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This actually happened to Tucson developer Tom Warne — and most telling of all, it doesn't surprise other commercial developers in Tucson.

"When we were working on the Main Gate project, we were building two new restaurants, and there was one set of rules from the city for one of them and then when we started work on the second one, they applied a completely difference set of rules for that one," Warne said.

"The irony is that it's not the city staff's fault — two people will find two contradictory sets of rules in the land-use code. The code is very cumbersome and it's not clear and it's voluminous," Warne said.

Mike Hammond of Picor Commercial Real Estate said he had a client who was tripped up by a rule saying that if the flush handle on a toilet is not on the side away from the wall, you have to replace the toilet. Cost: Six toilets times $500, plus labor. Reason: Unclear.

This is absurd and bad for business. It must be fixed. Thankfully, various elected officials, city workers and citizens like Hammond and Warne are working to get that done.

Hammond says Tucson's land-use code has become so byzantine that "quality developers that we want in our city can spend $15,000 on a project and then discover they can't do what they want to."

Because of such hassles, many of them borne of confusion among city workers about what the code means, commercial developers like Warne and Hammond warn that Tucson is losing new businesses, and thus jobs, to competitors like Marana, Mesa and Chandler.

As for revitalizing the central city in the face of such bureaucratic hassles? "That's just a myth," Hammond said.

The mayor and City Council are taking on the problem, though it won't be a quick or easy fix, given the complexity of the Land Use Code.

Vice Mayor Nina Trasoff has lead the charge to clarify the city's requirements for certificates of occupancy, which tenants need to have in order to get business licenses.

C.T. Revere, Trasoff's chief of staff, said her office had a "rash" of calls from businesses that had signed leases, made improvements and then found they couldn't get a certificate, and thus a business license.

"It was happening too often," he said.

After Trasoff, Hammond, Warne, Jessie Sanders of the city's Development Services Department and others worked on the issue, the council last week unanimously approved a requirement that landowners give potential renters a city document that encourages them to visit Development Services to learn about certificate of occupancy (COO) requirements before signing their lease.

The council also asked Trasoff and her team to bring back to the council by Oct. 15 proposed rules to cover, among other things:

● A provisional certification of occupancy, a negotiated settlement between the city and lessee to give a tenant a year to bring issues into compliance.

● An "application certificate of occupancy." In cases where the new use of the property is essentially the same as the old (say from a real estate office to a law office), the new tenant would need only to pass a health and safety exam to get a certificate of occupancy.

● The parameters of baseline drawings that new tenants must provide of their floorplans. The city used to required drawings by registered architects.

Hammond is on board with all of this, though he says next "we need to spell out exactly what are the health and safety issues so that every inspector has the same information and applies the same standards; and the city needs to find a way to turn around the process in hours, not days or weeks — otherwise these businesses are not going to open in Tucson.

"It's a bad law if you don't have clarity of when, how and what you're looking for in these inspections," he said.

Revere agrees. He says "these are just opening steps of a longer process, because what everybody knows is that the land-use code is a mess. We're going to start attacking the elements that don't allow us to create the kind of city we want."

On a parallel track, Councilwoman Karin Uhlich is working with the city's Department of Urban Planning & Design and also Development Services to streamline and radically simplify the land-use code.

"The feedback we get is that the whole land-use code is confusing and difficult and dissuades people from developing in the city," Uhlich said.

Her group will "eliminate redundancies and contradictions between different sections. When issues of substance come up on whether to change provisions, we'll bring those forward to mayor and council."

"That's what we're all hoping can be changed," Warne said. "If we can get a code that is clear, concise, and easier to interpret, we can stop the decay in the city core, from the Tucson Mountains to the far East Side, from Prince Road down to the airport, we can make it more business friendly.

"We can rehab older buildings. We can keep businesses from being driven to Glendale or other towns within the county."

Tucson is anything but homogeneous. We celebrate our community's diversity and encourage leadership to recognize that one-size-fits-all regulations are not always appropriate and can be detrimental.

Community leaders must balance the need for unity and uniqueness.

Such is the case in land-use regulations, one of the issues that percolated to the surface during the Star-sponsored "Tucson Growth: Decision at the Crossroads" in March and from answers to forum questions answered by Tucson City Councilwoman Shirley Scott. (Page A8)

Touring 100-square-mile Ward 4 on the Southeast Side that Scott represents last month, she pointed out some of the distinct differences in geography and demographics from the more urban parts of Tucson.

For example, large swaths of land in the ward enable it to accommodate major employers, such as the 1 million-square-foot Target distribution center under construction north of Interstate 10 on Rita Road. We encourage the City Council and staff to embrace the city's differences as it begins revising and reforming an outdated land-use code that is subject to interpretation.

We also encourage regionwide attention to land use. A community conversation on land use among area jurisdictions to explore the benefits of regional collaboration on land use without sacrificing autonomy is being developed for early December.

We believe land regulations must be unifying and strong, yet flexible enough to accommodate the specific needs and preferences of the individual, distinct parts of our community.