Adding 'Teeth' to County Building Rules

DAYTON – Do you know your county building and permitting rules? Columbia County suggests you reacquaint yourself with them because officials have asked the planning department to brainstorm a way of “adding teeth” to current ordinances.

Jake Davis, Greg Abramson and Kim Lyonnais, with the Columbia County Planning Department, presented information last Wednesday to commissioners on a county-wide problem with building-code violations.

Dilemmas include everything from residents running unlicensed salvage yards on their property to construction of entire – sometimes expensive and elaborate – cabins without any building permits.

Giving just a cursory, first look at the problem of code enforcement, planners found a large number to address.

“What we have here is about 40 slides of violations that we spent very little time out in the field looking for, and we found them pretty easily,” Lyonnais, director of planning, told county officials.

“This has really exploded, and we’d like direction,” he said. “In particular, how much time are we going to spend on this situation that we’ve uncovered?”

For county commissioners, the toughest problem is making the consequences for code violations fair. “It’s a real problem,” Commissioner Dwight Robanske said. “If we say we’re going to allow something, we have to change the code to allow everyone to do that same thing.”

For some rural property owners, enforcement could mean the removal of entire buildings constructed without a permit – ones that cannot, for one reason or another, be brought to county code. For some business owners in violation, it has already meant months or years spent working with the county to become compliant.

Operations such as the Shangra-La RV Park on Rose Gulch Road, the Monteillet Fromagerie on Ward Road, Running T Ranch on North Touchet Road, and Ace Nursery in Huntsville are a few examples of local businesses that have been working to resolve problems with the building department for several years.

For the planning and building department, the question is: How will the county enforce its codes?

Dale Slack, deputy prosecutor for the county, has been working with Lyonnais on the issue. One particularly troublesome case – involving a property on South Touchet Road where the county alleges that a family has been operating a wrecking yard without a license for many years – has finally made its way to district court (see story above).

“We’re just working with what we have right now,” Slack said. “We don’t have a lot of penalty portions to our code. There’s a lot saying what you cannot do and what you need a permit for, but if you violate that – there’s not a lot of teeth. The county has been looking at putting some teeth into it.”

The prosecutor’s office doesn’t make the laws, however; it can only advise the county on what is legal and enforceable, Slack said. It’s up to the commissioners to set the rules and consequences down in writing.

“And things that have already happened are going to be kind of tricky,” Slack said. “We can’t go back in time. We can’t really enforce new laws on a situation that has already developed.”

The planning department, however, doesn’t appear to be looking at any new laws – the county building and zoning codes are already in place. Officials are just looking for direction in how to penalize the violators and encourage compliance in the future.

Commissioners have directed Lyonnais and his staff to draft a plan for code enforcement. Can the county fine violators – what are the steps needed to make that happen, how much, and who writes the citations?

Lyonnais said his office would work with the prosecutor’s office and come back to the commissioners with a proposal as soon as possible.