Regulation Overload
Ever wonder why so many new properties are built out west, while so few rundown properties in older Hattiesburg get redone? Me too! One of the biggest reasons for this is the difficulty of dealing with Hattiesburg’s regulations. Our land development code (171 pages and counting) is designed and implemented with an eye towards projects on raw land off Highway 98 rather than a redevelopment on Broadway Drive. They are also designed for larger scale, multi-unit operator tenants like an Applebee’s rather than a Southbound Bagels. I’d like to live in a town with more small, locally owned restaurants and shops. I suspect if you’ve found your way to my corner of the internet, you might feel the same way.
I can tell some crazy stories. My favorite is the small snowball stand (600 feet), where a building official insisted I needed two bathrooms. Not one, but two. Even after I’d already put in a commercial concrete dumpster pad with hot/cold water and a drain with a grease separator plumbed into city sewer. Almost all of our rules make sense in isolation. Trying to meet all of them on a weird parcel subdivided before we even had a land development code with a broken down structure built in multiple additions over the past 75 years on a small town budget…it can seem impossible.
I am not criticizing officials in our building permit and planning departments. I cannot stress enough that this is a criticism of Hattiesburg’s policies - not the people, the policies. The public servants in these departments have almost universally been kind, knowledgeable, helpful professionals. They are just doing their job! The policies are put in place by the people we elect. And guess what - those guys are doing their job too!
We, as voters and citizens, are the ones falling down on our jobs. How many people call Councilman Carol about the one or two lonely potholes in Innswood and how many call to complain about the thicket of red tape preventing small businesses from opening? If we don’t complain about regulation overload, it isn’t going to get better.
What if we just started with something small? Most businesses need a sign. Did you know that all signs in Hattiesburg (no matter how small or inconspicuous) need to be pre-approved via a sign permit? How about that any sign in a historical district also has to be approved by the Historic Hattiesburg Commission, a process that can take up to 40 days? Or that only an approved sign vendor (not the owner and not even your contractor) can apply for a permit and install a sign? Or that the bottom of hanging sign like the one below has to be 6” taller than the tallest NBA player ever, Yao Ming, (minimum of 8’ from the ground) unless you apply for a variance, which is a whole different process. We should establish a pre-approved category of signs where as long as you meet a short list of minimum design standards and do not exceed a maximum size, no permit or pre-approval is needed.
We went through a lot of trouble for this little bitty thing…