News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The White County Budget Committee approved funding to hire a second employee for the county’s codes department Monday.
Budget Committee Member Derrick Hutchings motioned to allow up to $28,000 to be spent on a certified codes inspector through June 30. Hutchings said the department barely breaks even as it is, but the county needs to provide proper permitting services for local residents.
“He needs help right now,” Hutchings said. “And that can keeps getting kicked down the road like everything else. But parks and rec, I mean that can wait, we have a vision for a future for that. But codes needs help. They needed help in November.”
The budget committee also recommended a plan to increase the county’s building permit fees to one dollar per square foot on all future construction projects. That plan must be reviewed by the county’s Steering Committee B. County Executive Denny Wayne Robinson said he is unsure if the county is allowed make its own fees outside of a fee schedule from the International Code Council.
“I’m guessing you’re probably looking at somewhere between a sixty to seventy-five percent increase in the cost of a building permit is what I would guess,” Robinson said. “The way that they have presented it, it’s still up in the air.”
Robinson said the system needs to change as the county’s current building permit fees are based on how much a developer tells the county that a new building will cost to construct. Robinson said that means the fees rely on the honor system using information provided by developers.
“I just know that we’ve got some people coming in, building a 1,200 square foot house for $160,000 and we’ve got people building a 2,000, 2,500 square foot house for $160,000,” Robinson said. “That’s not possible. Either the person that’s building the smaller house is paying too much or the person that’s building the bigger house is not paying enough.”
Budget Committee Member TK Austin said any forward movement is better than nothing when it comes to a new building code fee schedule, even if it has to be changed again in the future. Austin said that increasing building permit costs by this much may sound bad, but it is necessary to support the long-term growth and success of the county for years to come.
“Every month that this goes, that’s money that you’ll never recoup,” Austin said. “It’s not something that you can wait six months, two months, three months. If you’ve done ten thousand dollars a month, that’s ten thousand dollars a month you’re never going to recoup if we don’t take some sort of action on this.”
Steering Committee B Member Robert McCormick said the county must hire someone for the codes department who is commercially rated, as the county is leaving a lot of money on the table without the ability to distribute commercial permits. Robinson said that getting an additional employee for the codes department would allow Codes Director Brett Nash the time he needs to get certified for commercial permits himself.
“I know for a fact that the commercial, they want the inspections,” Austin said. “They want it simply for the liability. Some of these factories that I do work in here in the city limits, they’ll have me go buy a permit just so they can say they had a permit.”
The budget committee landed on the $28,000 figure for a new codes inspector by calculating what pay rate would be ten percent less than Codes Director Brett Nash’s. The funding and new position will be considered by the White County Commission at its meeting on Monday, January 21.
In other business, the budget committee approved a budget amendment appropriating some $10,000 from the sale of surplus vehicles for the sheriff’s department. The budget committee also approved some $7,400 to pay for the repairs of the BonDeCroft Volunteer Fire Department’s fire engine. Finance Director Chad Marcum said that work has already been completed and the vehicle is ready to go back on the road.
