Demolition of Building Procedures
One of the legacies from David Lanman's term as mayor will be the demolition of Marfa's construction planning and oversight activities. In his short tenure, he has managed to make a mess of the city's building programs during the biggest construction boom in maybe five decades. The latest example is his efforts to undermine the integrity of the recently proposed building permit review committee. It is not for lack of familiarity with construction. Quite the opposite. When it comes to the mayor's construction law knowledge, one could say that familiarity breeds contempt.
Before running for office, Lanman considered himself a "free form" builder and remodeler. While mayor, he understated his work as being a "handyman." He is quite talented at transforming old structures. The Highway 90 Gallery is a good example of how he can make a construction vision a reality. As a do-it-yourself kind of guy, he enjoys doing his own wiring and plumbing. That's probably standard procedure from his South Brewster County experience and probably completely opposite of his early construction experience on the east coast. One of his priorities while Mayor is to make Marfa a little more like Terlingua than Boston. No rules. Frontierland. Toss the codes, licenses and laws out the window. Make Marfa a little bit more like our neighbors south of the river than the seat of our democracy.
I know there are many people who agree with him. It is a bit of the Texan spirit to do what you want with the property you own. There is another issue called the law, and it applies west of the Pecos as well as east of the Pecos. Like it or not, we are a nation, a state and a community of laws. These laws define the accepted norms of the community. Many are designed for communal safety. Don't speed in a school zone. Treat your drinking water and wastewater to certain standards. Build with certain safety considerations. Texans have considerable freedom to do their own work for their own homestead. That freedom ends when you do not live with the results of your own work.
The state licenses trades that involve safety. This includes many things from barbershop cleanliness to elevator maintenance. In Marfa, the barbers are more strictly controlled than the plumbers and electricians. Another issue is regard for your neighbors. Just because you own a piece of property does not mean that you can build in such a way as to negatively impact your neighbors. Lanman may be the best unlicensed electrician/plumber in the state, but if he uses his mayoral powers to undermine state laws, he enables every other handyman to break the law. As chief executive officer of mayor, he swore to uphold the law not encourage citizens to disregard it.
Marfa has the barest essence of a municipal planning and building culture. We have a Planning & Zoning Board. It is not as effective as possible, but they are doing their best with almost no direction from the city council. Our Zoning Ordinance is good for at least having some set of written rules, unfortunately, much of it was simply copied from another city's ordinance and does not relate to Marfa (e.g. huge minimum lot size and lawn requirements). The zoning map has been a sore spot for years, though there is enough blame to go around for all parties to share regarding our inability to get a functional zoning map adopted. We need an accurate and reasonable zoning map (the Chinati Foundation is residential?) and a zoning ordinance that is appropriate for Marfa. There is room for lots of work in P&Z.
The Board of Adjustments (BoA) has been plugging along doing a professional job despite the Mayor's repeated attempts to circumvent them or eliminate them. P&Z make the rules. BoA is independent and handles exceptions to the rules. If your project requires a variance from the zoning ordinance, BoA considers it. If you want to put a mobile home on a lot, BoA coordinates the review of the plan and consideration of neighbors. If a permit is illegally issued, BoA can rescind it. The mayor once called BoA "arrested" when in fact it has been consistently active and impartial. When BoA rescinded an illegal building permit issued by the mayor, he sought to eliminate the board.
Readers might remember the dark days when Lanman tried to eliminate both P&Z and BoA and reconstitute them as one board under the leadership of his eager assistant Betsy Burns (Dr. Burns to you nonprofessionals). Betsy came to town from academia with considerable experience in city planning and a sincere desire to help Marfa. Lanman charmed her into doing his dirty work and caused her to suffer a serious amount of resistance. Besides the ill-planned idea of having one group do both the rules and the exceptions to the rules, Lanman wanted his person to run the construction show.
This was not long after the Mayor co-opted Betsy to plagiarize a Building Permit Ordinance that had undergone months of work and review from the community, council and attorney in order to write an alternative draft which would allow him to continue with his illegal plumbing and wiring. He sold the idea to her as helping the "handyman" while using her as a pawn to circumvent state law to benefit his business activity. The end result was the mayor's intentional derailing of the permit ordinance that would have increased city revenue from $2,000 a year to maybe $15,000. That's for the whole city for a whole year. In California, you can spend $15,000 on the permit for one house.
