More activity downtown: Good

Cover the riverfront with high-rise condom(inium)s: Bad

Support for Village of the Arts: Good

Manatee Players stupidity: Bad

Tamiami Trail (14th St.) fixup: Good

Treatment of homeowners trying to improve their own property at their own expense: Bad to the point where it’s hard for me to talk about the way Bradenton stymies self-financed renovators without cursing.

And that’s sad, because I am a local booster by nature, working hard to improve my little corner and, by extension, the neighborhood around it.

Your choice, when doing renovation work around here, is either to do it “underground” without a permit and hope you don’t get caught or to get a permit and get harassed anyway.

Yesterday my front yard was finally filled in after nearly two weeks of go-arounds between the legitimate, licensed contractor we hired and a building inspector who failed our new sewer line twice for non-existent violations — after which the City demanded an additional fee for a third inspection.

The contractor called the inspector’s boss and eventually got things straightened out, but it wasn’t easy.

On a previous (legally permitted) job, which I did myself with help from a friend, I waited nearly two months for a final inspection. And this was work — window and garage door replacement — one building official told me he saw no need to inspect when homeowners were doing it themselves on their own homes. When I went to city hall in person for my fourth (or was it fifth?) attempt to get this work inspected, the clerk I spoke with at the building department told me I shouldn’t complain; that many homeowners waited six months or more for inpections on minor renovation work. Oy!

“We’re better than Manatee County”

This is the standard response to any criticism of Bradenton’s building department. I’ve heard it from clerks, building officials, and even a City Council member. It’s a lame excuse, no better than your eight-year-old child saying you shouldn’t be angry with him over a “C” grade because his friend got a “D” in the same subject. Saying, “We’re better than the worst around,” is sad when what’s really needed is the will to improve. What a poorly-served taxpayer wants to hear is, “We know things aren’t running smoothly. We’re overwhelmed with new development and doing our best to hire new people and catch up. Please bear with us — and if you have any suggestions we’d love to hear them.”

Of course, then the taxpayer would actually expect things to improve.

And that might be a problem. I am 100%, rock-bottom, totally sure the millionaire developers building condoms and other new dwellings for the Have More crowd aren’t waiting months for closing inspections — or putting up with improper inspection failures — and just as sure that no one in the building department cares much about working-class residents who are trying to improve their homes and communities.

The local newspaper doesn’t do much old-fashioned investigative reporting at best, and may be cozier with City Hall than it should be since the current Mayor, Wayne Poston, used to be its editor. But if someone in the news business here did look through Bradenton’s building permit and inspection records, I suspect they’d find glaring discrepancies between the way developers and homeowner/renovators are treated.

Eventually, I suppose I’ll need to make time to research and write this story myself.

It’s sad that an indvidual resident with a half-assed personal blog needs to do the local paper’s job, but that’s the way of the world these days.

A Bradenton Lesson: Don’t Waste Time with Underlings

I wanted to put a small (8′X8′) storage shed in our back yard. The local building code enforcer told me that — Surprise! — this required a building permit. I went down and applied for one. It turned out that the $300 shed kits at Home Depot didn’t meet Bradenton’s shed wind-resistance requirements, although they were apparently fine outside the city limits in Manatee County. Fine. I contracted with a local (licensed) shed company to build one on my lot for $1300. And went to get a permit to build this shed, whereupon I was told I needed a new property survey before I could add any new structures since the one I had was more than five years old.

Oh, come on. The property lines haven’t shifted. A survey costs $400 or more, and suveryors here are so busy laying out new developments for millionaires that little schlumps like me need to wait months to get one of them to show up. Okay. Fine. I arranged to have a surveying firm come out and rip me off if and when they could get around to it.

And then I went to a City Council meeting, stood up during the citizen comment period, and dared the Mayor or any Council member to give me a good reason I needed to spend $400 on a survey to put up an 8′X8′ storage shed.

Suddenly I heard, You don’t need a new survey. You can get an exemption for a shed that’s 200 square feet or less. All you have to do is ask.

This was from a building department representative at the Council meeting on whom the Mayor called for clarification.

By then I’d already ordered the survey.

