Court and Contracts

Tomorrow I have to go to court and plead my case in front of the City Council. This is NOT the way that I wanted to spend my Tuesday afternoon. It became necessary because of hoops, bells and whistles that the city has instituted to fight abandoned houses that just become tawdry run-down properties and often can lead to lowered property values and increased crime. However, that's not our house. Our house is dearly loved and we've been working on renovating and fixing it up to put onto the market in the summer of 2013.

When I moved up to Minnesota in the late 1970's (yes, I'm that old *sigh*), my DH and I moved into his grandmother's home. She was a feisty German woman who, along with her husband, had moved to Minnesota in the late 19-teens. They purchased this little house from the carpenter who had built it and who had lived in it for two years while he built another home for himself. It's a beautiful house - very small but sturdy. It is a typical arts and crafts house, 1-1/2 stories high with a full, unfinished basement of poured concrete walls. It has outstanding hand-finished woodwork - hardwood floors, solid doors, wide moldings, and built-ins all over the place.

The city has decided that since we have not lived in the house for many years, nor had tenants that we were renting it to, it is a vacant house. This means that we have to pay an additional $1100 tax to the city for the property. But, more than that, it means that to be able to put it on the market in 2013 (which is our intention) we now would have to have a series of inspectors come through and certify that the house is properly cared for, totally up to code, etc. I understand where the city is coming from, but we went through this earlier and were assigned a class 1 status meaning we just needed to keep the property up and all would be well. But, someone new came into the Fire Inspections department, determined to impress her new employers, and my file was one that was pulled. So, because of her push, we've been dropped to class 2 status and that's not good. Tomorrow I get to state my case in front of the City Council and try to convince them to allow us to resume our class 1 status. If that happens, I'll have that house ready to go on the market in the summer and it will be sold before the end of 2013. It's a dog and pony show.

I've also been reviewing my contract for my short story "Dragon Seeks a Wife". I already had them change the few things that were actually germane to the document, and so I will sign it (with the certain knowledge that I will NOT be getting rich on this story - LOL). But there are typos, dropped punctuation, etc. that also exists in the contract, even though this is a second run-through. So I'll also tell them about those even though they won't have to change the contract to reflect those changes. But it would be really, really nice if they did change it one more time...just saying...