Dealing with Inspectors and Other Officials

Dealing with Inspectors and Other Officials

I had created what's called a mini estate at a time when the building inspection industry was just

starting up. I ended up spending a lot of time with the building inspector, who was a new man on

the job. In the past, there were no building inspections.

They had planners telling us how everything should be done. I remember that if a downtown

storekeeper wanted to repaint his building, he had to get permission from the city for what

colours he would paint it. Some of the buildings were nice antique buildings. The building

inspector and the city powers decided that the building would have to be clad in aluminum

siding. These were beautiful stone buildings. That cladding—a government requirement decades

ago—has now been removed. The old buildings now look more historically appropriate and

attractive. The planners’ mistakes have been rectified.

This is all part of the evolution of things. Regional districts were created, and the planners got

working. At times, they did not have any idea about what people could afford to do or would

accept. They were telling people that they had to follow the new rules if they wanted to do a

development. I fondly remember one planner from the Regional District of East Kootenay saying

how this large piece of land should be developed. In my opinion, he was all wrong. Anybody

would have known that he was wrong. In the end, we did it a totally different way. The planners

were not helpful.

While these bureaucratic powers emerged, the province decided the highways needed to be

upgraded. The Highways Department had been left these old roads. Some of them were not even

paved. I can remember going to Golden in the spring. The road was just a mud hole, almost all

the way from Kimberley up north through Canal Flats and up to Golden.

They started rebuilding and paving the roads. At the same time, the current British Columbia

Premier W.A.C. Bennett decided that the province should be building power dams. In our area,

they built the Waneta Power Dam and the Brilliant Power Dam, and then started building power

dams up north and across the province.

As soon as construction on the power dams began, a network of powerlines was installed, which

created all kinds of development, surveying, and construction work. At roughly the same time, in

1958, natural gas came to the area. The pace and extent of development work had never been

greater.

The pipeline came down from the Okanagan and into the Kootenays. I worked on one of the

branches that went over to Creston or went from Creston to Yahk. This development required all

kinds of consulting work, both for engineering and surveying. To keep up with the work, we had

to bring in a group of new professional surveyors. At that time, I had just started as a surveyor.

Within a few years of my being in Nelson, three other surveyors came to the region, joining the

older people who had been doing all the work in the area from the turn of the century up to the

early 1950s.

One of the older surveyors passed away in Nelson. My old mentor, Boyd Affleck, who was in his

eighties, decided to retire. That left five youngsters in our group. We handled the new workload

for the building sites, navigating the new rules put in place by the bureaucrats and professional

highway engineers.

For example, a new position was created known as the Highways Local Approving Office. This

individual was the senior engineer for the Highways Department. He had staff that would review

every proposal. The complexity of the reporting and approval processes increased. If you were

working on a building, you would have to go through the building inspection branches. If you

were doing a land development, you had to deal with several different agencies.

The Health Department was probably the worst one to deal with because its members suddenly

started imposing new requirements on the sewage systems. As mentioned earlier, I sponsored my

engineer son, who had graduated in civil engineering, to go back and take a master's degree in

sanitation so that he could work on sewage disposal fields. I hoped that he would come back to

the area and work alongside me. In the end, consultants were able to handle this new work

because of the new equipment that became available.