An Ottawa couple will have their building permit fee waived to completed flood repairs to their basement, after initially being told they were ineligible because of unapproved work done by the previous owners. Jenn Jarvis and Andrew Sampson have spent the last eight weeks ripping out their basement in the city’s west end after severe flooding on Canada Day. “It is all consuming. It has impacted every aspect of our lives,” Jarvis said. In July, the city announced it would waive building permit fees for flood-related repairs. Instead of the fee being covered when they applied for the permit, they were given an invoice for around $1,000. They were told by multiple city employees that because the previous homeowner had done work without a building permit, they weren’t eligible to get the fee waived. “I said, ‘okay, well, that doesn’t appear to be in writing anywhere.’ On the website, it just says city council voted to waive the fees. The mayor came to the neighborhood on his press tour and said, ‘we’re going to waive fees for residents,’” Sampson said. Sampson said after escalating the complaint, the amount of the fee was dropped to $330. “We’ve already been spending every waking moment trying to recover from this and trying to move forward and now you’re telling us that this thing you had promised us as an act of goodwill and as assistance to us, the one thing that we’ve tried to take advantage of, we’re not eligible for because of a technicality,” Jarvis said. Soon after CTV News contacted the City of Ottawa for comment, Jarvis received a phone call from a city official saying if the couple sent photos of the space before the damage, the fee would be waived after all. “It shouldn’t have come to that,” Sampson said about having to go to media about the issue. “If there was additional documentation they needed or collateral to move it forward, I don’t know why they didn’t just say that to us on the phone. Instead, they were insisting that it had to be previously permitted.” The City of Ottawa confirmed in a statement that after “receiving additional information to support consideration” for the couple’s building permit, it waived the fee. “Where a project also includes additional renovation work or expands the home beyond what existed before the flood, building permit fees would generally apply to that additional work. The waiver is intended to support residents in restoring their homes following flood damage, rather than new or expanded construction,” said John Buck, the city’s chief building official in an email. The couple had not been seeking to expand the home beyond what existed before the flood. The city says it has received 555 flood-related permit applications to date and approved all but one of them. Buck says only one application has been charged the full permit fee as the scope of the work was determined to be unrelated to flood repairs Jarvis says she wanted to speak out to warn other homeowners who may encounter a similar issue. “How many other people are going to be in our situation? In the grand scheme of all the money that we’re going to spend to not only restore the space, but to make it better, is this the biggest expense that we’re going to have? No,” she said. “It might seem like a really small thing, but after eight weeks of just day in and day out frustration, it just feels unnecessary.”
