I don't know much about this town, but I will say that your approach of yelling at people won't work. It rarely does. My suggestion is that you at least act like you care about their concerns. Go to their meetings. Even a few that are unrelated to your building permits. When their offices are open, go to ask them what they need to hear from you. Be nice. Ask people what they want. Make them feel comfortable. Be prepared to say "sorry" a lot.

Politics in small towns is about relationships. You need to build them if you want to build anything else. There's a reason you got this building for a deep discount: it's going to cost you a lot of time to get anything done. You didn't pay a lot of money for this building, and that was for a reason: you're going to have to pay in other resources.

Alternatively, if you're going to yell, you need to back it up with some persuasion. In this case, legal threats from actual lawyers (no pulling a C&D letter off the internet and changing a few things - you need your threats to be legit). That is going to get expensive very quickly, but it may work - small towns don't have a lot of legal resources and neither do their residents. The guy whose building got demolished for not doing disallowed repairs probably has a big payout waiting if he sues.

This is the best advice and perspective I've seen in this thread.