Your state employes really do care--but about what
Posted by bobcorlett 10 years, 1 month ago to Business
I have been in the development (home) for 40 years, the last twenty on my own and with a partner. An E-1 pump grinds sewage and pumps it uphill to the gravity flow system. At the time they were rated for one pump for two houses. We were 54 houses into the development when a department of environmental quality guy shows up and said we should have been using one pump for each house. Ask for a meeting and 15 DOQ guys met us and you could tell they wanted us to fail by the looks on their faces. Claimed we had been informed of the change and they said they would sent it to me. A short time later I received a letter with the notice of change. One problem! The letterhead had a picture of our present (at the time) Governor but the letter was backdated to before he was elected! What they cared about was seeing how much money they could cost us or break us. When the letter and it's flaw was pointed out to our state senator we quickly got a waiver for work completed. Without that rather childish mistake we would have been out several hundred thousand dollars--sure they care!
But.
In the process of looking for a licensed inspector, I discovered that all over the country, engineering standards for sewage systems were being 'redefined' (in the manner described above) and people were being required to install high-tech systems. This is apparently being done with no change in law, just a shift in the interpretation of the law. In some instances (eg Lancaster desert) these regulations are being used to force the removal of people from their homes on land that they own.
Quietly, quietly, this is happening.
Jan, calling another potential inspector
Also look up what happened to "Phonehenge West."
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at getting out of CA as soon as I can. This is not the way a free people lives.
What was up? Well, someone wanted to buy the property (right near a major highway), but didn't like the price of $15,000,000. If condemned, the price would obviously be more like less than a million--anything to get those county inspectors to go away.
Oh, and the county discovered that the building there had never received construction permits. "No record of any permits." The building were put in about 1988. The county's records only went back to 1996 because of "housecleaning" involved in moving to the new courthouse.
It took over a year to get the county to go away, and I don't know what happened behind the scenes. Property's still for sale, if you want it. Got $15,000,000?
A positive job evaluation means a "step raise" as well as added job security.
That's what those DOQ guys were after but at the deep expense of somebody else.
folks have climbed into that evil pile over there, y'know,
the enemies of humankind. somehow, the pile
keeps growing larger. -- j