Hi all! I used to be a frequent reader, and i’m dealing with something that i’m hoping people might be able to give guidance on.
I purchased my house almost 6 years ago that had a converted garage. At the time, we were told garage conversion permitted status was “unknown”. We checked with the county, and confirmed the square footage matched the house square footage with the garage conversion area. So we figured it was permitted. The actual permit records are flimsy at best, we couldn’t tell from looking at them whether a permit had been pulled, but there did appear to be a mid-70s permit that would match the garage conversion timeframe (a longtime resident told us roughly when it had been converted. And that the owner at the time was the neighborhood “permit enforcer” so they were skeptical it was unpermitted).
Flash forward to now. We take in plans for an expansion. They get rejected because, according to the city, the garage conversion is not permitted. We’re working with the architect to find a way around this (it is a huge pain because we live on a cul de sac and apparently our huge driveway isn’t long enough to be “replacement parking”).
However, i’d like to know if anyone has any insight on how the county assessor could be counting it as square footage on which we pay taxes, but the city says it’s not habitable square footage. I’m flummoxed, and i’d love to have some kind of authority or code or something to go to the city so that we don’t have to go through the process of getting an “as built” permits, inspections, etc on the conversion. Alternatively, I might consider asking for reassessment of our property tax bill based on the “correct” square footage (i.e. not including the unpermitted area) if that’s possible.
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