Regulators Tell Matt Blunt that Deregulation Hurts Citizens

The Missouri state legislature has passed a bill that will remove redundant inspections on new homes in one area of the state:

Currently, homebuilders have to get a county building inspection as well as a fire inspection. Developers argue that the inspections, in some instances, overlap each other.

However, the bill does have some opponents, including those in charge of the eliminated inspections and their friendly legislators:

Rep. Rick Johnson, D-High Ridge, opposed the bill along with most of the county's representatives. He views its passage as a deregulation effort by the Home Builders Association of Greater St. Louis (HBA).

"Firefighters can inspect a building the way a building official cannot," Johnson said. "The HBA wants it done as cheaply as possible. The firefighters are the ones concerned about safety."

And:

"Do we have some redundancy (between the two inspections)?" Mayer said. "Yes we do . . . The big point I want to get across is that our goal is to have fire-safe homes. We want fire-safe homes for the citizens to live in and fire-safe homes so that when our firefighters go in, they know they are inspected. If we get that, then we're happy."

The bill originally eliminated the redundant inspections statewide, but legislators watered it down for esoteric reasons according to lawmaker calculus.

We at DMB2008 hope the governor signs this bill and extends it statewide. As a point of order, the libertarian component of DMB2008 thinks that all government inspections during the homebuying process are pointless and only serve to generate revenue or infringe upon property rights to prop up property values for other citizens.

When we bought our house, we paid a private inspector to examine its soundness; we trusted this inspector to tell us what was wrong, in detail, with the building before we moved in. He pointed out the condition of the wiring, the foundation, roof, individual rooms' maintenance, settling overall, drainage, and other graphic detail of our home and property and the things we would have to fix or replace in the coming years. The city inspector showed up, took his fee, ran through his checklist, and told us the house was not fit for occupation until we painted the soffits.

Fortunately, we did not have any additional inspections from the fire district, the parks board, the vector control board (looking for mosquito breeding areas at $100 a visit), the department of highways and traffic, nor the business development department.

Local governments get away with these additional "safety" inspections--and the inspection fees, plus any violation fines--because home buying is so expensive to begin with and because mortgage companies and title companies and all other parties within the homebuilding/home buying process have conditioned consumers to throw out several hundred dollars in fees for various and sundry ginned-up reasons. Local governments want a piece of that pie, and private entities have done most of the behavioral work on consumers already.

But for safety's sake, fire protection districts don't (yet) inspect each power tool purchased from a yard sale or hand-me-down retro blender homeowners bring into their homes--each of which provides some measure of fire risk, and, depending upon how cheap the item was, possibly greater risk than any electrical wiring done by reputable electricians. Of course, no one has given the local government intrusive inspection power to this degree, but the local government would probably accept it and its resulting revenue gladly.

We here at DMB2008 hope that Matt Blunt continues his support of individuals and businesses against the power of the state. All signs are that he will.