In a part of Dartmouth that will soon be known as Port Wallace there’s a guy who runs a construction company. The company in question was founded by his father in the 1970s and when his father died the son continued on with his father’s business. The son is now a man in his 60s and the business has run on the Port Wallace property since the 1970s. Right now, the property in question is a construction material storage yard which is common in the area, with the large and noisy Conrad Bros construction storage yard 700 metres down the road.
But someone who lives nearby lodged a complaint with 311 about the “eye sore” that is the construction material storage yard. Staff showed pictures of a property, and anyone in the gallery learned some lessons about some of the fun inconsistent quirkiness of the laws that govern our lives in the HRM. For example, if you have a vehicle that is unregistered, you can’t store it on your property, as that is considered to be a derelict vehicle. One would assume that you could store things you own on property you own, but that is not correct. Some of your property that the state considers dangerous, like guns and cars, need to be registered with the state before they can be legally stored on your property.
City staff sprung into action after receiving the complaint and kickstarted the cumbersome process of levying the power of the state to bully a man at the end of his career because of one person’s whinging. Staff went out and documented all of the issues with the property in question. It was a very comprehensive report detailing all of the ways in which this man needed to clean up his property. The property in question is his, and the eye-storage is too. The only issue with the staff report, really, is that written about the wrong piece of property.
In the hallway after the meeting staff explained that it was okay that they wrote this report about the wrong civic address because staff use Property Identification Numbers, or PIDs to identify the property. Staff said that even though the civic address was incorrect, it wasn’t really, because the PID is correct and part of the same civic address. The only problem with that is that the PID in the staff report hereinafter referred to as “the property” has a different civic address than the property the appeals committee voted to sanction at this meeting.
In regards to why the paperwork is a mess, a city comms staffer emailed The Coast explaining that the PID in question is used to identify the property owner, not the civic address. It doesn't matter that the staff report has the wrong address in the title because the address listed is where the property owner lives.
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