Evictions loom for all

By Brian McNeill

Published: April 30, 2008

ZION CROSSROADS — Lachelle Johnson scrapped plans to throw a going-away party for her brother — a soldier being deployed to Iraq — after receiving a letter Friday notifying her that she and her mother were being evicted from her mobile home.
“We thought we’d have a little celebration for him, but now we’ve got to scrape together all our money to move,” said Johnson, sitting on her porch at the Zion Crossroads Trailer Park. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Thirty families in all — including Johnson and her mother, a housekeeper at Martha Jefferson Hospital — must vacate their trailer park homes by the end of October.
The property’s owner, Robert S. Glass, opted to shutter the 41-year-old trailer park in the fall rather than comply with tougher clean water laws.
Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality found that the trailer park’s private wastewater treatment facility was emitting high levels of copper and zinc into a nearby stream. The site’s new permit requires Glass to curtail the heavy metal pollution by November.
Robert Glass Jr., a railroad conductor and the trailer park’s former property manager, spoke Tuesday on behalf of his parents, who were out of town. Glass said that the cost of replacing the 25-year-old wastewater treatment equipment is estimated to be between $500,000 and $750,000.
“It was a hard decision to make,” Glass said. “A lot of these people have lived here for 30 years. It was a lot of soul searching. But it came down to the basic economics of doing business.”
Many of the trailer park’s residents are either unemployed or work in low-paying jobs throughout Central Virginia. At least a dozen residents said Tuesday that they doubt they can afford to pay rent elsewhere. The typical rent at the trailer park is between $400 and $650.
“We don’t have any options,” said C.C. Smith, who moved to the trailer park with two young children three years ago. “I don’t have the money to move. That’s why I’m living here.”
Several of the residents own the mobile home in which they live. These homeowners must cover the relocation costs of their trailers. Some of the trailers are so dilapidated that residents fret that they are unfit to move.
Over the weekend, the shock of the news that they were losing their homes rippled throughout the neighborhood of around 75 people. Keith Carter, who grew up in the trailer park, said his grandmother had a heart attack Sunday and was rushed to the University of Virginia Medical Center.
“She’s worried and she’s stressed,” said Carter, pulling his 1-year-old niece along in a red plastic wagon. “A whole lot of people around here are going to be on the streets.”
The site’s wastewater treatment facility handles between 11,000 and 12,000 gallons of raw sewage each year. In addition to the trailer park, it services the nearby Crescent Inn Restaurant and a laundry. Glass owns all three properties.
Officials with the DEQ met with Glass earlier this month and advised him that he needs to upgrade the facility or connect to a central sewage line. Glass told the officials that he would hook the restaurant and the laundry up to Louisa County’s sewer system. The trailer park, he told them, would cease to exist.
“We were advised that he had made a financial decision to take neither of the routes that we proposed to him,” said Larry Simmons, deputy regional director of the Valley Regional Office of the DEQ. “At this point, he hasn’t violated the limits. But we want to be prepared. We gave him a reasonable compliance schedule.”
Glass said that because the trailer park is located just over the county line in Fluvanna, it is ineligible to hook up to Louisa’s sewage system.
He blamed the trailer park’s closure on Virginia’s enforcement of state and federal laws designed to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. While the laws’ goal of protecting fish, wildlife and water quality might be praiseworthy, such regulations can have unintended and dire consequences, he said.
“It’s just not a good situation,” he said. “I feel for the folks who live here.”
The neighborhood has been in “chaos” since Friday, Johnson said. Many people, like her mother, are searching through newspaper classified ads for cheap apartments. On Tuesday, Johnson’s mother was bringing home boxes from the hospital to pack up their belongings.
“It’s a lot of stress on families,” she said. “How are we going to keep paying rent, keep paying our lot fees and still save enough money to move elsewhere?”