One of the hallmarks of this administration is that you really do not need to get a building permit. Marfa does not enforce its building laws related to permits. If you do apply for a permit, the mayor will review it and decide if you get it or not. When he does that, he is more likely to consider the "who" of the application than the "what" of the application and is very unlikely to consider Marfa's Zoning Ordinance. The mayor has issued many illegal permits out of favoritism or ignorance. At the beginning of his term, he permitted a gallery to be built over the line on the neighbor's property. He permitted a second story addition right on a property line with almost no side yard. Most recently, he permitted two modern box structures south of Alamito Creek with one in violation of the side yard restrictions again.
At first, he approved applications with his distinctive DL signature. When someone questioned his authority to do an administrative task that belongs rightly under the administrator, he instructed the front office to sign approved applications with his name. After a few more permit mistakes, he instructed them to start signing the applications with "City of Marfa City Hall" or some such nonsense. Sometimes, permits are issued on a verbal approval with no signature.
The mayor should not be involved in permit review. This is an administrative task and not a political task subject to favoritism or delay depending on his affections. Furthermore, this is a task that requires a small amount of diligence to insure compliance with applicable ordinances which seems to require too much diligence for the mayor.
The BoA ended up with many of the mayor's permitted problems when illegal projects were forced into the variance process after construction had already begun. In October 2006, BoA started discussing the need for an alternative method of reviewing permits to make sure that projects were considered carefully before the permits were issued. A citizen committee was suggested in December with the goal of reviewing the permits for compliance with the zoning ordinance and making non-binding recommendations to the administrator. The administrator would take official action to approve, deny or request more information. A draft resolution was discussed at the BoA January meeting and amended upon review. Councilmember Mary Williams agreed to support the resolution and present it to the rest of council.
The BoA prepared to present the idea to council in a report at the second meeting in January last month and it was described in this blog. The idea of the committee is to have council appoint three citizens to an advisory committee that serves the administrator. The goal is to review the permit applications for compliance with the zoning ordinance and calculate the appropriate permit fees. The information would be passed to the administrator for official action. Council appoints. Citizens volunteer. Administrator administrates. Mayor stays out of the office work and focuses on larger community leadership issues.
I described the plan on Tuesday before the Thursday meeting. The mayor starts off his report with what sounded like a new idea that he had just come up with. He made no reference to official city work going on for months. Here is what he had to say before Mary Williams could introduce the idea or BoA could describe the resolution:
When Lanman says "professional" he means "friends that will do my bidding." He wants to retain control of the process by controlling who serves on the committee. He knew that he was about to have control wrested away from him. So he tried to grab hold of the process right before it went to council as if the whole thing was his idea. This is disingenuous. He would never have floated another committee if he had not seen the writing on the wall. Remember when he said that a Finance Committee would not be needed for the 06-07 budget (and that no more committees were needed at all) before blowing the budget deadline by ten weeks?
His big idea is to restrict committee membership to "professionals." In other words, he does not think that an average citizen who is interested in building and construction is smart enough to look at plans and read the zoning ordinance. It smacks of the days when he pushed the concept of citizens providing resumes when they expressed interest in serving on P&Z or BoA. This elitism is disrespectful of the vast majority of citizens that have plenty of integrity and common sense but lack his "professional" requirements.
The real reason for his professional requirement is that he wants to limit the pool of potential committee members to his newly-arrived buddies with academic credentials and a shared vision for his way of running Marfa's construction. The original idea was to let citizens express an interest in serving to council and let council choose. Lanman's idea has been to solicit "volunteers" that he already knows will agree with him or that he thinks he can charm into his service. Then he will have a committee of his like-minded hand-picked buddies to continue his politicized permit approval process.
