Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 11, 1993 TAG: 9301110041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BOONES MILL LENGTH: Long
BOONES MILL MAKES FUSSIN' AND FIGHTIN' A HOBBY
IN THE BOONES MILL town government, it often seems as if the person who yells the loudest wins the debate. And there may be much to debate at Tuesday night's meeting.
Half-a-dozen or more of this town's 239 residents will amble into the white, concrete-block building on Easy Street.
They'll sit on folding metal chairs in Town Hall, very close to the table used by Town Council.
At 7:30 p.m., the meeting will commence. Within 30 minutes, more than likely, there will be some shouting.
Other than that, it's hard to tell what will happen at the Boones Mill Town Council meeting Tuesday night.
Boones Mill has been mired in controversy since last summer. That's when Virginia Carroll was voted a council seat for the first time.
It's also when Tom Roucek, owner of Easy Street Cafe, began doing battle with Mayor Juanita Murray over a wooden deck he built along the Maggodee Creek.
Murray declined an interview request for this story, but sternly answered a few questions by telephone last week. Told that complaints by town residents seemed to be getting louder and more frequent, Murray said, "That's fine."
"Let them air their dirty laundry before the council."
Carroll was supported by the mayor in her July bid for office, but since then she has antagonized Murray at every turn. She is a reformer who doesn't just prod; she bludgeons.
Along with her husband, Claude, Carroll thinks the attorney general's office should investigate the town for not making its records available to the public.
Carroll has been to Franklin County Commonwealth's Attorney Cliff Hapgood and asked him to investigate the situation.
Carroll said she was denied access to town meeting minutes and other documents.
Hapgood said he mailed a letter Friday to Murray and the town spelling out what is required by state law regarding access to public documents.
As an example of how town records are kept, residents point to a September council meeting. An audience member asked to see a letter the town had sent to a local business.
Police Lt. Lynn Frith, the town's only full-time employee, excused himself, went out to his police car, and got the letter.
"The Town Hall is not a very secure place," Frith explained last week. "If [Mayor Murray] doesn't keep certain records there, and if she keeps them in her own file, in her own home, at least she's maintaining that file."
Frith said he keeps his own file on certain matters for investigations. In addition to enforcing the town's speed limit - some call him a one-man speed trap - Frith enforces other laws, including the flood-plain ordinance.
Both Frith and Murray said if someone asks to see town documents, they will make them available. "There's nothing that says the records have to stay in Town Hall," Frith said.
Town residents are divided into two camps: Those who support Murray and Frith, and those who don't.
Claude Carroll calls the leadership of Murray and Frith a dictatorship. His wife agrees.
"If the other council members stayed home, there'd be exactly the same meeting with Lynn Frith and Juanita Murray," she said. "It makes no difference if they come."
Kevin Goode, elected to council the same time as Carroll, said he thinks Carroll, however well-intentioned, is going about her mission to reform the town in a destructive fashion.
When first elected, Goode said he, too, thought town business was "being run under the table." He no longer thinks that's true.
"I think she needs to take a look at how she's operating," Goode said of Carroll. "It gets personal; people start calling people names. It could have been avoided if we'd have worked the way we should've worked."
Frith has been a lightning rod for those who don't like the town's direction since the town bought him a souped-up Chevy Camaro to pull over speeders.
"I tell you what gets me," resident Rachel Murray said, "we went camping in Pittsylvania County last year, and we told some people from North Carolina we were from Boones Mill. They said, `Oh, where that million-dollar cop is.' "
Two months ago, Frith presented bids for the town to pay $33,000 for a backhoe.
Frith said a "staff study" - though he admits that as the town's only employee, he is the staff - found that the town could save money by having its own backhoe to work on the water system.
Some have suggested the backhoe would be just another toy for Frith.
"I never said I would operate it," Frith said. "Some of these things they come up with on their own . . ."
But Homer Murray, a Boones Mill resident who is on the county Board of Supervisors, joked that Frith is the town's lawyer, engineer, police officer and backhoe operator. "Boones Mill has about as much use for a backhoe as a hog does for Sundays," Murray said.
Murray said the town is run as a "friendship club, not a local government."
Roucek's Easy Street Cafe is the only place in Boones Mill to sit down and order lunch. It also looks like a political campaign headquarters.
Even the life-sized Killian's Red beer stand-up poster girl holds a clipboard that asks customers to sign petitions for a beer license.
The Town Council has asked Roucek to remove three feet of his outdoor deck, which the town says juts into the Maggodee Creek flood plain.
Because Town Council considers Roucek's deck a violation of its flood-plain ordinance, Mayor Murray and Frith showed up at an Alcoholic Beverage Control Board hearing to speak in opposition to Roucek's beer license.
Murray says Roucek built the deck on a Sunday, when no county offices were open, because he lacked a permit to build where he did. Roucek thinks the mayor is picking on him because she doesn't want him to serve beer.
In the past two months, someone has shot a pellet gun at Roucek's truck windshield, shot out a light globe outside the cafe, and raked a sharp object across the outside of his truck.
The Carrolls' car was scratched across the door. Roucek and the Carrolls won't name names, but they wonder if the vandalism is related to their fight with the town.
"If I could pick my whole business up and move it out of town, I'd do it," Roucek said.
Homer Murray is concerned that business owners like Roucek will soon get tired of battling Town Hall and move out.
Frith said the town is not picking on Roucek. In fact, he pointed out that the town has given Roucek half a year to comply with its flood-plain law.
Some town residents think the council has cracked down on Roucek, while letting North American Housing Corp. get away with filling in part of the Maggodee in the late 1980s.
Mayor Murray said she is in the process of addressing both infractions. When or how, she wouldn't say.
"I know somebody's been to you and told you to come to me," she said Wednesday. "This town's been standing for years. We've never had problems before this."