City of Garrison, North Dakota - Building Permits and Inspections

City of Garrison, North Dakota

city

1 West Central Ave., PO Box 459, Garrison, ND 58540

Required

Required

Building permits in Garrison are handled at City Hall, 1 West Central Ave., PO Box 459, Garrison, ND 58540, on 701-463-2600. The City's own process, per its FAQ: "Take a moment to read all required information provided. Then pick up a building permit application form and return to City Hall." No application form or checklist is published online - the City directs applicants to call or email for the forms rather than download them, which is thinner than several neighboring North Dakota cities that post a form on their own site. THE ONE FEE FIGURE THAT IS PUBLISHED sits inside the Zoning Ordinance's Planning and Zoning Commission fee section rather than on a dedicated building-permits page: a "Building Permit Fee Schedule" keyed to Project Cost, running from $20 for $0-$5,000 up to $500 for $300,001 and above, alongside a separate Planning and Zoning Fee Schedule for a Conditional Use Permit ($100), a Set Back Variance ($250), or a Zoning Change ($250-500). Confirm current fees and required documents with City Hall before bidding a job, since none of this is posted as a standalone fee schedule for the Building Permits and Inspections Department itself.

Garrison runs its own Building Permits and Inspections Department, and the City's own Planning & Inspections page states in terms that it is "responsible for the following: Enforcing building codes [...] Scheduling and conducting building inspections" and that "Our Building Codes and Inspections Department take[s] on the responsibility within our community of [...] Enforcing building codes and Ensuring the health, safety and general welfare of our citizens." So the City itself, not McLean County, is the enforcing authority. WHAT COULD NOT BE ESTABLISHED. The City's own Zoning Ordinance (Ordinance 2022-1, read in full, all 36 articles) refers to a separate instrument it calls "the Building Code of the City" at least four times - governing signs "in 'C-S' and 'I-P' districts" subject to "the building Code," fences that "shall be constructed and maintained in accordance with the Building Code of the City," a construction standard "set forth in the Building Code of other regulations of the City," and fences again that "shall conform to the construction standards of the building code." None of those four sentences names an edition, a model code, or an adoption ordinance number, and the zoning ordinance itself contains no roofing, roof-covering, sheathing, drip-edge, ice-barrier, impact-rating, or layer-count provision of any kind - it is a land-use and zoning-district instrument, not the building code it refers to. THE SEARCH FOR THAT INSTRUMENT CAME UP BLOCKED, NOT NEGATIVE. The City's own "Ordinances" page lists only the Grass, Firework, Traffic & Parking, Snow Removal, Dangerous Dog, Zoning, and Crossing-Yellow-Lines ordinances - no building code. Guessed document-folder paths for a building-code PDF on the City's own site all returned a redirect rather than a document. The Municode client API (queried directly) lists nineteen North Dakota clients and Garrison is not one of them. codelibrary.amlegal.com returned a Cloudflare "Just a moment..." interstitial (HTTP 403) rather than content. codepublishing.com returned the same shape of block. So the text of "the Building Code of the City" is unread, and this record does not guess at its edition. THE STATE FRAMEWORK, FOR CONTEXT ONLY. North Dakota Century Code Section 54-21.3-03 provides that a city electing to administer and enforce a building code "shall adopt and enforce the state building code," which "may be amended by cities [...] to conform to local needs." This record does not assert that Garrison has elected to run on the state code, on a frozen edition, or on some other amended version - only that whichever it is, its text was not reachable. Call City Hall at 701-463-2600 and ask which edition the Building Permits and Inspections Department is currently enforcing before bidding a job that turns on a code detail.