Before running for office, Lanman considered himself a "free form" builder and remodeler. While mayor, he understated his work as being a "handyman." He is quite talented at transforming old structures. The Highway 90 Gallery is a good example of how he can make a construction vision a reality. As a do-it-yourself kind of guy, he enjoys doing his own wiring and plumbing. That's probably standard procedure from his South Brewster County experience and probably completely opposite of his early construction experience on the east coast. One of his priorities while Mayor is to make Marfa a little more like Terlingua than Boston. No rules. Frontierland. Toss the codes, licenses and laws out the window. Make Marfa a little bit more like our neighbors south of the river than the seat of our democracy.
I know there are many people who agree with him. It is a bit of the Texan spirit to do what you want with the property you own. There is another issue called the law, and it applies west of the Pecos as well as east of the Pecos. Like it or not, we are a nation, a state and a community of laws. These laws define the accepted norms of the community. Many are designed for communal safety. Don't speed in a school zone. Treat your drinking water and wastewater to certain standards. Build with certain safety considerations. Texans have considerable freedom to do their own work for their own homestead. That freedom ends when you do not live with the results of your own work.
The state licenses trades that involve safety. This includes many things from barbershop cleanliness to elevator maintenance. In Marfa, the barbers are more strictly controlled than the plumbers and electricians. Another issue is regard for your neighbors. Just because you own a piece of property does not mean that you can build in such a way as to negatively impact your neighbors. Lanman may be the best unlicensed electrician/plumber in the state, but if he uses his mayoral powers to undermine state laws, he enables every other handyman to break the law. As chief executive officer of mayor, he swore to uphold the law not encourage citizens to disregard it.
Marfa has the barest essence of a municipal planning and building culture. We have a Planning & Zoning Board. It is not as effective as possible, but they are doing their best with almost no direction from the city council. Our Zoning Ordinance is good for at least having some set of written rules, unfortunately, much of it was simply copied from another city's ordinance and does not relate to Marfa (e.g. huge minimum lot size and lawn requirements). The zoning map has been a sore spot for years, though there is enough blame to go around for all parties to share regarding our inability to get a functional zoning map adopted. We need an accurate and reasonable zoning map (the Chinati Foundation is residential?) and a zoning ordinance that is appropriate for Marfa. There is room for lots of work in P&Z.
The Board of Adjustments (BoA) has been plugging along doing a professional job despite the Mayor's repeated attempts to circumvent them or eliminate them. P&Z make the rules. BoA is independent and handles exceptions to the rules. If your project requires a variance from the zoning ordinance, BoA considers it. If you want to put a mobile home on a lot, BoA coordinates the review of the plan and consideration of neighbors. If a permit is illegally issued, BoA can rescind it. The mayor once called BoA "arrested" when in fact it has been consistently active and impartial. When BoA rescinded an illegal building permit issued by the mayor, he sought to eliminate the board.
Readers might remember the dark days when Lanman tried to eliminate both P&Z and BoA and reconstitute them as one board under the leadership of his eager assistant Betsy Burns (Dr. Burns to you nonprofessionals). Betsy came to town from academia with considerable experience in city planning and a sincere desire to help Marfa. Lanman charmed her into doing his dirty work and caused her to suffer a serious amount of resistance. Besides the ill-planned idea of having one group do both the rules and the exceptions to the rules, Lanman wanted his person to run the construction show.
This was not long after the Mayor co-opted Betsy to plagiarize a Building Permit Ordinance that had undergone months of work and review from the community, council and attorney in order to write an alternative draft which would allow him to continue with his illegal plumbing and wiring. He sold the idea to her as helping the "handyman" while using her as a pawn to circumvent state law to benefit his business activity. The end result was the mayor's intentional derailing of the permit ordinance that would have increased city revenue from $2,000 a year to maybe $15,000. That's for the whole city for a whole year. In California, you can spend $15,000 on the permit for one house.
One of the hallmarks of this administration is that you really do not need to get a building permit. Marfa does not enforce its building laws related to permits. If you do apply for a permit, the mayor will review it and decide if you get it or not. When he does that, he is more likely to consider the "who" of the application than the "what" of the application and is very unlikely to consider Marfa's Zoning Ordinance. The mayor has issued many illegal permits out of favoritism or ignorance. At the beginning of his term, he permitted a gallery to be built over the line on the neighbor's property. He permitted a second story addition right on a property line with almost no side yard. Most recently, he permitted two modern box structures south of Alamito Creek with one in violation of the side yard restrictions again.
