Quaint Vituperations: the Glen House Inn Controversy

Below is the first section of a forthcoming nonfiction novella that chronicles the goings on of a small township in southwestern Ohio. I was sent to cover a township trustee meeting as a reporter for an area newspaper. Although nobody from the public normally attended those meetings, this was in particular was a hotbed of controversy and drew a dozen or so irate citizens. A rogue bed and breakfast was making waves in a neighborhood, and some neighbors wanted it shut down. The anti-B&B neighbors had a list of complaints against the inn that they said stretched back years.

However, a number of the B&B’s neighbors were friends of the owners and supported what the B&B was doing. The neighborhood was divided into cranky adherents on both sides, and the following trustee meeting was attended by pro-B&B neighbors refuting the points made by the first. To the neighbors, depending on what the trustees decided, the township was either tyrannical or ineffective.

While this may not sound like a riveting thing to write about, it was. The nature of the dispute and the personalities involved are fascinating, and the ways in which they clashed are hilarious, aggravating, serious, and quaint, all at the same time.

And this isn’t even taking into account the rest of the evening’s meeting, which involved everything from unknown remains found in an old cemetery to a visit to the Ohio Snow and Ice Removal Conference. My upcoming novella, logically titled “Dance of the Trustees,” discusses life in the township, from its history of burial mounds and murders to the storied careers of the township trustees who have taken it upon themselves to steer such a multifaceted ship.

Quaint Vituperations: the Glen House Inn Controversy

Trustee Mark Crockett is a man who speaks deliberately, delivering each phrase with the ponderousness of a court justice who has all the time in the world. He sat in an equivalent posture on the evening of September 9, slightly reclined in his chair behind the table at the head of the room, fingers interlocked over his belly. He looked out on the room with equanimity, observing the proceedings and taking them in.

Crockett, like the other trustees, was in an interesting position. He had lived in the area with his wife for almost 40 years, owned a business, and was otherwise just a man around town. But he, like the other trustees, made decisions on behalf of his fellow residents.

Neither Crockett nor any of the other trustees had previous experience holding political office. Spracklen was a farmer, Mucher used to own the area’s video store, and Crockett is a jeweler and guitar player. (Though Mucher was an in-law to the DeWine family, an Ohio political dynasty.) But civic management skills were picked up on the job, and the public had trusted them enough to reelect each of them multiple times.

However, President of the Miami Township Boards of Trustees Chris Mucher looked around the meeting room warily on September 9. He could sense tempers were a little high, and so the outcome of the evening would likely make some proportionally serious waves. Any decision made is bound to offend someone, and in the case of the first portion of that evening’s meeting, any official position would offend at least half of an entire neighborhood.

The meeting began shortly after 7 p.m.

Mucher stood up and introduced himself and the rest of the people at the table: fellow trustee Mark Crockett, Margaret Silliman, the financial officer, “number one road employee” Dan Gochenouer, Miami Township Zoning Inspector Richard Zopf, and Stephanie Hayden, the Greene County assistant prosecutor, who had been called in specifically to give her interpretation of the B&B dispute.

Mucher’s right hand stayed in the pocket of his khakis as he gave a referee-esque preamble to the proceedings.

“In our opinion, the board of trustees is the bedrock of local government,” he said. “It’s the place where the balance begins between the rights of the property owner and the rights of society. Sometimes it gets a little messy, but I assure tonight isn’t going to be messy. It’s going to be polite and dignified.”

The balance between the rights of the property owner and the rights of society were indeed going to be discussed. The meeting was the latest skirmish in an ongoing battle between a bed and breakfast and the neighbors it reportedly annoyed. The anti-Inn neighbors, the Concerned Circle Citizens (CCC), sat in the front row and nodded. Their de facto spokesperson brought with her a folder full of stapled documents to prove the soundness of their position. Nobody in favor of the B&B was there, as pains had been taken to avoid telling them the topic was going to be addressed at the meeting.

On the surface, the debate may seem a bit droll: how often does a quaint B&B drive neighbors mad? But such charming disputes are practically written into the township’s DNA.

An odd bit of Ohio Code allows the average residential homeowner to run a B&B out of her home with little official oversight.[1] In fact, a number of area residents were taking advantage of this allowance. Miami Township encompasses a number of picturesque hamlets, including the village of Yellow Springs, a progressive small town full of art galleries, a tourist destination most appropriately served by quaint B&Bs. A bumper sticker claims the area is “2.2 square miles surrounded by reality,” and the area’s pastoral vistas suggest this may be the case.

