A Case for Less government Involvement that Helps Us and Them

There are many reasons for smaller government, the ones I want to touch on are all impediments to property owners and government administrators that places unnecessary financial burden, and wasted time constraints on them.

Doing construction on one's own property is one such concern.  I am not saying it should be a free for all, just remove the redundancy.  As it stands, many activities, and construction must be monetized to state and local governments in the form of permissions.  There are many routine projects that need only 1 organization signing off on it, not several.  And not many permissions, just one.

Take for instance, a homeowner, wanting to put an outbuilding next to his home.  Our county has the prospective builder firstly pay for a C.L.E.A.R. permit which stands for comprehensive land use and environmental review.  This encompasses everything from excavation, wetlands, well use, placement of buildings...you name it.  This is a recently new addition to the permission process and boiled down equates to an early alarm for any governmental agencies that may take issue with anything on your property.  That in and of itself is not my primary point of contention.

I can speak from experience, as I recently went through this process.  The CLEAR review in my case invoked the attention to a culvert that dumped onto my property from the land above me, and deposited a flow of water when it rained profusely, The rest of the time...nothing.  Visa vi the CLEAR review, this occasional posit of water became noted as a "type N non-fish bearing stream".  It had no visible bed, or path, as the grass over grows it's passage during the non down-pouring times, nonetheless, the powers that be only understood from the CLEAR document it was indeed a stream.

Now, in order to put a driveway across what I would call a ditch where the occasional flow of water travels, here are the permissions I had to get:

Grays Harbor County -
Perform work in the county right of way permit,  waiver to perform work in a stream bed (ditch), a driveway permit, and address, and another permit for the fire district to ensure the turn around was properly installed.  Additionally, I hired an environmental biologist to the tune of $1000 dollars to ensure the part time ditch stayed that way and some smart character didn't try to argue it was any more than it's classification from behind a desk. Each of these had a significant fee associated with it.  I do not have the individual figures present at the time of this writing, but suffice it to say, each itemized charge will make you roll your eyes at the very least.

Next, the Department of Fish and Wild life - After all the hoopla with the county, I had yet to acquire permission to place a culvert in the ditch under the proposed driveway.  This was the only one permission from them I needed. Yet had I not fit the criteria of "expedited" due in large part to running out of decent weather, and the threat of creating mud in the ditch, I would've had undergone a SEPA review.  SEPA (State Environmental Protection Review) is similar to CLEAR in that it alerts even more agencies to environmental aspects of your project.  I won't go into the details of it, as I escaped it by the skin of my teeth, but that bad boy packs a 30 day wait and much more cost and detail...(YUCH!).

So I made it through all that to the cost of roughly $750 dollars, not including the grand for the environmental biologist.  All this just to put in a driveway culvert, this is not even beginning to cover the actual cost of the driveway, culvert and equipment to do the job.

The part I was troubled with, beside the cost, was the time and redundancy of it all.  These are pretty routine things and shouldn't take the time and monetary resources of taxpayers and government employees.  The time for government employees could be much better spent on the truly difficult to manage projects out there, rather than these basic ones.  Honestly, the difference of my procedure of installing a driveway and culvert differed in no way from my original plan to the installation after all the government involvement.  It wasted my time, and theirs, only they got paid.

Make no mistake, I have the highest respect for State an local government insofar as managing big projects, but I loathe the idea of being fleeced for something I know full well how to do and I know is not damaging the environment by doing so. I expect by experiencing how far behind the state and county agencies were in their response times, they too are sick of chasing the "small fish".

I spoke with two high ranking officials about the redundancy of the process on small projects and the waste of resources and manpower it invokes, one at the state level, and the other from the county.  Surprisingly, they both agreed, and had ideas formed to combat this very thing, unfortunately implementation is quite another story.  The government entities are addicted to money and are quite unwilling to part with the means of getting it even if the means are inefficient.

This, to me is where small procedural changes here and there could drastically improve our economy, and efficiency, as the administrators could focus on actual problematic projects, rather than the minutia that can for the most part take care of itself with little government intervention, and/or oversight.