Frankenmuth, four communities and one code office

Frankenmuth is the one town in this region where the first question about a basement job is not about the basement. It is about who has jurisdiction, because the answer is not what people assume.

The code authority, not the city

Code enforcement here runs through the Construction Codes Group, operating as the Frankenmuth Building Code Authority, from 240 West Genesee Street, on 989-652-9901, open Monday to Friday from half past eight until five.

It is a shared service. The same office serves four member communities: the City of Frankenmuth, Frankenmuth Township, Blumfield Township and Tuscola Township. It issues building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits, and it also issues county soil erosion permits for Saginaw and Tuscola counties.

Two practical consequences follow. The first is that a contractor who works mainly in the city of Saginaw may not have dealt with this office before, and the registration position is different: the authority operates a contractor registration form of its own, which is a separate thing from the state licence. Ask whether whoever is quoting is registered here.

The second is that the office covers both sides of a county line. For an exterior job, where a soil erosion permit can be triggered by earth moving near a county drain, having one desk that administers both counties removes a step that would otherwise involve working out which county authority to approach. That is a small administrative mercy and it is specific to this area.

A town with its own soil series

The United States Department of Agriculture maintains official descriptions of soil series, and one of them is called Frankenmuth. Its type location is in Saginaw County roughly eight miles northeast of the city, which is to say here.

The description classes it as somewhat poorly drained, formed in stratified calcareous silt loam, very fine sand and silty clay loam, on lake plains with slopes of nought to four percent. Permeability is moderately slow. The seasonal high water table sits one to two feet below the surface from November through May.

Set that against the Zilwaukee series a short drive northwest, which is poorly drained rather than somewhat poorly drained, runs 35 to 60 percent clay, and holds water at or just below the surface from October to June. The Frankenmuth ground is better ground. It is not good ground. A water table between one and two feet down for seven months of the year is still well above any basement floor, and the stratification in the parent material, silt over fine sand over silty clay loam, means water can move sideways along a layer and appear at a wall in a place with no obvious relationship to what is above it.

What that means for the work

The somewhat better drainage means a slightly wider range of workable answers than on the heavy clays. Surface work and grading are more likely to make a measurable difference, because the ground can actually take water away. Interception at a specific layer can sometimes deal with a localised seep rather than needing a full perimeter.

The stratified parent material is also the reason to be careful about single point diagnoses. Water appearing at one corner of a basement in Frankenmuth is not necessarily arriving from directly outside that corner.

On value, Frankenmuth is the outlier in this region, with a median owner occupied home value of 300,500 dollars against 60,000 in the city of Saginaw. That gap does not change the physics, but it does change what proportion of people will opt for exterior work rather than the cheaper interior route, and it is worth being conscious of which of those a quote is steering toward and why. The cost page gives the ranges for both.