However, Crockett said most people who live in Miami Township just want to be left alone. The presence of a B&B in a quiet neighborhood a few miles outside of Yellow Springs was said to be aggressively challenging the desire to live unmolested. The Glen House Inn, located in a quiet neighborhood a few miles outside of Yellow Springs, was accused of hosting dozens of visitors and large-scale events like weddings, self-help workshops, and Solstice vigils, a far cry from the romantic (and manageable) couples who usually patronize B&Bs. The excess noise and people “undermined the quiet integrity of the neighborhood,” as one neighbor put it, and another said he never would have moved to the neighborhood in the first place had he known the Inn would so loud. Negotiations between the sides had deteriorated, if they were ever civil at all. Both sides accused the other of being obstinate and dishonest, and both accused the township of not acting with consistency in enforcing its laws.

As such, on September 9, the parties sought a definitive interpretation of code. Was the Inn operating legally or not? Should the Inn be found in compliance, the neighbors would just have to deal with it; should the Inn be found in violation, the B&B would have to scale back its operations, a change the owner said would ruin him financially.

Prosecutor Hayden was there to give an official interpretation of the law, and to offer suggestions about what steps could be taken to square everything with code. Throughout the meeting, her face held a look of intelligent skepticism, the fiercely judicious look of someone professionally capable of seeing through bullshit.

The crowd murmured, eager to get started. Richard Zopf, the wild-bearded township zoning inspector, tried to look relaxed while knowing that the whole room was eager to blame him for their troubles. Gochenouer, the road crewman and cemetery sexton whose official business didn’t have anything to do with the crowd, folded his hands and smiled faintly.

Genesis of the Dispute

Grinnell Circle, where the Glen House Inn is located, is a ten-minute drive from the MTFR building. Down Corry Street, past a nature preserve and a stable of therapeutic horses, is Grinnell Road. A left turn on Grinnell takes the visitor down a sizable hill and onto a road overlooked by the colorful buildings of a recently revamped wastewater treatment plant. A few miles further south and the visitor will come to a noticeably bucolic setting, a clearing with stone walls and an old mill with water wheel set among hedges and trees. The Glen Circle neighborhood is back in this splendiferous idyll.

Glen Circle is a collection of homesteads grouped around an acre of common area. Some neighbors have gates; some have none; most have a decent amount of money. Eric and Deirdre Owen, the owners of the Inn, spent $700,000 to build a large house on the Circle in 2005, largely because of its regal charm. Both grew up in Yellow Springs, and wanted to return. The house is based on a dream home they sketched on a cocktail napkin in Europe many years before.

Owen is in his late 40s, thickset, unkempt in a way that speaks for consistent productivity in his pursuits. He’s a kind of wheeler-dealer, active in the art world and owner of a few properties, including part of a hotel in small-town Michigan. He was thrust into bed and breakfast ownership when he had a falling out with the partners of a company he founded 25 years before. He took a year’s salary and retired, but quickly recognized the money was not enough to sustain him forever. He knew he had to do something to secure his retirement. A beautiful house was at his disposal, and he decided to turn it into a B&B. The Glen House Inn’s website was up and running within thirty days of his decision. He said it was the only way to save the house.

In the interest of being open about his plans and in order to get a permit to follow through with them, Owen met with the Board of Zoning Appeals in July 2011. The BZA overhears building plans, checks them against zoning code, and questions prospective builders about the effects the construction will have on the surroundings. All BZA meetings are open to the public, and citizens are encouraged to attend and weigh in with their concerns. Anti-Inn neighbors came to the BZA meeting, anticipating the B&B would be trouble, and wanting to register their reservations.

Both sides grant some kind of tenuous agreement was reached regarding the operations of the Inn, but none of the claims about what was said can be proven, as the official record for this meeting has disappeared. Video of any BZA meeting would ordinarily be available through the local cable access station or on a DVD at the library, but the master recording could no longer be found, and the person who took notes at the meeting no longer worked for the Township. Ultimately, Zopf recalled, “there was no reason not to grant Owen a permit,” as Owen’s plans seemed kosher.

