permission to spend my money to
reconfigure the driveway as had been mandated by other public officials (in
that very same beautiful, modern administrative office) whose salaries are
being paid by my taxes and fees.
The tyrants whom we have been taught to fear are those who use
their power to crush, imprison, and kill their opposition through
force. C.S. Lewis accurately discerned that the civil servants who
enforce rules, regulations, and codes and collect fees at every possible
opportunity are no less tyrannical than a tsar, caudillo, or duce. They merely
impose tyranny slowly, bloodlessly, almost imperceptibly.
What need is there for a strongman to oppress his subjects with
messy, brute force when oppression can be implemented cleanly by unassuming
clerks in beautiful, modern administrative office buildings?
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA
Tea Party Leader
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