Rights & Wrongs

Friends of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the group that has sprung up in Watauga County to protest the Ginn Company's 6,000-acre resort development called Laurelmor being developed on some of the previous Heavenly Mountain property, is planning a noisy protest next Thursday, April 13th, in front of the Ginn Company offices (the AF bank building, 1675 Blowing Rock Rd.) Without a good legal basis for opposing the development (that would take ZONING or at least more land-use regs than Watauga County currently has) the group has decided to opt for gestures of defiance.

The group is publishing a newsletter, "Watauga Watchdog," and their third issue alleges that the Ginn Company sent a spy to one of their meetings, a spy who announced that he was with "the Natural Resources District Council," which rang just wrong enough to make everybody instantly suspicious and guarded. Plus he was waving around a camera in a much too friendly way. When the spy began trying to arrange a group photograph, and the group wouldn't cooperate, "he just started taking people's pictures in the room."

If the spy loses his job with the Ginn Company, he can always write a book: "How NOT to Deal with Citizen Protest."

The book the Friends of the Blue Ridge Mountains might write will be infinitely more tragic, until the group gets a better grip on private property rights and the processes of regulating growth in an unzoned county.