The Our Town - Clarenville Blog by Paul Tilley

At this past week’s Council meeting, it was revealed that a home builder had built a house in such a way to contravene the town’s building regulations.  The house was built closer to the road than is allowed by the current code.   This situation was discovered only AFTER the house was built.  So the Town was, once again, left in a pickle prompting Mayor Best asked: “How did we get to where we got?” Unfortunately, that fundamental question was never addressed at Tuesday’s meeting – it needs to be.   ( listen to the PACKET’s March 5 Meeting Coverage starting at the 15 minute mark ) There are essentially three choices when a breach of the regulations is discovered. 1) Get the home owner to bring the build into spec.  2) Ignore the contravention or  3) Change the regulations.  Unfortunately this latest situation is not an isolated occurrence. It has happened before and from previous experience the Town’s attempts to force builders to fix their contraventions (option 1) have am