So…the not-so-fun work of cleaning, painting and repairing the building was happening. The substantially more fun work of decorating the room was chugging along.The part we were ignoring somewhat was dealing with the permits.
When I initially hatched the business idea last year, one of the first things I did was head down to the permit office downtown to see if our building was zoned correctly. I was pretty sure it was since the last three incarnations of the room had been as a bar/restaurant going back at least to the 1980’s. But I figured it made sense to double check before we sunk any money into it.
I thought it was a fairly simple question, but I was terribly wrong.
I presented my inquiry to the clerk in the codes office. She told me that “nobody sits at that desk anymore” (???) and they needed to call someone from upstairs. The zoning office, I found out later.
I posed the question to the clerk from zoning. She looked up the property and confirmed that we were indeed zoned as a local business, which meant restaurants, cafe’s and bars were fine. But – she told me I needed to spell out our entire project in a letter and get approval from zoning first. I had mentioned that we would rent the room out when we didn’t have something going on and that seemed to throw a wrench in the whole process – it didn’t neatly fit into any of their categories.
I returned with the letter and she told me we would have an answer in a couple of weeks. I followed up a couple of times and she informed me that she was too busy and hadn’t had a chance to review my (1 page) proposal yet. Eventually, she came back with a half-hearted green light for our venture, but only if we got a “special” permit. Having already done a lot of poking around on the city’s website, I already knew that was a requirement for all new restaurant and bars.
(Only in the city though…it’s not a requirement in the suburbs. Makes sense, right?)
I discovered that in order to open our little cafe we needed to acquire a crazy number of permits;
- The Special Permit, which has an obscene list of required submittals.
- An Entertainment license, which would allow us to have live music.
- A Sign Permit
- A Health Department permit, so we can serve food.
- A liquor license
- A plumbing permit, which ensured that our plumbing work was done by master plumbers licensed in the city of Syracuse.
- A certificate of use, which seems to be pieces and parts of the other permits
- A certificate of inspection, which is the city checking out our electrical work and the fire marshall checking for fire hazards.
And they all come with fees, of course.
Needless to say, I wasn’t anxious to dive into this rat’s nest of paperwork and documentation. Instead, I kept myself busy with other projects (and there were plenty).