At first, he approved applications with his distinctive DL signature. When someone questioned his authority to do an administrative task that belongs rightly under the administrator, he instructed the front office to sign approved applications with his name. After a few more permit mistakes, he instructed them to start signing the applications with "City of Marfa City Hall" or some such nonsense. Sometimes, permits are issued on a verbal approval with no signature.
The mayor should not be involved in permit review. This is an administrative task and not a political task subject to favoritism or delay depending on his affections. Furthermore, this is a task that requires a small amount of diligence to insure compliance with applicable ordinances which seems to require too much diligence for the mayor.
The BoA ended up with many of the mayor's permitted problems when illegal projects were forced into the variance process after construction had already begun. In October 2006, BoA started discussing the need for an alternative method of reviewing permits to make sure that projects were considered carefully before the permits were issued. A citizen committee was suggested in December with the goal of reviewing the permits for compliance with the zoning ordinance and making non-binding recommendations to the administrator. The administrator would take official action to approve, deny or request more information. A draft resolution was discussed at the BoA January meeting and amended upon review. Councilmember Mary Williams agreed to support the resolution and present it to the rest of council.
The BoA prepared to present the idea to council in a report at the second meeting in January last month and it was described in this blog. The idea of the committee is to have council appoint three citizens to an advisory committee that serves the administrator. The goal is to review the permit applications for compliance with the zoning ordinance and calculate the appropriate permit fees. The information would be passed to the administrator for official action. Council appoints. Citizens volunteer. Administrator administrates. Mayor stays out of the office work and focuses on larger community leadership issues.
I described the plan on Tuesday before the Thursday meeting. The mayor starts off his report with what sounded like a new idea that he had just come up with. He made no reference to official city work going on for months. Here is what he had to say before Mary Williams could introduce the idea or BoA could describe the resolution:
- "This administration recommends a board of professionals to review permits. There was a hoodoo about two buildings that went up on the edge of town. People have a right to do what they want within the ordinances. I think we need to have a board to review the permits. One of the buildings over there needs to go to the BoA because of an oversight on our part. We could have a more thorough investigation; we could do a better job on all that. We are going through some changes in the community, with the building infrastructure. "
- hoodoo: noun 1. voodoo; witchcraft. --a run of bad luck associated with a person or activity : when is this hoodoo going to end? --a person or thing that brings or causes bad luck.
- see also: malfeasance. noun, Law wrongdoing, esp. by a public official.
When Lanman says "professional" he means "friends that will do my bidding." He wants to retain control of the process by controlling who serves on the committee. He knew that he was about to have control wrested away from him. So he tried to grab hold of the process right before it went to council as if the whole thing was his idea. This is disingenuous. He would never have floated another committee if he had not seen the writing on the wall. Remember when he said that a Finance Committee would not be needed for the 06-07 budget (and that no more committees were needed at all) before blowing the budget deadline by ten weeks?
His big idea is to restrict committee membership to "professionals." In other words, he does not think that an average citizen who is interested in building and construction is smart enough to look at plans and read the zoning ordinance. It smacks of the days when he pushed the concept of citizens providing resumes when they expressed interest in serving on P&Z or BoA. This elitism is disrespectful of the vast majority of citizens that have plenty of integrity and common sense but lack his "professional" requirements.
The real reason for his professional requirement is that he wants to limit the pool of potential committee members to his newly-arrived buddies with academic credentials and a shared vision for his way of running Marfa's construction. The original idea was to let citizens express an interest in serving to council and let council choose. Lanman's idea has been to solicit "volunteers" that he already knows will agree with him or that he thinks he can charm into his service. Then he will have a committee of his like-minded hand-picked buddies to continue his politicized permit approval process.
posted by RobC at 5:13 PM
26 Comments:
Rob, glad you jumped on another of the Mayor's pretentious efforts as well as baldfaced lies crafted to make him look foresighted and important. Just like his brilliant epiphany to create a budget "timeline" and start the budget early.
