Posted on 08/05/2015 9:05:04 PM PDT by TMD
Exactly none. Not having the time or ability to spend full-time combing through the minutia in every single city council meeting in the last 28 years in anticipation of rules that would effect me at some point in time, I relied on the city council to balance the interests of its taxpaying homeowners wanting to improve their properties with the city interests in having local properties improved. We do pay them to look after our interests.
Campbell has always been a rather sleepy, laissez faire, non busy-body sort of town where reasonableness was the rule.
The paperwork has “Development Application” across the top, it seems pretty obvious it’s aimed at a development rather than a puny little addition. The designer questioned them and their only response was “You’re in a special study zone”.
When my husband takes the paperwork in, he’s going to say - “I think we were given the wrong paperwork because it’s an application for a development, not remodel.”
City councils are run by them that donated and those that show up to meetings. You can bet the left showed up for every CC meeting for the last 50 years. I have even been to a Campbell CC meeting in 1995 to help a friend of mine trying to expand his home.
Read up on The War of the Regulation (1765-1771), wherein gruberment corruptocrats in North Carolina provoked a mini-rebellion in western North Carolina before the Real Deal.
Gruberment Rust gets paid with YOUR tax dollars to never sleep, while you're working full-time and raising a family.
I feel your pain but why aren't the commission members accountable? Are they appointed by your local elected representatives? Are they directly elected?
Don't confuse poor choices made by your fellow Campbellians with unaccountability.
I’m passing along a suggestion from my elder-wisers here.
Take the money and energy you’ve reserved for the home addition and put it elsewhere. Big vacation, or an rv, or a car or whatever. If you have some nestbuilding instincts that are not fulfilled, then just use the money to buy a fixer-upper somewhere, a vacation home perhaps, and work out your instincts that way. Overfixing your own place will always end with a should’ve-done anyway.
Besides, if you find a fixer in a friendlier state, you’ll have someplace to go when you’re finally fed up with CA.
All the best to you.
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