Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.

It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.