Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 16, 1991 TAG: 9103160090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SCRUGGS LENGTH: Long
Dudley raised his right hand in a friendly greeting, but the driver's eyes never left the road.
"See that guy?" Dudley said. "He used to wave at us until this trailer stuff. Now he doesn't even turn his head."
Dudley, 31, has become a non-person to many waterfront homeowners in this section of Smith Mountain Lake since he began talking about putting a 16-unit mobile home park on his family's farm.
Neighbors - some of whom live in waterfront homes costing more than the Dudley's entire 100-acre farm - don't like the idea of trailers. They're cheap and unsightly, they say, and they could run down property values.
"I don't think anyone wants to drive down [Virginia] 616 and see a mobile home park there," said Bill Simmons, president of the property owners association at Deer Creek, a nearby subdivision.
At issue is "quality of development" at Smith Mountain Lake, a debate that began 25 years ago when Appalachian Power Co. dammed up the Smith Mountain notch and created a 20,000-acre reservoir.
The first lake "developers" were farmers who rented out camper and trailer spaces for summer vacationers.
These trailer courts - complete with outhouses - were considered an eyesore to Apco officials and others interested in "proper development," a term for subdivisions of single-family homes.
Rising land prices have squeezed out some mom-and-pop trailer courts. But dozens remain, much to the chagrin of the owners of affluent summer and retirement homes.
There have been vacation trailers on the Dudley farm since 1968, three years after Smith Mountain Lake reached full-pond stage.
The land - 240 acres before the lake flooded 40 acres - has been in Jeff Dudley's family for more than 100 years.
Dudley said his father, Harry, was upset about the lake and was anxious to sell the waterfront land that he and other farmers considered of little value. "At that time, they didn't realize what the land would do," said Dudley, who was a small child when the lake was rising. "They wanted to get away from the lake."
Dudley's father sold about 100 acres of waterfront land to a speculator for $25,000. "He thought that was a great deal," Jeff Dudley said of his father.
The Dudleys were left with a few hundred feet of water frontage, where they rented out spaces for eight mobile homes.
Tenants include a plumber, a retired railroad worker, a dairy farmer and a dentist. "They're all nice folks," Jeff Dudley said "I don't know anyone they've bothered."
A Roanoke City firefighter, Jeff Dudley has worked to keep the family farm going after his father's death. He raises 25 beef cattle and tends six acres of tobacco in his spare time. He is the last remaining tobacco farmer on Virginia 616, below the Scruggs community. His mother, Augusta Dudley, still lives on the farm.
In 1989, Dudley decided to add 24 more trailer spaces after the farm's value jumped 50 percent in Franklin County's general reassessment.
He applied for a special-use permit that fall and collected signatures of support from more than 100 longtime residents of the Scruggs community.
The permit was opposed by landowners from two nearby subdivisions, Key Lakewood and Deer Creek. At public hearings before the Franklin County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors, opponents said mobile homes would be out of character with surrounding subdivisions, would create extra traffic and would be an eyesore.
They insisted that Dudley plant 6-foot-tall pine trees around the entire project to screen it from motorists on Virginia 616 and 601.
The Board of Supervisors voted 4-2 to deny the special-use permit.
This month, Dudley submitted a new request that scales down the number of units to 16, stipulates that he will bring in only new trailers and contains a soils report for septic drain fields.
Dudley, however, will not agree to screen the trailers with mature trees, which cost as much as $40 each. Instead, he has agreed to plant pine seedlings.
Dudley said he would be more sympathetic with concerns about screening if residents of Key Lakewood or Deer Creek had to look out their windows at the trailers.
The fact is, he said, that both subdivisions are at least a half-mile away, and residents would only see them as they drive to and from their houses.
"They would only see them for 10 seconds a day," he said.
Simmons, the Deer Creek resident, said he will insist on the 6-foot trees.
"If he would put things in according to regulations and add screening of a reasonable size, I have no quarrel with him whatsoever," Simmons said in an interview last week.
The Planning Commission will consider the mobile home park request at its March 26 meeting.
Dudley said he hoped the newcomers would try to be more accommodating. There were trailers - on his land, in adjacent Blackwater Cove and on another farm up the cove - long before the newcomers arrived.
Dudley said natives like him did not run down to Rocky Mount and complain when lake subdivisions popped up, clogging roads and altering the farming community's pace of life.
"It's selfishness," Dudley said, "because they feel like the lake is only for them, the people with $200,000 houses."
Dudley said some of his neighbors continued to complain to the county about him, even after his special-use permit was denied in March 1990.
The county zoning office received a complaint that Dudley had not taken down two cardboard signs he had been required to put up to notify the public of his zoning request.
Dudley - who said he could not believe anyone could be so petty - got even by leaning the signs against one of his barns, in plain view of the road.
"They're going to sit there," he said, "until they rot."
by CNB