If you are going to open a food and beverage business, I have some advice for you.
Your patience is going to get a serious workout. Learn how to meditate and practice deep breathing. Develop some healthy coping strategies for dealing with stress. And don’t forget to stock up on booze – you are going to need it.
The process is frustrating, time-consuming, maddeningly inefficient, and expensive. You will be given incorrect and conflicting information on a regular basis. You will have to provide crazy amounts of documentation for things like trash cans. You will get really good at making scale drawings and your local copy center will know you by name. You will jump through fiery hoops just for the sake of jumping.
Here’s where we’re at in Listening Room land:
We’ve submitted the applications for our certificate of use, entertainment license, our 30-day notice of intent to apply for a liquor license and our “special” permit.
The “special” permit is an absolute beast requiring massive amounts of extra documentation. We got a call from zoning that they need more info from us in order to process that application. Also, despite the fact that we are zoned correctly, not doing any construction and keeping the use of the building the same, we will not have an approval on this permit for about 3 months.
Seriously, 3 months.
Our liquor license app is almost complete, but it’s an expensive application – around $3500. Do we risk sending it in before we get our special permit? Or lose 3 months of time?
What would you do?
The grease trap situation is our biggest issue at the moment, and The Great Grease Trap Challenge took a bat-shit crazy turn yesterday.
We’ve been trying to get this work done for 4-5 months, I wrote the first chapter in the saga HERE.
When we left off, Plumber #4 had just told us that the county approved a 250lb trap and they were waiting for the city to approve the deviation from the normal code. When we questioned who exactly needed to approve it, they switched gears said they were all set to go and could get the job done in a couple of days.
That was 2+ weeks ago. They’ve been MIA and we haven’t been able to get a return call since then.
We were freaking out due to the lack of communication and the passing time with no work done, so we started messaging the owner of the plumbing company. We eventually got a call back from our plumber who told us that we were waiting on “the city” to approve the smaller trap. I asked him who, exactly needed to approve it on the city side. He said, “I think the codes department has it”.
Back to that…interesting
I emailed my two wonderful contacts with the city and posed the question to them. Jake is the director of the central permit office and Nora is the deputy commissioner of business development in the city. They’ve been really helpful in trying to help me get answers and sort through the red tape. They both confirmed that the city has ZERO say in plumbing issues
And I’m fairly certain they think I’m completely crazy.
But wait – it gets better.
Jake encouraged me to call Dennis, the head of plumbing control for the county, which I did. He informed me that while someone had asked a few questions about our property a few weeks ago, they didn’t have a file on us yet and certainly hadn’t approved anything at this point. He had given the plumber a list of documentation he needed to consider the waiver and that was the last he had heard of it.
The plumber did not share the list of requirements with us and didn’t return our calls for weeks. Dennis reiterated that the city has no say in plumbing permits.
So the story about the city needing to approve our project was a total fabrication…as was the statement that the county had already approved a 250lb trap.
More wasted time.
Dennis sent me the list of the information he needed in order to consider a smaller trap and I got the information back to him within an hour. He was really kind and helpful and I regret that I didn’t reach out to him sooner. We are in contact with Plumber #5 and anxiously awaiting the verdict on the grease trap from plumbing control.
If they stick to their guns and insist that we install the larger trap with the manhole, it puts the entire project at risk. We do not have a kitchen and cannot cook anything, which makes an unnecessary $15,000 expense impossible to recoup. We’re having some really difficult conversations right now about what we’re going to do if that happens and we have put a moratorium on buying anything else related to the business until we get this resolved.
I have to say, the permit system could use an overhaul. Entrepreneurs who are willing to put in their time, money and sweat equity into launching a business venture (especially in a neighborhood that needs some extra love) should be allowed to do so without navigating this swamp of bureaucratic paperwork. I would expect to deal with extra red tape if I was building new or trying to change the zoning, but we’re not. It’s a simple project and the current “one size fits all” process does not make sense.
Maybe the whole point is to weed out the weak and unworthy?
Good thing I bought the BIG bottle of vodka this week.
