THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408280085
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Four women who cleaned up and repainted a public housing complex playground received eviction notices for tampering with public property.
``We thought we were doing something good, but apparently no one else thought so,'' said Debbie Muskelly, one of the women. ``We couldn't believe they wanted to evict us.''
``You should have seen that playground,'' she said. ``It was real dirty, and there was glass and trash and condoms all over the place.''
Muskelly and her friends, Lisa Freeman, LaVonda Cooke and Anissa Cooke spent about five hours one night in June raking up all the trash in the area around the Pine Chapel Village Apartments. They painted the graffiti-covered playground beams red, white and blue. On one beam, they painted part of the alphabet, on another, the word ``happy.''
Two days later, the women received eviction notices from apartment manager Wanda Smith. The notices said the women violated their leases by painting the playground - public property owned by the Hampton Housing Authority - without permission.
The letters also informed the women they would have to scrub the new paint off the playground, Freeman said.
Both Jim Rattray, director of the Hampton housing authority, and Margaret Stokes, Pine Chapel's other manager, said they never intended to evict the women.
``These people did get letters saying their leases would be terminated, but that was so we could get them to sit down and talk, and resolve the problem,'' Stokes said.
The women have reached an agreement with Pine Chapel authorities under which they can stay. They will remain ``on probation'' for a year. They will also repaint the playground this week and keep the playground area clean for a year.
Stokes said that if the women had come to management for permission, ``the housing authority would have provided them with whatever they needed.''
``We understand and sympathize with what the residents were trying to do,'' Rattray said. ``But they didn't have the appropriate equipment, and they didn't ask for permission, not even from the Residents Council.
``It's as if someone went out and painted your car without asking,'' he said.
Freeman said she and her friends did not know they needed to ask for permission to paint. ``There was already so much paint people had spray-painted there,'' she said. ``We didn't think anyone would care if we did some more and made it look better.''
``The man who comes to cut the grass won't even cut the grass in the playground because there is so much trash and glass,'' she said. ``We figured they had to see how it looked, and that they didn't care.''
The housing authority is responsible for maintaining all of the grounds at Pine Chapel, Rattray said. He said he did not know the last time the playground was cleaned or painted. by CNB