Had my best week yet with our community garden project

We finally got the rain collection system hooked up at the lot on 5th Street. It was just me and two neighbors, took about 4 hours on Saturday. I was worried the city would give us trouble about the permits, but the zoning office actually helped us out. Has anyone else dealt with city bureaucracies that ended up being more helpful than you thought?

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ray1894mo ago

Hang on a minute though... city zoning offices don't usually hand out help like that for free. You might want to double-check that the permit covers your water rights, because some municipalities get funny about collecting rainwater off public property. Better safe than sorry with that kind of thing.

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daniel8573mo ago

Did you actually run into problems with water rights yourself, or is this more of a general concern? Around here the city was pretty upfront about what we could and couldn't do, and rain barrels on community plots aren't really a fight they want to pick.

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danielb434mo ago

Man that's awesome to hear about your rain collection system... we did something similar at our neighborhood plot last summer and I was shocked how smooth it went with the city too. The permit guy actually walked us through the whole process on his lunch break, showed us where to route the downspouts so we wouldn't mess with any easements. I had this whole backup plan in case they gave us a hard time, but nope, they just wanted to make sure we had a backflow preventer so nothing nasty got into the main water supply. Honestly it was the easiest part of the whole project, way less headache than getting the soil tested or figuring out who was going to haul the compost every month.

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