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little advertisement. No one came out to speak against it or raise any issues,” he recalled, adding that he thought at the time, as the owner of just a house and lot, the ordinance would never affect him. “It only affected the big land developers,” Mr. Johnson continued. ‘They used that very instrument to make their millions and move on.”
When the ordinance was updated in 1973, the local people “still didn’t pay much attention to it.” But in the 1970s, things began to change a little, Mr. Johnson said, adding that he and others like him wanted to “provide a home and a livelihood for our children so they could stay in the county ... I wanted to use a piece of my own land, or buy a piece of land, but everything I tried to do, I was either denied or I wound up in court.”
“If I asked five different attorneys (to interpret sections of Rappahannock’s subdivision ordinance), I’d get five different answers. That’s how vague it is,” Mr. Johnson continued. He objected to the county putting layers of its own regulations overtop federal and state laws, particularly when the local ordinances are vulnerable to legal challenge. “If it’s only a bluff, why put it in there? The big developers will run right over you! They’ll call your bluff. Only the local people, the people who can’t afford $40,000 in lawyer’s fees, are going to be intimidated.”
Mr. Johnson said he opposes “any ordinance that’s not in black and white and enforced fairly.” The county may be justified in imposing controls on those who get preferential assessments in the use value taxation program, he said, but not on those who are paying taxes at fair market value. “And if you do, you’re going to wind up in all kinds of court battles,” he warned the supervisors.
He called on the board to table
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