Certificate of Occupancy (Change of Use / Occupancy) in Farmington, Utah

Farmington City Code requires a Certificate of Occupancy signed by BOTH the Zoning Administrator and the Building Official before any land or building may be changed in use or occupancy -- this applies even when no structural alteration is involved, not only at the end of new construction. Per City Code section 11-4-050.C (Duties of the Zoning Administrator): 'No land shall be changed in use or occupancy and no building shall be changed in use or structurally altered until a certificate of occupancy shall have been issued by both the zoning administrator and the building official,' and 'a certificate of occupancy shall be required for the purpose of maintaining, renewing, changing or extending a nonconforming use.' Separately, City Code section 11-8-090 requires that a building permit for any building/structure needing a Conditional Use Permit cannot be issued until the Planning Commission approves the conditional use permit -- a related, but distinct, requirement about building permits rather than certificates of occupancy specifically (11-8-090's text does not itself use the word 'certificate'). No fee line item labeled specifically 'Certificate of Occupancy' or 'Change of Use' was found in the city's Consolidated Fee Schedule (adopted 2026-05-19); the closest related published fees are the Land Use Related Fees for Administrative Determination and Conditional Use Application described below, which apply only when the new use requires a zoning classification determination or falls under the nonconforming-use/conditional-use provisions. Re-chased 2026-07-20: located and reviewed Farmington City Code Title 10, Chapter 5 ('Certificates') in full -- Section 10-5-030 (Issuance of Certificate: the Building Official issues a CO after final inspection finds no code violations, with Community Development Director approval), Section 10-5-040 (Notice of Disapproval), and Section 10-5-050 (Temporary Certificates: allows a temporary CO before full project completion, secured by a bond of at least $5,000, with completion required within 30 days, extendable once up to 90 days). Also reviewed Section 12-2-047 (Certificates of Occupancy, Title 12 Subdivision Regulations), which is a DIFFERENT, narrower CO trigger -- it blocks occupancy of any structure within a subdivision until required subdivision infrastructure (street surfacing, street signs, house numbers, utilities) is complete; it does not govern a standalone change-of-use CO for an existing building. None of these newly-reviewed sections states a dollar fee or a numeric review-timeline for a standard or change-of-use Certificate of Occupancy -- this is now confirmed as a genuine, thorough gap in Farmington's own published code and fee schedule, not a retrieval failure. UPGRADED 2026-07-20: read the Consolidated Fee Schedule's full Section C (Building Permit Application and Related Fees) directly via page-image rendering (pages 8 and 11 of the 28-page PDF), which the earlier pass had only sampled for A/B-series Land Use fees rather than reading Section C's complete line-item list end to end. This surfaced two governing fee mechanisms previously missed: (1) Section C5, a genuine, itemized 'Temporary Occupancy Application Fee' of $50.00 (plus the already-documented $5,000 minimum bond under City Code 10-5-050) for a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy; and (2) Table No. 1-A (the same 1997 UBC valuation table used for the base Building Permit Fee), whose item 3 is an explicit catch-all: 'Inspections for which no fee is specifically indicated ... Minimum Charge - one-half hour, $55.55/hr' -- the governing mechanism for a pure change-of-use Certificate of Occupancy inspection that is not otherwise tied to a building permit (since no CO-specific line item exists, this catch-all is what the fee schedule's own structure directs such a case to).

Verified 2026-07-20 · Source