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“year-round barracks-like facility” 850 feet away will decrease his property value.
“Property values and safety - or our perception of safety” will be affected by the expanded migrant camp, Mrs. Gorfein added, asking what’s to keep these migrants from taking jobs away from local workers at the packing house should they stay past harvest season.
Commissioner Fannon asked if the Gorfeins’ sole objection centered on year-round use and not the increased number of laborers.
“I have difficulty with the notion that you should reward someone who violated their permit . . . and systematically circumvented the entire system of zoning, but no, we have no objections (to allowing a greater number of workers to use the housing facility),” Mrs. Gorfein replied.
Zoning administrator John McCarthy recalled that the new zoning ordinance adopted last December had initially qualified labor camps as seasonal. The Board of Supervisors, however, dropped that restriction with the clear intent of permitting the POTENTIAL for year-round migrant housing to be regulated through conditions attached to the required special exception permit, he pointed out.
“For me, it seems almost inhumane - 16 guys, for a whole year with no family life,” commmented Commissioner Werner Krebser, suggesting that migrant workers use tenant housing and be allowed to bring their families.
“As it is now, they stay as long as there’s work and then they go back to their families,” Mr. Sharp said. He explained that the same men don’t stay for 12 months, from pruning season through harvest season. "They’re in rotation constantly.” As to Mrs. Gorfein’s contention that Virginia has no year-round migrant camps, he said the state only knows of those orchardists who hire workers here under a certain type of visa. “Ask them how many labor camps are in Rappahannock County and they would have said none. Now they’ll say one,” Mr. Sharp added.
Reading from the Virginia Code’s definition of migrant workers and camps, Mr. Baumgardner pointed out that it doesn’t restrict the facility’s use to part of the year. And neither does the Rappahannock zoning ordinance, he noted.
“There’s nothing that says migrant workers can’t live in tenant housing, in existing housing,” Mrs. Gorfein countered, citing another provision of the Rappahannock zoning ordinance that stipulates a proposed use shall not adversely affect a neighboring property or impair that neighboring property’s value. “This is a special exception that’s being asked for, not a rubber stamp . . . not a right,” she argued, describing the migrant camp as “a facility determined to grow . . . This is not going to stop here,” Mrs. Gorfein maintained.
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