I don't know what this could mean at the city or county level. Keep an eye out for wayward Sultans and Allied powers?
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire
[1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
To Western Europeans coming from the very loose state structure of feudalism, the fact that the Byzantine Empire was effectively a modern state (similar to ancient China) was practically incomprehensible to them. Hence the phrase! On the flip-side, the level of institutional capacity let the Romans and Byzantines ride out incompetent Emperors fairly well compared to feudal states that would quickly disintegrate with one bad roll of the "off-spring lottery".
Even the most blatantly tyrannical presidents through history hit a wall of bureaucracy. It's slow, but people like me tend to get murdered when tyrants take over, so I'll take it over a quick changing system that can easily turn against me.
Even if you only count from the time it didn’t share an Emporer with the West, rather than viewing it as a linear continuation of the Roman State, looking at the Eastern Roman Empire as somehow a state that did a substandard job of standing the test of time is, well, implicitly setting a really high bar, since even counted from the partition its, what, the second longest lasting state in history?
just use a septic field instead of the sewer hookup if the county won't play ball. then they can't increase your sewer rates every year.
I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness?
Really I think the state ought to be setting complete menus that the local governments can pick from and apply in specific areas. If it's not possible to build a house in some location, it should be clear that it's not possible to build a house in that location. And if it is, it should be clear that it is.
It's less that it's any more straightforward in NY or CA, it's just that zoning and NIMBYism regulation is not the sole domain of either American political party. You can't escape it by moving to a red state.
The usual canard is something like "California won't build more dense housing, so I'm moving to Texas," but housing is even less dense in Texas, so lower costs are not caused by less regulation around housing density! It's just that the ratio of supply to demand isn't as out of whack yet, as metro area populations have been lower and the cities themselves less landlocked, so building out has been easier and cheaper.
Before the building permit was issued I had spent $120k on a fourteen-inch stack of documents and fees, for a house of 2200 ft^2 (~200 m^2).
It has got much more restrictive in the intervening time. New construction in the timber production zones has just about halted.
If "a dwelling would be impossible", the logical conclusion is that zero dwellings would be allowed.
This situation is the norm in US unincorporated zoning. I have never heard of any unincorporated jurisdiction with a "minimum residences per parcel regardless of parcel size" exception. If there is such a jurisdiction, it's the exception not the rule.
There is a limit to how many dwellings an area can support without major infrastructure upgrades (sewerage, water lines, new roads, additional sheriff's deputies). This limit has to be divided among the parcels. The fairest way to do it is by acreage. "Minimum acres per dwelling" is just the reciprocal expression of "maximum dwellings per acre" and more well-behaved since fractional acres make sense but fractional dwellings do not.
Giving tiny postage-stamp parcels the right to build one dwelling would be a windfall for all the kooky "sliver parcels" created by things like railroads and surveyors' errors. Those obnoxious error parcels are made undevelopable in order to encourage that they be merged into a neighboring parcel.
Costs like for all city services are standard everywhere in California.
The reason is proposition 13. Cities can't raise taxes to pay for services so they basically have to charge for each service "a la carte". That sewer charge is more or less for what you and others are going to get from the city over some longer time frame. It suck but the alternative is home owners paying taxes, which home owners have decided they don't want to do.
That being said there was one guy in LA who built a massive house called the enterprise I think. Edit: he lost in court and is being forced to demolish it.
I've met a significant number of otherwise carefully law abiding people with various non-permitted remodels and even outbuildings. (I guess the latter won't work so well in the future now that we have regularly collected high resolution elevation maps). It really seems like something is wrong with how this is handled across most of the US.
The refusal to issue a septic permit noted in a nearby comment is a prime example. Such things should be "will issue" so long as they won't cause any health or environmental problems in that location.
The problem isn't that they're forbidden from using a septic field when there's a perfectly good sewer line nearby. The problem is that they're being charged $40k for a sewerage connection. Where I live, it costs only $1000 for all the permits and inspections required for a new connection.
I would have to disagree that the unreasonably high fee is the only problem there. Charging a captive customer an unreasonable amount is certainly abusive. But so is arbitrarily forbidding what is permitted on private land. Such restrictions should require clear and articulable justification based on real world impact.
This is really outside my wheelhouse, but I could see an argument being made about the capacity of the larger system.
E.g. The direct, marginal cost of installing service to your house is $200 to review the plans, send the guy out for an inspection etc. But the added capacity requirements of you and the 10 new houses in your development puts an upstream sewer out of capacity, costing $50,000 to upgrade. If you don't charge the full marginal cost through the whole system for the upgrade, either the rest of the city is subsidizing your marginal cost, or there's a significant monetary shortfall on the short (say 1-3 year) timeframe, and you'll hope a rate increase is approved to make up for it.
If there were a need to charge for capacity upgrades, it seems such things should be billed separately and explicitly. (My electric bill itemizes hookup, transmission, and generation among other things.)
And absolutely none of it explains why septic should be disallowed!
These days, septic should be disallowed, if a reasonable sewer is available, as these days the effluents contain all kinds of toxic and non-degradable stuff that poisons the land and ground water. Over here, lossy septic tanks are illegal. You can either hookup to a sewer, treat your wastewater in situ via certified processes or, under some conditions, use a non-draining septic tank and have the wastewater treated.
I don't know your profession but let's take a statistical guess and say you're a software developer.
If I asked you to drive out to my place to take a look at 500 lines of Javascript, and tell me if the code is kosher, and if you're wrong I'm going to sue you. How much would you want to be paid to do that?
I think the local municipality typically sends an employee out to do the inspection? At least that's how it worked for me in the past (tbf that wasn't specifically sewer though). Permits having a nominal paperwork fee is understandable.
I very much doubt that the inspector only visits one property per day, or that they are paid anywhere near $1000 per day.