Building rates, Skinners Falls

News from the Cochecton Town Board

By LIAM MAYO
Posted 1/3/23

LAKE HUNTINGTON, NY — The housing market is heated in Sullivan County, with building—at least in the Town of Cochecton—up to match.

Town of Cochecton code enforcement officer …

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Building rates, Skinners Falls

News from the Cochecton Town Board

Posted

LAKE HUNTINGTON, NY — The housing market is heated in Sullivan County, with building—at least in the Town of Cochecton—up to match.

Town of Cochecton code enforcement officer Jim Crowley gave the town board an end-of-year retrospective during its December 14 meeting.

The town had 68 municipal searches in the year to date, said Crowley. “Things are going on with property, when you see this amount of municipal searches.” The building department had conducted 185 inspections and issued 118 building permits, three demolition permits, 10 logging permits, four unsafe-building notices, six certificates of occupancy (CoO) and 56 certificates of compliance.

The department earned a total of $27,734.92 for its work.

The board discussed with Crowley potential changes to the building department’s fees for 2023.

The rates the building department charges for permits and the like haven’t changed in a long time. Town supervisor Gary Maas said they might not have changed since he’d been on the board. That left the fees behind the times, and the building department shortchanged.

“The building fees in the town of Cochecton are ridiculous,” said Crowley. “Contractors, they love building here—you can build a whole house for $500.

“I’m out there 12 times before you get a CoO,” he added. “The people who use the building department should pay for it.”

Maas asked Crowley for an outline of what he thought the rates should be versus what they currently are. The rates as Crowley outlined them were discussed at an end-of-year board meeting on December 29.

Permit fees went up in a number of areas under the proposal. A building permit for a house currently costs $100, plus $0.16 per square foot of construction; the discussed rates would raise the square-foot rate to $0.30. For a commercial property, the base fee for a building permit would go up, but the square-foot rate wouldn’t change.

“Personally, I think we need to go this route,” said Maas.

Board member Sean Nearing offered the only dissenting comment; $850 for a building permit (an estimation from Crowley of the new residential rate) sounded like a lot, he said.

The board prepared to enact the new rates at its reorganizational meeting on Tuesday, January 3, a meeting set to occur after presstime.

Skinners Falls

Maas additionally updated the public present at the December 14 board meeting on a separate meeting he had attended to discuss the Skinners Falls bridge.

The Skinners Falls-Milanville bridge was closed on October 16, 2019, after an inspection revealed structural deterioration. Since then, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has led a process to decide the bridge’s fate—whether it should be repaired or replaced.

“It’s been three years now, October, that that bridge has been unusable,” Maas told the public. He said he asked the project team about the timeline for the project.

The project team told Maas it would likely take until 2025 to have a plan for the bridge and to know whether it would be repaired or replaced, he said.

“I think people are discouraged,” said Larry Richardson, Cochecton’s representative on the Upper Delaware Council and the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway. “They’re really discouraged about that whole thing.”

building department, building rates, fees, Skinners Falls

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  • Jane Cyphers

    That the PennDOT time frame to release a final report on the verdict regarding the future of the Skinners Falls Bridge has been pushed back to 2025 is ridiculous. It is a measure of incompetence that it should take so long to issue a final report and decision regarding the fate of the bridge. But it is likely that the delay has more to do with a strategy whereby PennDot thinks that the community will forget how upset it is with its closing and the way the project has been handled. PennDot and their engineers know well that given another two years of neglect it will be more difficult to restore and easier for them to justify condemnation.

    Joe Levine

    Milanville

    Monday, January 16, 2023 Report this