In my last post, about the Garage build, I mentioned we got a stop work order from the Building Department claiming our permit was invalid, which they later agreed was incorrect and allowed us to proceed. Unfortunately, that isn’t the end of the story. At the conclusion of that email with the building inspection supervisor, he indicated he would try to ‘pull back’ the case and if he couldn’t it would be dismissed.
We then received several copies of a summons from the city to attend a hearing on the violation. There was an option to avoid the hearing by providing the necessary evidence of remediation to the inspector beforehand, so I contacted him asking what I needed to do.
After some back and forth, he called me on the phone, and after I explained that we weren’t developers, flippers, and we lived in the property, he agreed that this could be dismissed. Apparently the city has changed how they manage permits and they have enacted a process for cancelling them after a period of inactivity which ours fell into. Since we’d gotten the permit to build the garage as part of the permit to remodel the house, but decided it was too expensive to do both at the same time, we delayed the garage build until this past summer. We checked at that time and the permit was active on the portal, but after we received the notice of violation, the permit disappeared from the portal.
We still had the physical copy with signed inspections on the back, but it was still disconcerting to feel like the evidence we had a permit was being deleted. In any case, the supervisor asked me to send all the details to him in an email which he would then forward on to the people that do the hearings and ask them to dismiss, which I promptly did.
With the deadline nearing and no word back, I emailed again and got an out of office from the supervisor. I followed up via email again but realized that while he had called me, I didn’t have his phone number and I couldn’t find it on the city website. Finally, the day of the deadline, he called back and after I reminded him who I was and what I was trying to do, he found the email with the details and sent it on to the hearing department requesting they dismiss the case, which they did.
This whole ordeal was stressful, but ultimately it worked out without serious problems. The garage was finished and we didn’t get fined. The fact it all stemmed from an E311 complaint by an “unknown” neighbor did sour some relationships, though.