Why couldn’t the building department tell me I could get an exemption when I originally asked for a shed permit? Sheesh!

My mistake, apparently, was to go to the building department counter and expect to be treated decently, which was as big a mistake as leaving messages on the building department’s voice mail number listed on the City’s Web site and expecting to be called back, something which happens (in my experience) only one out of four times.

What I should have done, from the start, was directly call the highest-placed building official I could find. That way I might have gotten correct answers to my questions.

Of course, now that I know the “complain at City Council meetings” trick, that’s what I’ll do on every contact with the city. It’s how my neighbor Andy East finally managed to get the City (and Manatee County) to notice that there are fighting cocks (called “feral chickens” in most media reports) that crow at all hours being raised by illegal immigrants in our neighborhood.

Nothing has actually been done about the chickens, mind you, but at least a lot of people have had a chance to watch city and county people pass the buck back and forth.

Hopefully, at some point the government buck-passers will get together and figure out how to capture chickens now that they know a lot of people are watching (and laughing at) them.

‘The Friendly City’ Meets the 21st Century

One of the charming things that originally drew us to Bradenton was its “land that time forgot” quality. In many ways it’s stuck in the 1950s. You can still find an actual, real-live pharmacist behind the counter of his own pharmacy here, and you can go to a restaurant and have the owner (who is also the chef) cook your meal. And City Hall still runs on the old-fashioned, “Call someone you know personally and they’ll take care of the problem,” system, which is fine once you know who to call.

But Bradenton is growing, and the old, personal style of government doesn’t scale.

Condomites and other Have Mores are moving in like mad, as are illegal immigrants at the other end of the economic scale. Middle-class residents are squeezed between the two.

Here in the Village of the Arts a number of gallery owners are leaving because they can make more money selling their home galleries for inflated prices than they’d make in a dozen years of selling art. This is not good, although I hope we may have seen the end of Real Estate Madness and can now return to building our community.

The award-winning community theater downtown is moving to neighboring Palmetto because Bradenton officials aren’t willing to kick in money to help it build a much-needed new facility — and because the city is rumored to be thinking of selling the riverfront land currently occupied by the Manatee Players to condomizers, along with any other desirable piece of city-owned property that might otherwise be wasted as a park or other public facility used by middle-class workers and retirees.

In general, I would say Bradenton is not a good place for a middle-class person or family to buy property right now, especially if they want to buy and fix up one of the many older houses in the Village of the Arts or other older sections of town. I’ve only detailed a few of the problems the city building department has created for us; in general they work very hard to make life miserable for people of modest means trying to fix up property here at the same time they make life easy for slumlords who let their properties degenerate instead of fixing them up.

(City officials will no doubt challenge my allegations here, and I’m sure no single person working for the City of Bradenton wants to be thought of as the slumlords’ friend and the enemy of middle-class homeowners, but that’s the aggregate effect of city employees’ efforts.)

Ending on a Positive Note

All is not doom and gloom in our building department. As one contractor friend puts it, “At least the inspectors here don’t try to get bribes out of you. That’s one good thing you can say about them.”

The trash pickup guys on our route are seriously great; helpful, hard-working, courteous, and clean. Sadly, they are counterbalanced by a demoralized, underpaid, understaffed police department that reacts to any criticism with total defensiveness instead of working to improve.

And then there are the sewer maintenance people, who were totally on the bounce when the sewer line in front of our house plugged up — on a holiday evening, no less.

(Here’s a funny “go figure” note: All the hard-working, helpful Bradenton trash collection and sewer maintenance people I see are black, while virtually all the less-helpful building department people and cops I see are white. I don’t know what, if anything, this means. Do you?)

In general, though, my wife and I are glad we live here, and when real estate prices come back down we think Bradenton will once again be a good place to come if you want to live, work, and even make art happily.

We expect the city will get its act together at some point and move into the 21st Century. We regret the continued loss of happy local institutions (like the Manatee Players) that give us pleasure, but we’re sure others will take their place — if not under the current Mayor and City Council, then under a new Mayor and Council that will inevitably replace the current bunch if they don’t get their act together before they are up for re-election.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Bradenton/local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.