Before you say GHO Homes President Bill Handler should’ve known better, given that his company is one of the most experienced builders in Indian River County, you need to hear the whole story.
You need to know that the Palm Beach-based contractor Handler and his wife hired to build a Tiki hut in the backyard of their Summerplace home assured them he was fully licensed and needed no county-issued permit to do the job.
You also need to know why no permit was necessary.
Hardly anyone knows, the Handlers’ contractor told me last week, about a Florida Building Code exemption that allows members of the state’s Seminole and Miccosukee tribes to build chickee/Tiki huts without first acquiring local building permits, provided the structure doesn’t include plumbing, electrical or concrete features.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and we’ve had to go to court a lot,” said Mario Lequerique, president of Palm Beach Tiki, which has a direct connection to the Seminole tribe and built the Handlers’ open-sided, thatched-roof, wooden hut just inside seawall behind their oceanfront home in October.
“A lot of city and county building officials aren’t familiar with the Seminole exemption, and they don’t know that, when no local permit is needed, no local license is required,” he added. “That’s what I was trying to explain to the guy up there.”
That guy was David Checchi, a contractor licensing investigator for the county’s building department, which on Nov. 16 sent a “notice of violation” to Lequerique, citing his company for “unlicensed contracting.”
Checchi launched his investigation earlier this month, after his office received an anonymous email alerting building officials to the Tiki hut. The complaint, which included photographs of the structure, was sent to Vero Beach 32963 as well, and likely came from one of the Handlers’ neighbors.
“That’s usually how we find out about these things,” Checchi said, adding that complaints about Tiki huts are rare in this county.
Even rarer, though, are contractors claiming the tribal exemptions allowed under Florida law.
“This is not unique in Florida,” said Roland DeBlois, the county’s environmental and code enforcement chief, “but I’m not aware of another situation where we’ve run into it.”
That’s why Checchi and DeBlois – they worked the case together – spent a fair amount of time researching all aspects of the exemption before citing the Handlers for hiring an unlicensed contractor, violating county zoning ordinances governing setbacks and not getting the plans approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
According to DeBlois and Checchi, who did a field inspection of the property and said the Handlers were “very cooperative,” the Tiki hut was built too close to the seawall.
“David went out there and found that the Tiki hut was only a foot or two from the seawall,” DeBlois said. “Our position is that it should be set back at least 5 feet from the seawall. We could force them to take it down and relocate it farther from the seawall, but there’s some uncertainty because the seawall isn’t the property line.
“Their property line actually goes out beyond the seawall, onto the beach,” he added. “In the past, however, when dealing with issues like this, we’ve always used the seawall as the property line.”
If necessary, Handler said he’ll move the hut to comply with the county code.
“If we’re wrong, we’ll address it,” Handler said. “We don’t want any problems with the county, but we’re still not sure what’s going on. It looks like we’re caught in the middle of something.”
They are.
The Handlers are caught in the middle of a legal dispute between the county and Palm Beach Tiki, which Lequerique said will contest the citation rather than pay a $500 fine.
“Our lawyer will be there,” Lequerique said, referring to a Jan. 28 hearing in front of the county’s Code Enforcement Board.
Although Checchi’s investigation revealed Palm Beach Tiki qualified for the tribal exemption – because Seminole Chief Joe Dan Osceola is a member of its board of directors – Indian River County contends the company must be licensed to build chickee/Tiki huts off the reservation.
Lequerique disagreed.
He said that while his company was fully insured and held a specialty license for thatching in South Florida’s three counties, “There’s no licensing requirement when the Seminole exemption is used, anyway.”
Lequerique admitted there was a “brief lapse” in the company’s license earlier this fall, explaining that some required courses had not been completed. “But we straightened that out over the past couple of weeks,” he said.
Besides, Lequerique argued, there’s also a federal law that provides a similar tribal exemption – one that he claims removes any licensing requirement – and he might be right.
In 1990, the federal government signed an agreement with Native American tribes, allowing them to build their traditional chickee huts without acquiring local building permits – an exemption that was awarded as part of the reparations for the nation’s mistreatment of the tribes in the 1800s.
“The federal law doesn’t require licensing, and federal law trumps state law,” Lequerique said. “The problem is that local building officials want to ignore federal law, so here we go again.
“Another county, another hearing,” he added. “It’s always the same story.”
While Lequerique plans to fight the fine for unlicensed contracting, he said he would relocate the Tiki hut if the county requires the Handlers to do so.
“If there’s a problem, we’ll move it,” he said. “If we’re in the wrong, we’ll fix it.”
What Lequerique won’t do anymore is accept jobs in our county – unless they’re big enough and lucrative enough to justify it.
“We go up and build a 10-by-10 hut, and look at what this has turned into,” he said. “I have enough work; I don’t need to waste time with this kind of stuff. There are too many issues. I don’t need the headache.”
My guess is the Handlers don’t, either.
