By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
There is a running joke among Florida builders that you can erect a 300-unit apartment complex faster than you can get a permit to fix a shed. It’s funny until it isn’t.
Ask Gordon Thames. Actually, don’t — he’s busy planning to demolish a perfectly functional maintenance shed because City Hall made it too expensive to keep.
Yes, demolishing. A shed. From 1989. Not because it was dangerous. Not because it violated some modern fire-code breakthrough. But because the City of Tallahassee’s building bureaucracy turned a routine renovation into a three-year maze that would embarrass Kafka.
But this isn’t just a story of unimaginable red tape. It’s a story of mistrust and misplaced priorities.
We know that because, at one point, a City of Tallahassee building official told Gordon Thames III that he “does not trust the document review from private providers.” That skepticism — not safety — became the justification for the blizzard of comments and delays that followed.
More on that later.
But first, the sorry tale of how a long-time apartment complex shed became a window into the state’s dysfunctional permitting culture.
A 35-year-old shed walks into City Hall
Eagles Landing Apartments were built in 1989. Like many properties of that vintage, it had two small maintenance sheds — unremarkable, functional, boring. The kind of structures that exist everywhere without incident.
In 2022, the owner, Arbor Properties, decided to refresh one. By their own admission, they assumed a permit wasn’t needed for a simple renovation. When they later attempted to get a power meter, the City pounced with a stop-work order — fair enough, rules are rules.
What followed was not enforcement — it was attrition.
The owner cleared a whopping 28 plan-review comments on a maintenance-shed renovation — that’s an entire house’s worth.
Three years later, still chasing comments
The City bounced the application, voided it, and forced a completely new permit process years later — requiring:
• New surveys
• A rain-garden plan
• Tree-mitigation calculations, even though no trees were removed — just grass behind a parking-lot curb
• Removal of a dumpster pad on the opposite side of the property
• A structural engineer to confirm 1989 concrete footers (spoiler: they’d need to X-ray them)
• A new gas-line relocation meeting
• A one-hour fire-rated wall
• And trimming part of a wall because the corner of the shed allegedly sat four inches over a property line, even after the neighbor submitted a letter saying they didn’t care.
Four inches. Thirty-five-year-old building. With neighbor consent.
And, to be clear, the “violation” wasn’t a wall or foundation — it was the roof eave extending about four inches past the setback line.
City Hall: “Never heard of it. Get out a saw.”
Meanwhile, when the owner met with the public gas team, the building inspectors reportedly crouched on their hands and knees “looking for stuff to nitpick.”
This is how you treat a developer who builds hundreds of quality housing units here?
The tree-mitigation mirage
Then came the greenest absurdity of all.
In one plan-review round, City staff demanded a full tree-mitigation plan — including a canopy calculation and protection fencing.
But as Arbor’s engineer pointed out, no trees were cut down. None. The work area was existing green space — just grass behind a curb, not a single stump in sight.
“No trees were removed as part of this project,” the engineer wrote. “Existing vegetation remains unchanged.”
Yet the tree-mitigation item stayed open through multiple rounds of review, clogging the workflow for months and forcing the owner to pay consultants to prove a negative.
For a city that brands itself as a national model of sustainability, Tallahassee somehow managed to turn phantom trees into real paperwork.
The private-provider slip
The City’s posture toward private inspections was clear from the start.
Florida law allows licensed engineers to perform reviews and inspections in place of local government — a process designed to speed construction and reduce bureaucratic load. But inside Tallahassee’s building division, private-provider work is often treated with suspicion instead of relief.
That culture of mistrust led to duplicated reviews, endless comment cycles, and what Thames calls “a moving finish line.”
Say it out loud: a City official openly admitted he doesn’t trust licensed professionals doing the same job under state statute.
There’s a word for that. It’s not “policy.”
A pattern we’ve seen before
If you think this sounds like a one-off, look west. Our work in Gulf County documented the same dynamic: projects cleared by state-licensed private inspectors got dragged back into government review, timelines stretched, and costs stacked — not for safety, but for control.
The details change, the playbook doesn’t: contradictory re-reviews, moving goalposts, and a quiet message to builders — use the lawful private-provider pathway, and expect extra friction. The net result is the same whether you’re on the coast or in the capital: fewer improvements, higher costs, and less trust.
Bureaucracy vs. honeymoon
Fast forward to late 2025. The City scheduled a final code-enforcement hearing. Initially, when told that Thames would be on his honeymoon the answer was: tough luck. Eventually it was pushed it to the spring.
That moment of reason, though, came with a catch: if the owner wasn’t in compliance by a certain date, daily fines would begin — even though the delays were almost entirely caused by the building department’s own review backlog.
The absurdity of being threatened with fines for failing to meet a timeline the City itself created says everything about how the system functions.
The cheaper option: destruction
After three years of bureaucratic ping-pong, the owner realized something terrifying:
It was cheaper and faster to demolish a functioning structure than to satisfy the City’s demands. Initially, Thames was told he needed a NEW permit – a demolition permit. And, for a while, as he waited on that permit, he was facing fines for not resolving the underlying problem.
To the City’s limited credit, both Building and Code Enforcement later agreed to let Arbor demolish the shed without a demo permit — a quiet sign, perhaps, that someone inside finally recognized the overreach.
Still, think about that logic. A 35-year-old building, structurally sound and code-compliant by any reasonable measure, headed for the landfill because compliance was harder than removal.
Climate plan? Sustainability? Affordability?
Meet the permitting division.
Why it matters
This isn’t about one shed. It’s about what it says:
• Bureaucracy is prioritized over problem-solving.
• The City will destroy value before it will bend.
• Private inspection options trigger institutional defensiveness.
• Housing providers watch this and think twice about investing here.
Tallahassee’s growth strategy cannot be “annoy them until they leave.”
One question for City Hall
Is this the business climate we meant to build — or just the one we accidentally built because no one is watching the building department?
How can a city government preside over a process that literally values destruction more than improvement?
What kind of culture allows that to happen — and who’s proud of it?
For the sake of fairness, the City has shown small signs of course-correction — but the larger pattern remains: systems designed to serve are too often built to stall.
We don’t expect quick answers from those in charge at City Hall. Just the usual smirk, the shrug, and the mumble as they turn their backs on the private sector:
“Shed happens.”