The Brown County Area Plan Commission is planning to devote part of its Tuesday, June 25 meeting to discussing what to do about abandoned or junked vehicles.
The topic had been on the agenda of the May 28 APC meeting as a “work session” after the regular business. But by the time all the regular business had been discussed, the meeting already had run for nearly three hours, so the board decided to put off this potentially lengthy discussion until the next meeting. About 14 people had been sitting through the earlier discussions to get a chance to comment on this topic.
Discussion about junked and abandoned vehicles had started near the end of the April 23 APC meeting. About three years ago, the APC had made a list of topics in Brown County’s zoning ordinances that needed to be revisited, and this was the next topic on the list, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.
The same week of April, the Brown County Redevelopment Commission started a parallel discussion in a separate meeting. It was about how to help local people legally dispose of all household items and how to define “salvage yards, blight and squalor.” The RDC planned to create a coalition that includes board members from groups such as the APC, solid waste management district, Keep Brown County Beautiful and others that have an interest in this topic.
RDC President Jim Kemp was at the May 28 APC meeting and invited the APC to participate in the coalition. A first meeting date for that coalition has not been set yet, but the RDC’s next regular meeting will be at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 27 at Brown County Junior High School.
The RDC is interested in the environmental condition of the county because of its responsibility to improve the “top line” of the county budget — revenue, mostly from taxes, Kemp said. The RDC doesn’t want to see taxes raised on residents; it wants to improve the housing inventory and retain and bring in more residents and businesses, which can all contribute to keeping the county financially healthy.
Kemp told the audience at last month’s APC meeting that if nobody does anything, projections don’t look good for Brown County’s resident and workforce population in the next 30 years.
“At the core of this is, do we want to as a community protect and preserve our natural environment?” Kemp asked. “Salvage yards, blight and squalor, along with failed septics, it’s all our natural environment.”
APC member Randy Jones applauded Kemp and the RDC for their leadership on this issue, saying the discussion is “desperately needed” because of a lack of laws already.
The rules now
APC attorney David Schilling explained to the newspaper last month that if an “obviously inoperable vehicle” — such as one on blocks or missing doors, wheels or an engine — is “visible from a public way” (a public road), “then that can be taken care of” by state law.
The county has rarely acted on that law.
In the county’s zoning ordinance, “abandoned vehicle” is not defined.
County ordinance does define “junk yard”: “a place, usually outdoors, where waste or discarded used property other than organic matter is accumulated and is or may be salvaged for re-use or resale.”
Junk yards are allowed on land zoned “forest reserve” or “industrial” if the owner applies for and receives a special exception.
If vehicles are being kept on a property for the purpose of auto repair or painting, the property owner can ask for a “home occupation” permit with a special exception. Still, “no more than four licensed vehicles other than the owner’s own vehicles, and no unlicensed vehicles” can be stored on the property, according to county ordinance.
At a property where vehicles are not being kept for the purpose of a business, there is no requirement that those vehicles be plated, Schilling said. Only the “inoperable” part in state law applies in regards to them being seen from a public road.
If county leaders chose, they could make a rule that says that any vehicles on private property have to be on an “improved parking surface,” Schilling said — gravel or paved, something other than in the yard. “Parking vehicles like that, the problem is a lot of times they leak out gas and other stuff on the ground,” he said.
Vehicles are not specifically mentioned in Brown County’s dumping ordinance, passed in 2008. But it is a violation to discharge any non-food oils or chemicals onto the ground which pose a potential hazard to the environment, by state code and by county dumping ordinance.
“If I can’t find dripping water and gas, and the vehicle moves, I can’t do anything about it,” said John Kennard, Brown County Health Department environmental health specialist, in a 2017 story.
Culture and trust
The RDC had planned to discuss county cleanup at its May 30 meeting, but most of the two-hour discussion revolved around what the board wanted to do with its website. Members discussed whether the site should be about “who we are” or whether it should be “aspirational.” That’s where some discussion about “culture” and the state of the county’s environment came in.
“We can market the heck out of Brown County,” said RDC member Terry Foy. “We just need to be honest about it.”
Foy said she cares about blight because she grew up here, and she didn’t come from money. She was one of seven children who lived in 800 square feet on land that was “blighted to the zenith,” and her family cleaned it up even though they were poor.
“Poverty and blight are not synonymous. They don’t have to be. My parents made something out of nothing in Brown County,” she said. “… It’s not about money; some of the richest people live like pigs. … This is not about poverty per se, it’s about how people live and about culture.”
What the RDC needs to look at is “what do people care about here?” Foy said. “Do we really care about the environment? … What is it that gets people excited? … It has to be something that matters to them, not to somebody outside, not to people coming in. What matters to me, from Brown County?”
One of those things is independence, she said.
County council member Darren Byrd, one of three members of the public who attended this meeting, added that local people also care about “the environmental aspect” as well as “country living,” but noted that you’re going to get a different answer from everybody.
“Arts and crafts” is another thing residents care about, said RDC member Jim Schultz. “It would have been gone as an area, economically died, without that,” he said. Ironically, Brown County’s art heritage took root after residents destroyed the natural environment by clear-cutting the forests, he added. It was then that they noticed the vistas and the artists began to come.
The group also talked about a need to build trust and increase transparency in government. Government has trouble getting the opinions and input of a wide swath of people; it needs to tap into various “trust networks” to really get an accurate picture of how people feel, Schultz said.
Part of the challenge is that there are “multiple cultures” here, Foy said, including some with Appalachian roots.
Jerry Pittman, a county commissioner and member of the RDC, is a member of one of those families that migrated from the hills of Virginia. They went through the flat land that would have been easier to farm and settled in Brown County instead because it felt like home, he said.
Some of those migrants didn’t even have money to buy land in the hills, so they became squatters, Foy said.
“There’s some truth in the fact that there’s a difference between ‘flatlanders’ and ‘hillbillies,’” Pittman said. “… This terrain attracts the same kind of people, and these kind of people attract those people too, and I think that’s where our culture has come from, and it’s a culture of great independence. They were willing to climb up and down the hills and chase the cows when the get out. We drive up and down those hills in the wintertime. It’s a lot more convenient to live and farm in the flat land than it is out here. I think that’s where a lot of our culture comes from, and it has been sustained over the years,” he said.
“I think preserving that is important to me, and I love that part of Brown County and I’m not ashamed to be part of all that,” Foy said.
However, all those varied backgrounds make it difficult to come to a unified vision for the county, and difficult for local officials to successfully articulate what they’re doing and why. The “results and data culture” and the “storytelling and history culture” can sometimes conflict, Foy said.
“It’s been really hard to get any kind of consensus on any kind of plan in Brown County for a very long time,” Schultz said.
“Standing in a place of judgment” is not something that Kemp said he wants to be a part of, and it would be “culturally insensitive,” Schultz added.
Schultz is advocating for county leaders to take their messages out to churches and other faith networks to try to build trust and to reach and engage more people in discussions. Revamping the RDC’s website will be part of that, too.
“We’ve got a lot of data that shows trend lines, that shows this, that shows that. … We just need to build a better access into the community, because we’re all paying for governance. That’s what our taxes do,” Schultz said. “And we should be happy, or at least feel like we have a voice. But how do you get that? I think that’s a huge challenge that hasn’t happened.”
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Work session about abandoned and junked vehicles: 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 25, County Office Building, Nashville
Brown County Redevelopment Commission meeting: 6 p.m. Thursday, June 27, Brown County Junior High School Makerspace (former library), Nashville
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