There is the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" that summarizes learning. We can forgive ourselves the errors of the uninitiated, or the ignorant, or even a simple honest mistake. But what we cannot excuse ourselves is to not learn from that mistake, and, perhaps even more importantly, admit to it and fix it.
In this episode's example of government failure, the focus is not really on the initial error, nor it should not be. The damnation should be directed at those who have not fixed the insult caused by the initial error. This one will get a bit technical, but I'll try to make it simple. The overall effect on you ought to be outrage, if I do my job.
This is about a relatively obscure part of the Environment Act. Under that Act are the Regulations Respecting On-Site Sewage Disposal in the Province (the regs). One part of these regs deals with how big your lot of land must be in order to have a house on it. The regs require a minimum area of land for each of four classes of permeable soil depth. basically, we have a pretty good system that sets residential density based on the land's capacity to suport it by assimilating treated sewage into the ground, while keeping the poop safely distant from people's wells.
I'll stop you here if you want to protest something technical. In this one small field, in Nova Scotia, I'm one of the technical experts. If anything I say here is not quite exactly right, its because I'm simplifying for a broader audience. Call me to discuss, I might answer.
Anyway, lets use a semi-real example, something that actually happened and which continues to happen in Nova Scotia today. A young family have a nice house, a three bedroom home, on a lot that is also new, and is just a little big larger than the minimum area required under the Act. Lets say 55,000 square feet. The also have a garage, a nice one that, like most garages in Nova Scotia, is not used for a car. It has a small workshop and a loft the kids sometimes hang out in via a ladder.
The next door neighbours took their garage the previous year and fit it up so the wife's Mom and Dad could move there, staying on the same property, having dinner with them most nights, teaching the kids to knit, and do woodwork. These people are seeing this, and knowing that his Dad has failing eyesight and will soon need more care than they can easily get on their farm. So they decide to do the same. Fix up the garage as a one bedroom semi standalone with water form the well, and connected to their septic system.
Just like their neighbours, they expect to have to have their septic system inspected, and probably expanded to accommodate not the extra people, but the extra bedroom. With the sale of the parents property, they can afford that.
But (there's always a but in these episodes) since last year, when their neighbours did their garage over, the Province has jumped into the middle and decided this practice had to be regulated in case... well, just in case someone tried something bad. Or whatever, something that there might not be control over by government. It's not like making sure the septic system was big enough to do the job, or the water was safe to drink, no we had to have more control over this or someone might benefit, somehow.
So, one experienced engineer was delegated to come up with Cluster System Guidelines. These are intended to govern cases where more than one home is on a lot, so developers don't go jamming in houses upon houses on one small lot to get around the legislation over lot size and density. There is some merit in regulating this, although in reality, with clearance regulations and offsets required from wells, it would be rare for anyone to be able to do very much.
This engineer, a very experienced one, came up with an OK set of Guidelines that was reviewed and vetted through the Committee responsible for technical changes to the Guidelines and Regs. His solution to our little situation with the garage was to simply make people assume the design flow would be 1500 l/d, design a new system for that, and all would be fine on the original small lot. If someone wanted to add more than one bedroom, they'd need to have a lot 1.5 times the size of the original minimum size. So the reg states that anything with more than one dwelling, with flows over 1500 l/d has to conform to Schedule A, wherein lot sizes are set to be 1.5 times the normal 3 bedroom home size. Under 1500 l/d, the lot can stay the same size. This was fine, as it allowed people to bring their parents onto their property and allow them to maintain privacy and independence.
It was all working out pretty well at this point, until some unnamed bureaucrat, probably someone who's never opened a septic tank in their life, decided, without telling the person who wrote the Cluster Guidelines, to add a 15% factor of safety to the design flow. And the Regs got published with that in them. Suddenly the design flow increase to the system on the lot due to the garage was no longer the very conservative 500 l/d (a normal 3 br house is 1000 l/d) it is now 725 l/d, or 1,725 total This for two people who will be eating and doing laundry in the house.
The kicker is this - the regional offices realize that now the total flow is greater than the 1500 l/d threshold so they start disallowing building permit applications to convert buildings to residential use, or build new small out buildings, for this purpose, unless the lots are 1.5 times the minimum area.
In our case, after fighting for a while just to do what their neighbours did the year before, the family put the parents into a Provincially funded seniors care home. This when they would have greatly preferred to look after them in the context of their greater family unit. Inhumane, almost. Unfair certainly. Of no value to society at all - especially considering that there was no engineering technical reason why. Nope, just an average bureaucratic day enforcing a typo to the detriment of the public we're supposed to be serving.
This is bad. Almost hard to believe, and it has happened more than once. Who knows how many times, as they don't keep track of their successful efforts on harming people in the Department of the Environment.
It gets worse. Remember the preamble? Well, this happened at least three years ago, and they have known about it for almost that long. No effort to correct this wrong has been made, and people are presumably going into our already overloaded seniors homes when they really don't need to be. This uncaring, family hating, technically unsupportable practice has been allowed to continue for years.
The inaction is appalling. Surely it can't get worse!
But it does.
In my somewhat vitriolic rant of 2011 here I respond to what these bureaucrats have been working on, instead of fixing this painful problem. They are actually working to remove any obligation they have to the socio-economic well being of Nova Scotians, instead of addressing their own public hating policies.
Yes, when they could have been fixing hurtful practice, they were instead busy changing the rules so they are no longer obligated to give a shit about the people who they purportedly work for, or, laughably, serve.
But in our Culture of No, they are winners, and are probably all promoted or retired with full pensions by now. I dearly hope they all run into the same problem and have to go into a home early. And not one of the nice new ones.
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