I'm here to address my recent building permit rejection by laurie and the inappropriate link the council has made between your short term rental issue and new construction. Your current rules are like treating a grasshopper problem by banning alfalfa.
My wife and I bought 4 acres on the North East end of Corrales road. We have a barn under construction and On friday I submitted a plan for a 4400 sq ft 3 bedroom home and a 4 car detached garage, both are permissive uses under part 33 of section 18.
As a part of our design we have a 600 sq ft area I called a casita on the plans.
It is connected to the house between the garages and is centrally located to the barn and there is a kitchen, bedroom and small work space on the plans.
Our application was rejected by Laurie yesterday and a resubmitted version that has no bedroom or kitchen in it was just rejected a couple hours ago.
My first issue is the manner of the rejection. Laurie - not Joe - flagged the kitchen in our attached casita and the fact that the casita was not in her mind 'connected enough' to our main house. She directed me to add a hallway to connect the casita to the house and Her last words before hanging up on me were 'when you give me something I can approve I will approve it' - wow so helpful. Section 45 suggests a more helpful coaching approach but I certainly didn't get it. And when I raised a request to the Mayor, she only redirected me back to Laurie who doesnt take my calls anymore.
It feels to me like you all are on a witch hunt and I'm wearing the pointy hat.
We had intended and designed our casita to facilitate our farming which will generally be a lot dirtier than the rest of the house. The kitchen would be where we clean, render,stage, dry and other preparation of our crop - aka food. Wouldn't all of you rather can 500 lbs of tomatoes somewhere other than your main kitchen?
We had designed the kitchen in the casita to do this so we weren't hauling hundreds of pounds of produce through the house - but this runs afoul of your new rules. All kitchens are not created equal - is an outdoor bbq a kitchen? You seem to want to force us to do all our food processing in our main house - just because we might rent our casita out someday - does that really seem fair to you? Wouldn't it be better to just tell us we can't rent our casita rather than tell us we can't build it the way that works best for us?
And to our next offense - We put a bedroom in the casita. When we travel we need someone to tend the farm and the livestock and the casita bedroom is centrally well-situated - you can see directly to the barn from the bedroom and are only 75 ft away. Which also is helpful some nights if we're up all night with a sick animal. And we do occassionally have guests.
But laurie and your new rules say we can't have any of this - because we might rent the casita out some day. Do you understand now how you impact our farm operation plans - hauling hundreds of pounds of crops through the kitchen, sleeping ocassionally in our RV parked where the Casita Would have been, sticking our guests in a tiny RV? Tracking mud through the main house?
- all because you are concerned we might some day rent that casita out? Let me Be Clear - This is NOT fair to us.
I am asking two things - First, obviously I want our building permits approved. Second, I think you need to get a better handle on your short term rental problems and quit trying to fix it through building restrictions.
To me it makes no sense to manage farm land design because you are worried about short term rentals.
Address that problem head on - use quotas, higher fees, greater restrictions, anything really, I'm not interested in how you fix it,
I only want you to back off your building restrictions because we are currently collateral damage. I hope our use case broadens your perspective.
Please Let us build our farm