GARRISON PUBLISHES NO ROOFING-SPECIFIC THRESHOLD AND NO EXEMPTION LIST OF ANY KIND, WHICH CUTS BOTH WAYS AND IS REPORTED IN FULL RATHER THAN RESOLVED. WHAT SUPPORTS A PERMIT BEING NEEDED. The City's Building Permits and Inspections Department page states without qualification that it is "responsible for permitting all construction and conducting inspections of all construction-related permits," with no carve-out for repairs, small jobs, or any particular trade. The Zoning Ordinance's own "Building Permit Fee Schedule" (Article XXXIII, Section 6) is scaled to Project Cost starting at $20 for a job of $0 to $5,000, with no stated minimum value below which no fee or permit applies. And the Ordinance's definition of "STRUCTURAL ALTERATIONS" (Article III, item 79) names roofing directly: it covers "any change or rearrangement of the supporting members of building, such as bearing walls or partitions, columns, beams or girders, or any complete rebuilding of the roof or the exterior walls," while expressly carving out "minor repair or replacement of nonstructural members" from that definition. So a complete roof rebuild reads as a structural alteration under Garrison's own words; a minor repair reads as excluded from that specific definition, and this record does not extend that carve-out to a full re-cover or re-shingle, which is neither "minor" nor named. WHAT COMPLICATES IT, DISCLOSED RATHER THAN RESOLVED. Article XXXII, Section 2 (Certificate of Occupancy) ties permit issuance to a certificate-of-occupancy application - "No permit for an excavation or the erection or alteration of any building shall be issued before an application has been made and approved for a certificate of occupancy and compliance" - and then states "Buildings used for single-family purposes shall be exempt from this requirement." Read in context, that exemption sits under a clause about a "change in the use or occupancy of land" or of "an existing building," and a re-roof of an already-occupied single-family house changes neither its use nor its occupancy, so this record does NOT read that exemption as reaching an ordinary re-roof either way - it is reported so a roofer can raise it at the counter, not adjudicated here. NO CITY OR COUNTY INSPECTION-STAGE OR THRESHOLD DOCUMENT WAS FOUND TO SETTLE THE QUESTION FURTHER. The safe course, and the one this record recommends, is to call City Hall at 701-463-2600 before starting and ask directly whether a re-cover or a tear-off-and-replace on an existing single-family roof needs a permit and at what fee tier.

7.00% on materials for a roofing job in Garrison - North Dakota state sales and use tax of 5%, plus the City of Garrison's local sales, use and gross receipts tax of 2%, and no McLean County tax. The North Dakota Office of State Tax Commissioner's Local Taxes by Location Guideline, rates effective July 1, 2026, gives Garrison local code 139 and a current rate of 2%, built from two 1% increases (1-1-96 and 10-1-06), with a refund cap of $50 per sale as of 10-1-06 and no permit holder compensation. The guideline's separate County Sales, Use, and Gross Receipts Taxes table lists exactly eight counties that levy one at all - Burleigh, Cass, Hettinger, Morton, Steele, Walsh, Ward, and Williams - and McLean County is not among them, consistent with Garrison's own row in the city table, which (unlike Wilton's, marked "**(McLean/Burleigh)" for a city that straddles both county lines) carries no county marking at all. So a Garrison address owes state and city tax only. WHO PAYS IT ON A ROOF. North Dakota treats a roofing contractor as the final consumer of the materials it installs: "A contractor or subcontractor entering any contract, except for a labor only contract, is regarded as the final user or consumer of all tangible personal property installed into real property. A contractor or subcontractor is responsible for paying sales and use tax on tangible personal property used or consumed to complete any contract." So the contractor pays the tax on its material purchases rather than charging the homeowner sales tax separately on an install-plus-materials re-roof. ONE POINT IN GARRISON'S FAVOR. The guideline names Garrison as one of sixty local ordinances carrying a limited exemption for "materials that are purchased within the jurisdiction, but later installed outside of the jurisdiction where the sale took place" - where the contractor gives the supplier a certificate of exemption at the time of purchase, the local tax follows the installation site rather than the purchase site, so buying materials in Garrison for a job elsewhere does not strand Garrison's local tax on them.