March 5, 2009
Clearwater codes literally drove my company to pollute
By Dru Jeanis
© 2009 www.keepthefish.com
Often, when meeting others interested in the issue, I am asked why I bothered myself to get involved with the Complete Angler dispute.
Well, I happened to have seen the very last episode of Seinfeld. You know, the one where Jerry and George and Elaine and Kramer go to jail because they stood around laughing at some poor weight-challenged individual while he was getting robbed. Well, I happened to take the moral of that take on the Good Samaritan tale to heart. When I heard news reports about Herb and Lori’s situation I wanted to help them, rather than just stand by.
Additionally, I have had my own run-ins with government bureaucracies and arbitrary policies for the past 35 years or so. Actually, since I was fifteen years-old. (I will write more on my earlier experiences in coming columns.) As a matter of fact, the policies of the city of Clearwater made the business my wife and I own cause more pollution. Here is that story:
Our company, Pure Postcards, Inc. moved into a pair of industrial buildings on Lincoln Avenue in Clearwater in July of 2003.
When we bought the buildings, which had previously been used as a manufacturing facility for fabricating pump equipment, they were quite dilapidated – prostitutes frequented the parking lot at night.
We fixed the buildings up, including adding four new Americans with Disabilities Act compliant bathrooms and re-roofing the whole place and so on, all with licensed contractors who handled the necessary permits and legal niceties. We cleaned up the outside of the buildings, cutting down weeds and installing attractive landscaping and even a picnic area, with security lighting to keep away the riff-raff at night.
The larger of the two structures is an industrial building by nature; it is basically a steel and cinderblock shell with a metal roof and concrete floors. Once the improvements were done I made arrangements to buy a new 2004 Heidelberg printing press, and went down to the city offices to get the permits to install it in this building. There I was told, flat-out, that we couldn’t have an “offset” printing press on the site. You see, our land had gotten rezoned at some point to where it was classified as “commercial” by the city, which meant it was now only suitable for “retail” or “office” use.
Now, the codes in force were written over fifteen years before the technology for our new printing press was even developed. Our printing press was a gorgeous thing; it didn’t even look like printing presses of old. It was digital in nature, using a similar technology and components to that found in every one-hour photo shop in supermarkets and drug stores throughout the country, even those in Clearwater. Instead of using metal plates, which need to be etched with harsh chemicals, our press used plates of a material not unlike standard 35mm camera film. It used a type of ink which didn’t need to be mixed onsite or create any real mess. Our press emitted no pollutants at all and was even incredibly quiet, much quieter in fact than the brake drum resurfacing equipment in the auto repair shop directly next to our own building, or those automated car washes found at gas stations everywhere.
Again, after explaining all this, I was informed in no uncertain terms that we could not put the press in our building. Thus, we had to lease a building over in an “industrial” classified area halfway across town. This meant that we had to spend an enormous amount of money improving someone else's building with new air-conditioning, insulation, electric hook-ups, walls, carpet, paint, phone systems, internet wiring and on and on.
This left us with empty space in our building, which was advertised – resulting in six business owners that wanted to lease it. Each of them went down to the city to apply for an occupancy permit. None were approved. City employees would not even let a cabinet maker store cabinets and run his showroom out of the space, because he needed to be able to screw parts of the cabinets together on-site before loading them for delivery.
The codes and city bureaucracy Clearwater runs on cost our business and employees hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, our employees too lost out, because we have profit-based bonuses for all of our staff.
Further, by making us put that press in someone else’s building, the city of Clearwater CREATED pollution – every single time an employee or I had to drive across town or back. And we had to buy two additional vehicles, a truck and a car, to handle all the back and forth traffic. On purepostcards.com, our company website, we have an entire page devoted to our environmentally-friendly policies and activities and it personally disgusts me that we were, quite literally, driven to pollute by our city.
In an effort to ensure that no one else has to go through such an experience, keepthefish.com has offered a series of solutions, which we believe would help the city of Clearwater to create a department that works for business owners, not against them – a department with the authority to bypass red-tape and bring the enforcement of codes and regulations, in fact their very wording, into line with 21st century technology and efficiencies.
