City Ordinances: who gets to decide what meets code and what doesn't ?

Windowgecko

I have construction materials used for garden decor. The city says no, I disagree, bird baths are ceramic, so is mine, ceramic drain pipe and a bowl on top. Same with my logs for cultivating mushrooms, city says yard debris, what else do you cultivate mushrooms on?

davidsdurions

In my town, there is a Code Enforcement Officer. If they were to issue a warning or citation, there's information on it on how to appeal. Additionally, all of my town's codes are available online, so I can check on things before hand, which I've done for allowable sizes of outbuildings and such.

If it comes down to it, you can go to a city council meeting, or equivalent, and bring up your concerns. I'd start with whatever appeal process is available to you first though, otherwise they'll just say you have to adhere to the judgement of the Code Enforcement Officer and that's that.

Enc

Generally speaking, things like logs with flowering mushrooms, cinderblocks, raw construction materials turned into bespoke art, etc. are usually never going to pass appeal if they are in your front space. Usually if the city is taking the effort to cite you for ordinance violations, someone has reported those violations to the code enforcement office (probably more than once). I'd exhaust all options as Davids mentions, but don't get your hopes up.

Re: mushroom cultivation, usually to do so you would need an agricultural zoned property and proper permitting in order to do so. As fungus carries special considerations, at least in my area, this is a difficult industry to break into even as a cottage industry and is tightly regulated due to the potential for poison control problems. Unless you have acres of woods to hide your logs in, that isn't going to fly in a city pretty much ever.

knitdan

Fond out who your city council person is, and go through their office. They can often help navigate the bureaucracies you’ll need to deal with if you want to address these issues.