Dancing in the Dark

Town Planning Committee meeting tonight.  More contentious than usual.  We OK'd the land use permit for the rental place on the other side of Dearhamer's.  (Actually I thought he had already requested one long before.)  Then the Town Chairman asked the committee their thoughts about the town taking over our sanitation permits from the county.  It was the most idiotic thing I'd heard since he had said the town should take over our own zoning from the county.   The committee tabled it until we can do research on what exactly is required to do that.  That segued us to the next item on the agenda which was reconsidering the zoning permit fee schedule.  For the past year building permits have cost double since the town said it was taking over it's own zoning and therefore charging for a permit.  The town hasn't been able to take over zoning lawfully though so the county also requires a permit and charges the same fee.  I'd protested in the last meeting that this wasn't right so it went on the agenda for this meeting.  I suggested we go back to charging what we did for permits before this whole zoning fiasco - which was zilch.  After looking up how many permits we'd had in the last year, taking that times the number of people on the committee, and the amount we get paid per meeting, it was determined we would need to charge $60 for every permit  to pay for the committee.  A motion was made to switch to $60 and it was a 2 to 2 split decision.   (We were missing one member).  The two members voting no wanted the payment to be less questioning if we had to have the committee look at permits since we hadn't taken over zoning.  We were at an impasse until the leader pointed out that if we didn't come to an agreement tonight, the existing permit fee schedule would stay in place.  $60 is a heck of a lot less than $300+ that we were charging for some permits.   A revote on the previous motion passed.  We can always tweek the fees more in the future