No Job Is Too Small for Red Tape

Clayton Rippey swears he wasn’t itching for a fight. For one thing, he’s 83 and has better things to do with his time -- like take care of his chronically ailing 85-year-old wife. But when Dana Point City Hall slapped him with a cease-and-desist order last week for a deck he was replacing at the couple’s beach house, Rippey was ready to rumble.

After all, he tells me as I try to decide whether to get involved in another tale of Man Vs. Bureaucracy, he was merely replacing a washed-out, rotting deck built 45 years ago so his wife, Marion, racked with emphysema, “could spend a little time out there in the sun.”

Of such simple intentions are great headaches born.

Rippey says he wasn’t enlarging the deck, which is contained by a white picket fence. But when a Dana Point code enforcement officer checking out a next-door neighbor’s project happened to see the work going on at Rippey’s home, she dropped by to ask if he had a permit.

He says the job, begun before Christmas, was half done. The substructure was in place. The only remaining task was to lay the vinyl boards for the deck itself.

I’m not sure I’d realize a stinkin’ permit was needed. Rippey still doesn’t get it.

“I just thought if I’m going to replace something, why should I have to have a permit?” he says. “It didn’t even occur to me to have to go through the preposterous act of submitting plans and all that garbage.”

We’ve been at this intersection before -- that place where what people think is their own business butts heads with what government thinks is best for society.

In that vein, I ask Rippey, a retired college art professor, what the code enforcer should have done. “Ignored it,” he says. “Because it was so obvious by this old white fence that we were replacing what was there. I just had the feeling this is one of those bureaucracies that wants to have its own little empire and runs amok with it.”

No doubt, Kyle Butterwick has heard this kind of stuff before. He is Dana Point’s director of community development and aware of Rippey’s situation. He says the enforcement officer “did the right thing” in stopping non-permitted work, noting that any construction job requires that plans be turned in and approved.

Butterwick says he’s not looking to bust Rippey’s chops. He can’t give him a pass on a building plan, but if Rippey can show it’s just a replacement deck, Butterwick says he’ll let him bypass a more rigorous procedure that normally would be required for someone living on the beachfront.

Simple plans and less than a hundred bucks could resolve things, Butterwick says. Permits ensure that construction conforms to current codes and protects public health and safety, he says.

There’s not a hint of imperiousness in Butterwick’s tone; nor does anything he says sound unreasonable.

Which is precisely why these squabbles are so vexing. Sure, it’s possible that Rippey could have built a new deck that wreaked havoc on the land. It’s just as likely, or more so, that the replacement could have gone in, trouble-free, without anyone ever knowing the difference.

Maybe once upon a time, things worked like that.

Rippey just doesn’t understand why government has to operate this way. He’d understand the need for a permit, he says, if he were expanding a pre-existing structure. “I said to the code enforcement officer,” Rippey says, “ ‘Whose side are you on? On government’s side or the people’s side -- who happen to be the government.’ ”

Butterwick would say she’s on the people’s side.

Given Rippey’s situation with his wife, who requires 24-hour care, I want him to be happy. I tell him that Butterwick sounded very reasonable and accommodating.

“They’re just trying to take care of you,” I suggest to Rippey.

Over the phone, I can’t tell if Rippey is smiling or grimacing as he replies, “They’re taking care of me, all right.”

*

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.