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Donnie Stevens and his wife, Charlotte, exhibit the view that now greets them from their front porch of a morning. They find themselves rethinking Dade County’s traditional disdain for “the Z-word” – zoning – after a neighbor began tormenting them by dumping trash on his back acreage, which is across the road from their Lookout Mountain home.
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By: Robin Ford Wallace, Reporter
It started out as a garden-variety country feud, neighbor v. neighbor. There were warring political signs, felled trees and harsh words of the git-off-my-proppity variety. There were even some chickens involved.
But now it has developed into a kind of parable about life in the rural South, one that sends exploratory tendrils toward the possibility of land-use restrictions in a county so allergic to same that the very mention of zoning can haunt a local politician for the rest of his life.
For those who take no position on “the Z word,” Charlotte Stevens of Lookout Mountain has this to say: “You’d have a big opinion if it was across the road from you.”
What, precisely, is this “it” across from the small, tidy house on Devore Circle Charlotte Stevens shares with her husband, Donnie?
“He’s just started him a dump across the road from our house,” complained Donnie Stevens of the couple’s estranged neighbor. “From our front porch, it’s about 60 foot to where he’s dumping.”
The Sentinel was unable to contact the Stevenses’ neighbor, did not hear his side of the story, and thus will refrain from naming him here. But the couple’s issue with his property is in plain sight for anyone who drives by. To wit:
Mattresses. Old tires. A derelict television. Decaying furniture. A rusted vacuum cleaner. “He keeps adding to it,” said Ms. Stevens. “I think he just goes out and picks stuff up from the side of the road and throws it out over there.”
But let’s back up and introduce Donnie and Charlotte Stevens properly. They are lifelong Dade residents who raised their children here and once operated a couple of small businesses in Trenton. Since those days, they retired, sold their house on nearby Charlotte Drive and moved to Florida.
Then, like many native Floridians, they decided they liked the mountains better after all and in 2004 came home. They still owned three rental houses on Devore Circle, which is a loop off Mount Olive Road with some seven residences. One of those houses happened to be empty and the Stevenses decided to move in themselves.
The couple’s three houses are all on the outside of Devore Circle. Meanwhile, the entire interior of the loop is owned by the neighbor. The Stevenses say their problems with him began five or six years ago when they called the county about doing some clearing on the two ends of the circle.
“In the summertime, you cannot see on either end, hardly, to pull out onto Mount Olive Road,” said Ms. Stevens. “One week I was nearly hit three times trying to pull out of this circle here.”
So Ms. Stevens called then-District 4 Commissioner Sarah Moore, who has since been replaced by Peter Cervelli and then, in last year’s election, by Allan Bradford. Ms. Moore agreed with her that visibility was bad, said Ms. Stevens.
“So Sarah came out and she cut a tree down on this lower end, and that’s when it started. He got mad as a hornet. He cussed me and I guess he cussed her,” said Ms. Stevens. “He didn’t like the idea of anybody cutting anything he thought belonged to him.”
“Then it just ballooned out,” said her husband. “It’s like, ‘I’ll show you.’ ”
In subsequent summers, the Stevenses continued calling the county about clearing the intersections, the county continued to oblige, and the neighbor continued to object.
Then came the tornados of April 2011, and in the aftermath more foliage was cleared. The Stevenses believe that was the doing of emergency service personnel or the county under its own steam. In any case, they had nothing to do with it themselves, they said, but they’re pretty sure their neighbor blamed them.
There have been other skirmishes. The neighbor kept chickens and sold the eggs. “We never said anything about that, but it smelled bad,” said Ms. Stevens.
And for his part, the neighbor objects – to the point of calling the law – when the Stevenses’ visitors park their cars across the road beside his fence, on what they consider the county right of way but he considers his.
A word on the local geography: Though the neighbor lives near one end of the circle, his property extends behind him in the interior of the loop, so that his backyard chain-link fence faces the Stevenses’ front yard. That front yard is tiny, and the road is narrow, so that scant feet separate the couple’s house from the fence. Every autumn, Donnie Stevens rakes and burns the leaves on the shoulder in front of the fence opposite his house, to keep his own place looking neat.
His neighbor never objected, says Stevens, until this issue of clearing the intersections arose. After that, though, he began complaining that the raking violated his property rights.
“He went to the DA. He went to the magistrate,” said Charlotte Stevens. “He even talked to the big guy over the forestry to get Donnie arrested.”
No one arrested Stevens, but law enforcement played a role in another part of this feud: The Stevenses and their neighbor took opposite sides in last year’s heated sheriff’s election. Both planted signs in their yards for the candidate of their choice. The Stevenses accuse the neighbor of taking theirs down.
Finally, two weeks ago, stuck at home recuperating from knee replacement surgery, Stephens was watching television with his wife when she glanced up and said, “Well, I wish you’d look out – that looks like chairs out there.”
They got up and looked and sure enough, four plastic chairs and a red recliner had taken up residence just beyond the fence.
That was on the Saturday. On the way to church Sunday, they noticed an old picnic table by their neighbor’s place. By the time they got home, it had migrated down to join the chairs.
That became the pattern over the following days. Foam rubber appeared. Old buckets. “And we don’t know what’s in that black thing over there,” said Charlotte Stevens.
They never saw the trash arriving, and believe their neighbor and his friend must have dragged it piece by piece through the woods to surprise them. “They’ve done a lot of work just to aggravate somebody,” said Ms. Stevens.
But the work paid off. The Stevenses were aggravated indeed, and began exploring what county officials could do about it. The answer was: shake their heads sadly.
“Ted [Rumley, Dade’s executive chairman] has done everything he can do. He has bent over backwards,” said Stevens. But bending over backwards doesn’t cut any ice with the law, and the law is that owners can do what they like with their own property, including trashing it. “There’s no ordinance in Dade County which prevents him from doing it,” said Stevens.
Their helplessness, added his wife, made their neighbor bolder: This is when the tires arrived. “He brought his van and set it right there and threw tires out and just stood around and looked like he wanted us to be sure to see him there,” she said.
“You know he’s doing it for spite,” said Stevens.
And that’s where the feud stands. The Stevenses hate their new view, aren’t looking forward to sitting on their porch of a summer morning watching the sun come up over it, and worry it will hinder them from renting out their house if they choose to leave.
But Commissioners Ted Rumley and Allan Bradford confirmed on Monday it’s a private matter. “It’s nothing to do with the county,” said Rumley. “We don’t have any zoning in Dade County at all. It’s come down to the point where they’re both going to have to get a lawyer and let the courts decide.”
The Stevenses say they’re considering that.
Meanwhile, though, they seem a little less adamant against the Z-word than most Dade Countians. “I believe in restrictions when it comes to case by case,” said Donnie Stevens. “I don’t think the county should be able to tell you when you mow your grass and when you do this and when you do that, or the city or whatever. But I do think that there should be a system …where somebody should look at each case each time and make a ruling on it.”
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