In a rare move, a zoning board has voted to defer a case for a full year rather than take action against a farmer whose way of life is threatened by encroaching development.
An anonymous complaint led zoning enforcement officials in September 2010 to the door of 85-year-old Signal Mountain resident O.C. Johnson. He lives on a private drive off Corral Road.
Officials told him that the rusty old cars and equipment he's kept on his property since 1963 had run afoul of county codes, and that Johnson, described by neighbors as a poor man with a "heart of gold," would need to move the "junk" or get the land rezoned for heavy industrial use.
"I've always liked junk," Johnson said, after being led to the microphone at a hearing Monday. "The first thing I did when I bought that property was put a little junk on it."
The hearing, the latest episode in the widower's five-month ordeal, brought Johnson to tears.
"Everything I own is on that 20 acres," Johnson, a man of few words who is hard of hearing, said in his defense. "I don't want to get rid of those [cars]. I'd rather die."
At issue are old vehicles and equipment that are not considered legal under the area's current A-1 zone, which has been in place since 1937.
But the growing population in the area and the corresponding rise in property values have turned what was once a backwater into what could be the next hot spot for growth, panel members said.
The new interest in the land has put Johnson's use of the property under a microscope, a situation panel member Bobby Scott called "asinine."
"It appears to me we've got 15 people here who can't help an 85-year-old man," Scott said, adding that he wanted "no part in this."
Several members of the panel, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission, admitted that they, too, kept junk on their property, and neighbors testified that they didn't have a problem with Johnson's use of the property.
Despite unanimous panel support for Johnson, commission members are prohibited by law from grandfathering in a behavior that was not technically legal in the first place, according to Greg Haynes, director of development services for the Regional Planning Agency.
But the unspoken question, said Johnson's great-niece, Jannie Reeves, was why anyone was bothering Johnson in the first place.
The man simply "loves his junk," and has had it on the property as long as she can remember, long before the area grew up around him.
"Him and his wife were married for 63 years, and she died four years ago," Reeves said. "That junk is all he has."
The panel will rehear the issue in February 2012.