The budget timeline is a bit off-topic but I'll toss in my two cents. Why would the mayor want to get council started on a budget process before an election in which the mayor and three council seats are up for grabs? What a wasted effort. The state publishes a good calendar for suggested budget work. The city should follow that instead of procrastinating like the last two years or jumping the gun this year.
It doesn't really matter. The city gave Budget Officer Lanman two chances to get the budget done correctly in his term. He blew it both times at significant financial damage to the city. His talk of starting a third budget early presumes he will be involved in the budget a third time. He would be out-of-touch to run again, and I imagine voters would send him a strong "no thank you" at the idea of him screwing up the city's finances for a third year.
Likewise, he managed to screw up the city's building procedures for two years in hopes that he could continue his "frontier" construction style after he leaves office. Like the finances, this is something that the next mayor and council will need to clean up.
96 days until the election.
5 days until candidates can file for place on ballot.
Register. Vote. Participate.
It's your city.
Take Back Marfa in '07
Yul Brynner in West World!!!
The highly capable Board of Adjustments that the Mayor has repeatedly tried to disband continues to meet. It is not composed of architects, city planners, or these "professionals" (read that Betsy Burns, Kristin Bonkemeyer and other FOM, nothing against these folks personally mind you) the Mayor keeps insisting we need on his latest AhHa moment project. The current BOA is just fine, thank you, and can read plans, the ordinance, and use a tape measure. Lanman amazes us all. He is a handyman, yet approves permits that have gaping errors in set back measurements. I don't want to get any where near his electrical installations!
http://www.tbae.state.tx.us/documents/RulesArchitect2006.pdf.
Architects !! Is Kristen Bonkenmeyer a register architect or is she just playing one in Texas? A very serious matter: practicing without being registered! An architecture degree does not make you one.
Another image maker for Lanman..hate those pesky rules
http://www.tbae.state.tx.us/documents/RulesArchitect2006.pdf
Wouldn't it be interesting if the BoA refused the request for a variance from the owner of the "hoo doo" cribs over on Ararejo and Galveston that the Mayor approved on his own recognizance as "City Hall". They violate the ordinance every which way...sideways, up, out, fire code.
Hearing on February 12. Heaven only knows about the electrical and plumbing.
That's a good question. At the least, the administrator should issue a stop work order until the case can be heard. The rights of the neigbors should not be violated by the friends of the mayor and his well-compensated administrator.
hate those pesky rules.
http://www.tbae.state.tx.us/Professions/Architects.shtml
Yeah, speaking of rules...there is a state license required for Residential and Commercial Contractors but I guess it doesn't apply to Lanman since he works on his own property and then sells it to the highest bidder. So not only are plumbers and electricians required to be licensed, so are contractors. Wonder how many here are?
off topic - the pool. lanman said that the reason the pool is not open during the winter is because the solar system cannot heat it adequately and its for that reason only that its not open. thought this tidbit might interest someone.
it appears that flave is quite fed up with all the flack they've been taking lately from the public, the press, etc. and they are getting prepared for their defense at this upcoming council meeting.
give them enough rope...
does Lanman the heating e'specilist really know the capacity of the solar heaters? If he is right why did they get spec'd with such limited capacity??? where is the math dave?
maybe a more knowledgeable pool person can answer this question. i do know that the heat gain from the solar panels will not warm the pool in winter without a cover for the pool. too much heat loss. it was not designed for winter heating. that cover cost more than $10,000. mr. "great job" greenwood got a $9500 bonus at the end of the job for taking over as engineer or architect or whatever.
this is supposed to be one of the great accomplishments of the administration. a solar heater that doesn't work when you really need it, the winter. what will they come up with next? a $230,000 air conditioning system for the winter?
So what Lanman is saying is he KNEW the solar heaters would not work in the winter!! Well then, why was all hoopla about them spun around.. Maybe just to say: "I was the green mayor who put solar heaters on the pool:..clear throath crummp-cough.... "but they don't work in the winter" ...
