The great wall
by Wayne Laugesen (letters@boulderweekly.com)

Will the prize twits who called Boulder County officials to complain about Dr. Patty Zishka's wall please come forth. We'll tar and feather you atop what remains of Dr. Zishka's wall, and you can each hold a sign that says "I'm a sad, pathetic tattletale who needs to get a life."

It all began three years ago when Dr. Zishka, an urgent-care physician at Boulder Medical Center, embarked upon constructing a beautiful adobe wall not far from my home. The 500-foot-long wall, west of 75th Street and south of Boulder Creek, is an artistic creation of monster straw bales covered with adobe concrete.

Dr. Zishka built it to provide privacy and relief from traffic noise. It was to be a work of art, beautifully painted and decorated with a southwestern motif. Then county officials did what they do best, and blindsided Dr. Zishka with a stop- work order just days before the wall was finished.

"We had probably a half dozen complaints," said Susan Basabe, assistant zoning administrator for Boulder County. "I think it was people going by on the bus, calling from their cell phones. They said, 'What is it? What's going up?' They said it was this hideous, huge structure being built in the wrong place. We're complaint driven, so I went out."

Basabe found Dr. Zishka's contractors building a unique wall —made mostly from organic, recycled materials — on her own property. She whipped out a tape measure and found that the wall was slightly higher than six feet high in some places.

"I intended to build it six feet high, but apparently with some variances in the terrain and some variances in the size of the bales, it exceeded six feet."

Not by much. Due to its organic characteristic and the inconsistency of straw bales, Dr. Zishka's wall exceeded six feet by three inches in some places and up to eight inches in a few others.

Basabe declared the wall a zoning violation, because county code requires a permit for anything over six feet. Problem is, Dr. Zishka had already spent tens of thousands of dollars creating something beautiful and unique, and the concrete stucco had already cured.

"This is just some kind of a need for control," Dr. Zishka said, tearing up with emotion. "It's just so horrible."

After Basabe informed her of the violation, Dr. Zishka hired a lawyer and examined her options. The process of defending her wall became exhausting, and after a three-year battle she came to the conclusion that the wall must be destroyed or shaved down. Soon, a $150-a-day fine will begin.

Dr. Zishka feels violated, and rightly so. She's the target of other people using the letter of the law in a malicious, callous manner devoid of common sense. Will a six-foot wall harm the community less than a six-foot, three-inch wall?

As we spoke from her backyard, a construction crew began the tedious task of shaving the concrete. The wall will never again be one solid piece of stucco, all poured at one time. It will never have the integrity it once had.

In return for this counter-intuitive deconstruction project, nobody who complained will have to look at a wall that's six feet and a few inches in spots. These drive-by fussbudgets will have county assurance that the wall is six feet high and nothing more.

Will the cumbersome and costly deconstruction project solve a legitimate problem or a gripe? Of course not. Instead, it will let a handful of sad, angry tattletales know that they invaded someone's space, anonymously causing hardship. It will assure the complainants that they control Dr. Zishka, her property and her wall.

I asked Dr. Zishka and her partner why someone might turn them in for something so harmless as a few inches of wall.

"We don't know for sure," said Dr. Zishka's partner. "We've wondered if it's in retaliation for some of the election signs we've put out front, or maybe it's because we're lesbians."

Basabe doesn't discount the possibility of either as motivations for those who complained.

"I deal with neighbors who complain, and they often have a lot of motives other than the code violation itself," Basabe said. "I have people who don't like the way a neighbor puts [out] the trash, so they look around and complain about everything else they can find."

And that's the problem with county officials who race to the rescue in response to the silliest of complaints. If a black family moves in and the neighbors don't like it, they can find a fence or a wall or a storage shed that's just a few inches too high or wide or in the wrong place. We see it all the time in this community. With one phone call, any hateful twerp can schedule for his neighbor a Boulder County Land Use colonoscopy, which always results in threatening letters, potential fines, lawyers and costly construction projects.

Knowing that most silly complaints result from nefarious motives, Basabe should have walked away from Dr. Zishka's wall. Regarding this beautiful work of art, Basabe should have said, "What's a few inches?" She should have seen the complainants as hateful slobs and asked them to live somewhere else. Doing so, she'd have made our county a better place.

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