GRANDFATHERING BY YELLOW CRAYON

Local resident and former Zoning Administrator David Konick offered a bit of history on how the county’s commercial zoning was established. He told the commissioners at their March 16 meeting that many years before he was zoning administrator in the mid 1980s, Fanning Baumgardner, Col. Evan. A. McNear and George Davis, Jr., “went around to everything in the county that had any kind of commercial use, like [the FT Valley] store” and others such as Hillsdale, Laurel Mills, Old Hollow, the Pine Knot, and Rappahannock Tractor on Ben Venue Road.

Back then, the early-1970s, McNear was the county zoning administrator, Baumgardner was assistant zoning administrator; and Davis was the commonwealth’s attorney. All of them, along with E.P. Luke, J. Newbill Miller, and others drafted the county’s first zoning, subdivision and building code ordinances.

“The old zoning was all tax maps,” said Konick. Baumgardener, McNear and Davis “took a yellow crayon magic marker, and colored in the commercial areas.”

This created the problem of spot zoning, explained Konick. “When I was the ZA, I pointed out to the Planning Commission at the time what I think most everybody agreed was the problem—if you have all these little spots all over the county that are zoned commercial, then the neighbors could apply and say, ‘We want to be commercial too.’” So, the decision was made to grandfather in all those spot-zoned commercial entities.