Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 4, 1993 TAG: 9309040286
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ Practically anybody who's ever lived in Rockbridge County knows how Tommy Spencer can carry on.
While his friends swirled to Zydeco tunes one summer night at the Lime Kiln theater he founded, he spent the evening sitting on a rock, holding forth on Kierkegaard and Cicero.
He goes on the longest and the gloomiest, though, about the sneaky politics he says go unquestioned in his county.
Now, the hounds are on Spencer's trail.
The Rockbridge Advocate, a news monthly, and the weekly Lexington News-Gazette reported this week his dealings with two county supervisors around the time they voted on a quarry-expansion rezoning he vehemently opposed.
Spencer acknowledged Friday that last winter he gave free legal advice on something else to Ben Nicely and that he arranged a $55,000 loan for Bobby Berkstresser in an unrelated land deal.
Spencer said his assistance wasn't intended as influence-peddling, and Berkstresser eventually voted for a modest quarry expansion, anyway. Nicely was opposed all along.
The news media are welcome to all the details, said Spencer, who said Nicely and Berkstresser released him from client confidentiality to talk about it.
"If that looks funny to the public," Spencer said, "they ought to know about it, but obviously there was no quid pro quo. . . . If I'm doing wrong, tell me."
Spencer, vocal champion of a free press, praised Doug Harwood, the Advocate editor whose three weeks of reporting turned up the story. Spencer admitted that if he heard of such goings-on by other folks, he, too, might have sounded the alarm as the reporters did.
"I suspect if I were in their shoes, I'd probably be doing the same thing."
Maybe, he said, it will blow a little fresh air into local government. "What are other members of the Board of Supervisors doing with whom, and other attorneys?"
Nicely couldn't be reached Friday, but Berkstresser was shaken by insinuations that "Tommy Spencer was trying to buy my vote."
Berkstresser called for a state police investigation of the deals, in the hope it will clear his name.
"I want everybody to know what I done," he said, "and that I'd do it again."
Spencer's been Berkstresser's lawyer for 15 years.
"Tommy has had money available that I could borrow for a long time," Berkstresser said. The money came from a trust fund controlled by Spencer, who said that client approved the loan.
Supervisors' Chairman Danny Snider was quoted in the Advocate as saying the loan was unethical.
Berkstresser, owner of the Lee Hi Truck Stop, said his disagreements with other supervisors often arise from the fact that he's a businessman trying to make the county more economical, and some other supervisors are not as business-wise.
"I have a lot of talent," he said, citing new school buses, landfill waste-balers and other changes he's pushed. "I have a chance to go into a meeting better prepared than they do.
"Danny is really a good guy," he said of the former schoolteacher. "He's a very conservative man. Bought one house in his life. Never bought a new car."
Berkstresser said his truck stop does more than $1 million in business each month, and land deals like the one in question are common.
"If the deal was tomorrow, I'd do it all over again," said Berkstresser. "It was a good deal."
But to a guy like Snider, he said, a $55,000 loan, such as the one he paid off quickly this spring, probably seems like big money.
John Gunner, a quarry neighbor who opposed its expansion with the help of Spencer, said Spencer is no sneak. He just runs his office like a small-town lawyer.
"I don't know how many times I've gone in there with a simple legal problem. We'd sit down for 30 minutes, and I'd never get a bill."
Others who've listened to Spencer harp on other lawyers for years don't mind his being skewered a little.
"I think everybody is sort of tickled," said one man who knows Spencer and all the players. "He was out pointing his finger at everybody when at the same time he was obviously in conflict. . . . Nobody's crying any tears over Tommy."
Harwood, whose publication claims to be as "independent as a hog on ice," said the stories about lawyers and politicians have just begun to fly up in Rockbridge.
"It's funny to hear the knives being sharpened," he said. Lots of people have lots of dirt on each other.
"Lord knows what's going to come out. I mean, we're talking about people who've been keeping score for 20 years."
by CNB