It is easy to say,
”
Croy Road residents should get their permits.
”
It is much harder to actually get them.
It is easy to say, “Croy Road residents should get their permits.” It is much harder to actually get them.
Consider, for example, the experience of a couple, friends of mine, who bought property near the summit. They are law-abiding and persistent folk, and were prepared to jump through all necessary hoops, even if getting permits took nine months, as the county said it would.
The first setback occurred because half a mile from their intended house site was a watershed, where rainwater ran off the mountain during heavy rains. The county dubbed this watershed a creek. A man from Fish and Game had to drive out every week for six weeks to study the fish that weren’t in the non-existent creek, and my friends had to pay for every visit. Eventually he determined that there were in fact no fish, and no creek. So that hurdle was passed.
The next problem was the road. Redwood Retreat Road ends in a dirt road, and a 100-year-old logging road goes from there up to the summit. One hundred year old logging roads abound in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They can be distinguished from the surrounding hillside or forest by the slightly less vigorous underbrush in the 100-year-old wheel ruts.
My friends, by driving up and down this road, had already improved it to the level of a bad dirt road, and were planning to improve it during construction to the level of a gravel road, and later to an asphalt road.
The county said my friends needed to improve the road immediately, pave it with asphalt, make it 18 feet wide, and provide six turnouts over its one-third of a mile length, so that two fire engines could pass each other going in opposite directions. The county further demanded that the road have curbs, gutters, streetlights, and three feet of landscaping on either side.
I’m not making this up.
My friends would have needed millions of dollars, tons of dynamite, and the Army Corp of Engineers to meet the county’s standard. While attempting to negotiate about the road, they pressed ahead on other issues. They managed to wend their way through enough of the Byzantine, Kafka-esque county agencies to obtain a lot line adjustment, and permission to divide their 150 acres into two parcels. This progress cost them 18 months and $70,000, and did not include building permits. They could see that building permits were going to take years and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. So they sold the property.
Come, let us reason together.
Even if there were no residents in the twisty canyons and on the windswept hilltops of the Coast Range, we would still need to fight fires there. Most fires are started by lightning, some by human neglect. We need to stop fires before they overwhelm towns, and to do this we need CDF trucks that can negotiate dirt roads and wild lands, and we need helicopters. Eighteen foot wide roads might be nice, but are neither feasible nor necessary.
Required permits add $30,000 to $50,000 to the cost of a flatland tract house. For a rural house, that cost can triple or quintuple, and the process goes from harrowing to insane, as every bureaucrat lets the paperwork sit on his desk for 30 days before demanding that the owner get every other bureaucrat to sign before he will.
Most rural residents would like to be able to install safe structures and systems, to pay an inspector $100 to come out and check their solar power system. But when the inspector is going to say, “I cannot sign off your solar power system until you upgrade your road, permit your septic tank, rebuild your foundation, and install a swimming pool,” most residents will give up.
In my humble opinion, we need to rewrite the standards to conform to what is necessary for safety, not what would be nice. We need to allow partial permitting, i.e., permit someone’s compliant solar power system, even if their road is not compliant. We need to make it possible for these folks to comply. Requiring the impossible is neither fair nor safe.
