Now I have written about this online permitting situation before — I did, right here in this column, just a few weeks back — and I said my piece about the internet access problem and I stand by every word of it, but something has been sitting with me since then and I feel it is time to circle back — because this week the county made it official that the Environmental Health permitting portal is live as of April 20th, and I want to talk about what it means when a county office that used to require you to walk through a door and hand a piece of paper to a real human being now requires you to have a working device, a reliable connection, and the patience of a saint who has never tried to load a webpage from the east end of the county on a Tuesday afternoon — and look, I am not saying the old system was perfect, I remember when you had to fill out the same form three times because somebody's photocopier was having a personal crisis — but at least when that happened you were standing right there and somebody could see your face and try to help you.
And another thing — I keep thinking about what it was like when the Environmental Health office used to have that one woman at the front counter, and I will not say her name because that is not how I do things, but she knew every parcel in this county by heart and she could tell you if your property had ever had a variance just by the look on her face when you told her the address — and that is not something a portal can do, I do not care how many tracking updates it sends you — the people who actually live here, the ones who have been navigating these processes for thirty and forty years, they learned how to work the system because they knew the people inside it, and now we are being asked to learn a new system that was designed, I can only assume, by someone who has never had to share satellite bandwidth with three neighbors and a weather station — which connects me to something I want to say about the 32-hour work week trial, because if county offices are going to be closed on Fridays starting in September, and the permitting system is now entirely online, then what exactly happens to the person who needs help with the portal on a Friday and cannot get through — do they just wait until Monday, or do they submit something wrong and spend the next three weeks in a back-and-forth that could have been solved in four minutes at a counter?
I raised questions about the Friday closures in an earlier column and I will not repeat myself entirely — you can look that one up — but what I will say is that these things do not happen in isolation, they pile up on each other like wood in November, and the people who actually live here are the ones who have to manage all of that piling — the new portal, the shorter hours, the Planning Commission seats that still need filling in District 3, all of it happening at once — and I just think someone should be keeping a list of what we are asking people to absorb, because I have been here my whole life and even I am having to take notes — which is not a complaint exactly, it is more of an observation, the kind you make when you have watched a county change and you want to make sure somebody wrote it down.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.