One of the hardest parts of planning and building a home has been dealing with the county. You would think the actual physical work required would be the hard part but that doesn't seem to be the case in this day and age. If it isn't filling out and dealing with paperwork it is dealing with uninformed government employees that enjoy wielding what limited power they possess.
I Tried to Be Proactive
Last year, when I first started to plan our new house I thought it would be a good idea to go down to the county office and find out which paperwork and permits I needed in person so I wouldn't miss anything important. Upon arrival, I went to the front desk and was directed to a planning department where there was yet another front desk. I was greeted by a middle aged woman who was more or less a receptionist. For this story we will call her Gloria (haha).
SourceI asked to speak to someone that was responsible for issuing permits but was told that they were all busy or out of the office. Gloria, however, said she was happy to help me figure out what I needed. I started to describe to her what we had planned and how we wanted to build a small house first that my mother would eventually move into once we built a second larger house.
Gloria said this should be fine but that the small or "garden house" could not have a basement and couldn't be more than 1000 sqft, unless it was a mobile home. I was a little disappointed in not being able to have a basement but was willing to make it work. For this house, I would need to fill out a building permit application.
This seemed simple enough until I mentioned adding a dugout to the property. This was when things started to get complicated as Gloria pulled out an additional development permit form for me to fill out. I mentioned that I had read on the county website that, for my type of property, it seemed that no permit was required for a dugout but Gloria insisted I should fill it out.
She also asked if I had any existing water on my property which I did. She looked my property up on the computer then struggled for several minutes, trying to pull up the specific information she was looking for while I stood around and waited.
Finally, after getting some help from someone else in the office Gloria had a detailed map of the property up on her screen including color coded areas that indicated different forms of wetlands. I was told that if my proposed development was within a certain distance to these wetlands that additional environmental paperwork would need to be completed and, depending on the situation, provincial environmental assessments might have to be made, which of course would cost money.
This is the map that was pulled up showing different types of wetlands. The yellow is supposed to be bog, the purple is marsh, and the light blue is water. The map isn't really that accurate either. The purple area isn't marshy at all and has a tiny stream running through it.
This is Starting to Sound Like a Nightmare
Oh boy, and here I thought this would be a fairly simple process. People build houses on rural properties all the time right? I thought filling out a bunch of environmental forms just to build a house sounded a bit ridiculous, especially on farm land. However, I had heard horror stories before about this type of thing happening to other people so I didn't really question it. I thought this was just the continued progression of our "beloved" nanny state.
So, while I went into the county office thinking that I might even be able to get the permit paperwork filled out that day I ended up leaving with nothing filled out and a file folder of seemingly complicated forms.
When I got back home to the tiny house and started to read through these forms I quickly realized that some of they were absolute nightmares with references to all sorts of obscure legislation. In particular, there was a page called Description of Biophysical Elements, that was filled with a bunch of loaded questions.
For example:
Do any of the following occur in within the Proposed Project area:
- Presence of historically listed plant species?
- Presence of noxious/prohibited weed species?
How the hell would I know? I'm not a plant expert! It referenced the Alberta Conservation Information Management System and the Alberta Weed Act. So, now I am supposed to read through hundreds of pages of legislation to figure out if I have any rare plants growing on my property? Isn't it the county's job to know what is going on with endangered and invasive plant species in their area?
If I was to answer "no" to these questions, because I am not an expert on this stuff, and the county later found out that the answers were incorrect, would I be liable for a fine or some sort of punishment? You know how it works with government; if you lie to the cops or the tax man you get in trouble but if they lie to you there are no consequences.
There was one question however that was even worse:
- Presence of (or potential for) provincially/federally listed wildlife species to occur based on availability of suitable habitat.
So let me get this straight, even if there are no endangered animals on the property, if there is even the potential of them being there it could be an issue? Who exactly gets to decide this?
Going through these forms along with some of the others was extremely overwhelming. I didn't really know how to proceed but I knew I didn't want to get an environmental assessment because it would just bring more beaurocrats into this situation which is never a good thing. I also didn't want to assume that the answer to some of these questions would be "no" because of the potential of getting in trouble at a later date for falsifying information.
Due to these uncertainties, this paperwork just sat untouched over the winter. It was a lot like a big school project that keeps getting put off. I didn't want to deal with the BS and was completely demotivated to get the forms filled out.
To Be Continued...
