Mr. Fiumara has the unique distinction in this County of not only possessing a Law Degree, but he has earned a separate Master’s Degree in City Planning from one of the most prestigious Ivy League Schools in the Nation, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Before practicing law, his second career, Mr. Fiumara had more than 15 years of land use, zoning and government work experience. He worked for the infamous New York City Mayor Edward Koch in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). If you can work for Mayor Koch and survive in New York City at the same time, you can thrive anywhere else! Later, the City of Newark, New Jersey hired Mr. Fiumara as their Senior Comprehensive Planner for the City. He stayed in that position until he began law school at Rutgers University in New Jersey because he wanted to be further challenged.

Mr. Fiumara also gained insightful and valuable land use experience when he served as a tremendously active planning board member in the rapidly growing Philadelphia suburb of Voorhees, New Jersey. There he worked with planners, developers, politicians and individual property owners to develop and implement a master plan and site design review plan. In Philadelphia, while a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Fiumara worked in the City’s Gift Property Program where he worked with a wide variety of community groups and nonprofit organizations to help improve the City’s housing stock.

All the above mentioned experience and organizational skill development has sharpened Mr. Fiumara’s ability to successfully resolve many of the complex land use conflicts that he is hired to resolve in Santa Rosa and in Sonoma County. The types of land use & zoning cases Mr. Fiumara has had experience working on include, but are not limited to:

  • Violation of Sonoma County or Santa Rosa building and/or zoning codes
  • Illegal dwelling unit issues/red tag concerns
  • Construction without permits/unlawful construction
  • Illegal septic systems
  • Structures converted to a second unit illegally (illegal conversions)
  • Nuisance abatement
  • Use permits/modifications/variances
  • Business licenses
  • Alcohol Beverage Commission (ABC) hearings (all administrative hearings)
  • Legalize unlawful construction
  • Eminent domain
  • Water & sewer connections/ City utilities