A culture war rages in The Plains, Virginia, a small town of around 250 people 30 miles outside Dulles. It’s something of a Hatfields and McCoys situation, where the political affiliations of the parties involved might blind the obvious regarding the current beef. It’s for sure why The Washington Post devoted so much ink to this dispute.
The publication ran a story about this battle between a conservative family who owns a wealth management firm and their gay neighbors, who own the restaurant next door. They’re side-by-side in the town. The article contains more words than the population of the town. It’s not some exaggerated tale to make conservatives look terrible, though the piece does its best to mark those fault lines between the Left and Right. It is, however, a red-meat tale of how local politics can go right off the rails fast. In suburbia, these types of stories sell, so I’ll give the Post a pass on that one, but the political leaning of the Washer family and William Waybourn and his husband, Craig Spaulding, didn’t start over a fight about the 2020 election or Black Lives Matter. It was over parking, zoning permits, and trash disposal.
Their political dispositions are peppered throughout the piece, but Mike Washer and his wife, Melissa, first complained about the early morning deliveries to Waybourn’s Front Porch restaurant next door in 2019. Then came what the Washers felt was the real cause of the war between the two businesses: garbage.
Mr. Washer offered to give up two parking lots their business owned to accommodate a dumpster. Waybourn and Spaulding reportedly served them with a no-trespass order by local sheriffs. The couple had reportedly spent between $30-40,000 at Front Porch. Now they were banned. In retaliation, the Washers hired a lawyer. They sent letters to Front Porch’s vendors, saying they would no longer be permitted to offload their deliveries in parking spaces designated for ICS Financial, the Washer’s firm. Front Porch and ICS have a shared parking lot. Waybourn said that the dumpster idea was tried before and failed. Other people started to fling trash into the receptacle, leading to him being fined for the excess mess. The permit and zoning applications were reviewed—the Washers had filed multiple complaints—and Waybourn and his husband were determined to follow existing regulations every time.
Then, the parking dispute was taken a step further, with the Washers wondering if Front Porch, which can seat up to 60, had enough off-street parking space to maintain its operating permit. The Washers say the rules aren’t being fairly enforced, as they have tenants occupying adjoining space that operates a sandwich shop but is required to have 15 parking spots. They claim this is due to their political opinions while adding, maybe tongue-in-cheek, that it was due to racism. The owners of the sandwich shop are black.
The endless legal challenges forced the town attorney and zoning administrator to leave their positions, with The Plains’ volunteer council and staff devoting an inordinate number of resources to the Washers’ FOIA requests, some dating back ten or years, long before Front Porch was ever around.
This war has also been marked by dead rats being thrown on porches. Waybourn thinks the Washers threw it on their property to get the health department involved, while the latter says they were returning the favor; the rat being hurled onto their premises first by Front Porch. Before he was banned, Mr. Washer would dine at Front Porch without a mask, leading to a confrontation with a local which he denies ever happening (via WaPo):
The Washers and Waybourn disagree on just when their neighborly tensions turned into a serious conflict.
The Washers say it happened in early September 2021, when sheriff’s deputies served them. A couple of days earlier, Mike had offered the Front Porch two parking spaces to use for a dumpster, Melissa said. The Washers thought the idea might resolve the dispute: It would move the restaurant’s trash from under the couple’s window — and out of smelling distance.
Instead, an officer appeared at their front door on Sept. 5 with no-trespassing orders, requested by Waybourn. “We were completely blindsided by that,” Melissa said. “Completely.”
[…]
Four days later, the Washers responded with no-trespassing notices of their own. Their attorney also informed the Front Porch owners that no one — not Waybourn or Spaulding, not their employees, not their diners — could use the parking spaces that the couple own but once shared as a courtesy with the neighboring businesses.
By mid-September, the Washers had installed signs in the lot that said, “Reserved for ICS Financial Visitors Only.” Later, the couple added smaller signs underneath to reinforce their point: “No Front Porch Parking.”
In November, Robinson started sending letters to Front Porch vendors, including its produce supplier, trash collector and uniform company. The letters said the vendors were prohibited from unloading in parking spaces not owned by the Front Porch. At the time, the restaurant owned only two, the ones closest to the back entrance. These spots were often hard for delivery drivers to access, because Mike parked his large GMC Sierra Denali truck next to them, Waybourn says.
[…]
If there’s one thing the Washers and the Front Porch owners agree on, it’s that the town has been AWOL during the conflict. Daniel Bounds, an attorney representing the Front Porch, says the town could have quashed the Washers’ permit appeal from the start. The attorney argues that despite their claims to the contrary, the couple have no standing because they have not been harmed in any direct way by the restaurant’s operations. (Waybourn, incidentally, estimates he has spent about $53,000 in legal fees to fight for the Front Porch’s right to operate as is.)
[…]
At a Board of Zoning Appeals meeting in April of this year, when the panel heard arguments on the Washers’ appeal, current zoning administrator Bruce Reese explained to the gathered crowd why The Plains would want to grant a special-use permit to the Front Porch that required no off-street parking. “Unless you’re building a new building. . . we’re not going to require you to have any parking at all,” Reese said.
“So why would they do that? Because it’s The Plains,” Reese added, to scattered applause and laughter. “The anticipation was that the charm of the town is such that we don’t want to force parking everywhere. We don’t want to have to have a building removed in order to make room for parking.”
[…]
A month after its first hearing on the case, the Board of Zoning Appeals denied the Washers’ appeal on May 4 during a standing-room-only meeting at Grace Episcopal Church. In a 3-2 decision, the board said the couple had “not carried its burden of proof” to overturn previous opinions on the Front Porch’s special-use permit, including the new zoning administrator’s assessment during an April 6 hearing. Waybourn was relieved, but he noted that had one vote gone the other way, his restaurant could have been shut down, if temporarily.
Many in The Plains had hoped the board’s decision would settle the dispute and allow the town to return to normal.
But on June 2, a Friday, the Washers appealed the decision in Fauquier County Circuit Court. The lawsuit is directed at The Plains itself but identifies the Front Porch as a third party.
The political overtones fuel the fire, but it wasn’t the spark or the tinder. This story is rooted in run-of-the-mill, small-town quarrels that often get out of hand. Who’s at fault for starting doesn’t even come up because it seems both sides have too much time on their hands. But now that we’ve blown up here, Waybourn is quoted saying he now views this fight as one about equal protection under the laws, “He [Waybourn] sees parallels between the Washers’ targeting of his restaurant and Republican legislatures and governors targeting transgender rights across the country. To the activist, it feels like a step backward after a lifetime of fighting for gay rights.”
Were the times that Mr. Washer ventured into Front Porch unmasked that caused Waybourn to snap when he and his wife offered some spaces to accommodate the early morning deliveries? Who knows, but trash collection and parking spaces seem hardly the issues where conservatives and liberals go at it at face value, which seems to have been dredged up afterward. It’s a nasty dispute between two businesses over how they operate. The politics is secondary. Then again, I don’t live in The Plains. The article ends with the owners of Front Porch putting their business up for sale.