I didn't know "token" was a shade of green.
Somebody get hold of the specs on the pool. Why did we put solar panels on it, to heat the pool in the summer??? Granted, the water here gets chilly but we have swum in it for years. Robert Arber, jump in here (forgive the pun). I happen to KNOW that the architect TOLD Flo and Lanman they HAD to get a pool administrator experienced in solar heating. Did they? NO, they expected Robert Silva to beat his brains out some more, or Robert Arber to take it on with no council approval. They only shut the pool down when outraged citizens called demanding that the thing be shut off, that it was running night and day, and the first big cold snap was days away. If the public didn't keep track of those bozos, the whole project might have imploded. Then at council meeting right after the public outrage, Oscar asked Flo what was the pool status and FLO DON'T KNOW.
10:39 ANON What defense, pray tell, will this totally incompetent city administration trot out? It may be time to publicly air the open records on Flo's sad administrative past. Flo's wife has told at least one local she is Mary Lou Martinez's cousin, straight from her own mouth. Therefore, Oscar continues to move heaven, earth, and council pawns to save Florencio's substantial bacon.
Like many, I have heard that rumor. Oscar denied being related to Flo, though nobody addressed a relationship through marriage. The story has enough credibility and the explanations have been sufficiently vague that questions remain. It would be nice to see this cleared up with some direct answers. Everybody suffers with rumors like this. I would like to see clear answers so that we can move on. Oscar strongly supported Flo's hiring and has supported him ever since despite all the financial and staff troubles. Many people wonder why Sauceda deserves such loyalty as his performance does not justify it.
flave intends to fight this vacation sellback fiasco by pulling his loyal staff in to back him up. he is going to act like he is fighting for the little guy's rights and has got them all riled up about losing out on something they have come to expect. what they aren't seeing here is the fact that none of this would have come under scrutiny and thus be subject to change if it weren't for the boss doing some things that are questionable.
did you know that the city is again losing staff in key positions? people have always come and gone within the city but there was always someone happy to take their place. no more! people go but no one comes! there are many open slots in the city now and no body is applying. wonder why that is?
At a recent meeting, Flo called in the heads of EMS and Fire to publicly speak in his favor before his performance review. Later, uring his report, Sauceda promised improvements to the EMS and Fire facilities...
When Dave thought the city might actually adopt a comprehensive ordinance for building permits, he called in his friends to argue against it. Witness the results of that wisdom in the current messes all over town...
Dave cannot pull in the crowds like he once could (fool me once...). Flo can still pull them in because he is the supervisor. He can promise and deliver unbudgeted raises. He fired (retired?) Leo. He fired Gracie. He tried to fire Corina whose job was saved by Leo. If you disagree with Flo, he will fire you. If you blow the whistle on shenanigans, he will fire you. If you do not show up to support him and his possible felony missappropriation of funds...
Dave and Flo get along because they manipulate people in the same way.
Yes, the City of Marfa continues to lose key people. They are not replaced because Flo does not want to replace them. Employees cost money. How do you think he finds money for his vacation sales? The money is in the budget because he does not replace people.
Flo has demonstrated that the city will keep going even if he does not do his job or show up full time. He figures that he could lose half the staff and nobody would notice. This is a slow destruction of the core of the city, as if by termites, as we lose experienced employees.
He got rid of the comptroller and has run the city's finances into the ground with nobody to stop him. The more people he gets rid of, the more money he has at hand. The longer we keep Flo, the more expensive it will be to repair the damages that he is doing. Pay attention council.
I'm hoping Rob is going to blog soon about the Mayor's self serving comments in today's BBS in which he blamed City Council for two years' worth of mistakes. And you can bet we, the taxpayers, paid for the Brown Recluse breakfast.
The mayor is a man of independent means and quite capable of buying his own breakfast. Capable of running the city is another matter altogether...
Stick to the facts. They are more fun than fiction. You can't make this stuff up!
He may be of independent means but I know of at least one occasion when he breezed out of City Hall one morning, declaring that he was going out to spend more taxpayers money on breakfast.
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