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Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 21:07:50 :
In Reply to: Local Vehicle Regulations posted by Paul Cook in Kempner, TX on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 16:04:12 :
You're right that most cities and counties simply adopt some standard pre-written set of laws rather than writing it all from scratch. They usually get a lot more than they wanted or intended to use, but it doesn't matter as long as they don't enforce most of it. But then some new administration comes along, or some busybody actually reads the law and demands that it be enforced, and there's nothing the victim/criminal can do, even though everybody's gotten away with ignoring the law until then.
I struggle with our planning and zoning code here because it's clearly a standard document written for a normal suburban city, and yet we're a city of 1000 people and the entire city is on the Historic Register. The trouble is, much of the zoning code is almost contrary to historic preservation. This is a 100 year old mining town in a narrow mountain valley. All the houses were built close together with very little setback from the street or from the neighbors, and yet the code says every house must have a 20 foot front setback and 5 foot side setback. Almost none of the old houses meets those setbacks, but new construction is supposed to. A lot of the lots are only 25 feet wide. With a 5 foot side yard setback, you're left with a 15 foot wide house, and with a 20 foot front setback, you're about 10-15 feet back of the neighboring houses. The historical code says that new houses should approximately match the style and locations of the neighboring houses, but the zoning code says you can't do it that way. As a result, we pretty much give everybody who wants one a variance to build as close as the building inspector will allow, but it's silly that we have to keep having variance hearings when all the people want to do is build a house just like would have been built back in our "historic period".