With the impression everything was on the up-and-up, the Owens opened the Glen House Inn. Guests lined up to rent its five spacious rooms, lounge on its patio, appreciate the impressive art collection, and swim in its stream-fed pool. The whole Inn is bathed in that tranquil, sunlit green characteristic of 18^th century paintings. It’s an objectively beautiful location, and business was steady.

However, perhaps because of the bacchanalia such locations induce, neighbors said their concerns about disturbed peace were immediately proven correct. Catering trucks parked on the berm of the already-narrow road. Fireworks – “nice ones, like you’d see in town” – were said to have almost hit two houses at 12:45 a.m. Guests playing in the pool were too noisy. One resident said he was unhappy with unknown people lurking in the neighborhood, and described a recent occurrence where a car circled around the neighborhood before parking at the Inn.

“Why would they do that?” he asked. “I think it’s a safety concern.”

(The Owens maintain that some of these events happened once and never again, and that the neighbors have been referencing them for years. And people drive on the road, Owen said, because it’s a public road.)

The neighbors maintain they complained to the township and the county, to no avail, for at least four years. But in 2015, action was taken after the Inn’s busted septic system began stinking up the area. The ghastly effluence was definitely coming from the Inn, one neighbor said. “A lot of sniff-testing confirmed it.” The Greene County Health Department investigated – they have jurisdiction over septic systems – and deemed the septic system completely inadequate for the amount of people the Inn hosted.

By this point the Owens had moved back to Michigan and the operations of the Inn were being managed by a live-in caretaker Jody Farrar and her husband Bill. The Owens and Farrars conceded the septic system was not working and fixed it. Other repairs were undertaken and the Inn continued hosting guests and renting out their facilities at a rate of $5,000 per weekend. The noise was alleged to have continued unabated.

The final straw was when neighbors got wind that Owen was talking about reworking the property into a winery. It was a clever power play, as viticulture is exempt from zoning. A winery is considered an agricultural practice, which Ohio Code explicitly states townships have no jurisdiction over, including the zoning of buildings as part of the agricultural operation.[2]

Owen had no qualms using this possibility as leverage. “I’ll convert it to a winery rather than face foreclosure,” he said. “Then there’ll be hundreds of cars per weekend versus just a few.” (When the viticulture possibility was brought up at the meeting on Sept. 9, Stephanie Hayden wasn’t impressed. “We have a lot of people threaten to open a winery to get zoning off their back,” she said.)

Credible threat or not, the neighbors ramped up their efforts to get the township to intervene, hence asking the trustees to invite Hayden and the neighbors’ collective appearance at the meeting.

At the Meeting of September 9, 2015

September 9 was it. Their big meeting, their big chance for an official showdown. The neighbors were sober and ready to go; partners held hands for encouragement. After his brief opening speech, Mucher introduced Hayden.

Hayden was Greene County’s prosecutor, and by statue, the township’s lawyer, she said. She clearly and concisely explained what roles the various boards and commissions played in the drama. She outlined the process of suing someone over zoning concerns, the difference between civil and municipal court, and the possible outcomes of such a suit. ($500 per day per violation, in one instance.) Her elucidations were illustrated with examples of other problematic zoning cases. “One guy was a junk property owner, an outdoor hoarder. We disagree what the definition of ‘junk’ is,” she said.

She then asked the neighbors to present their case.

“When did these problems start?” Hayden asked.
“First of June, 2011,” said the head of the CCC immediately.
Her ready answer prompted laughs.
“We’re on top of this,” the neighbor said.

The CCC enumerated the violations and complaints that plagued the Inn since it had opened. And not only was the Inn hosting many more guests than was legally allowed, the CCC spokesperson argued, but the Owens didn’t even live in Ohio, which meant that the Inn wasn’t owner-occupied, which meant that it wasn’t even technically abiding by the B&B guidelines set out in code.

Hayden listened to the neighbor’s complaints with total concentration, her body involuntarily twitching when she heard a particularly egregious violation. The neighbors were very thorough. “You’re the best witnesses I’ve ever had,” Hayden said. Her assessment was obvious: the parameters of what is officially acceptable, for bed and breakfast and everything else, are plainly spelled out in the Ohio Revised Code, the Ohio Administrative Code, Miami Township Code or any of the other official regulations used by a county or city agency. These laws are indisputable, and she was clearly baffled that the Inn was still in operation at all. Her expression also hinted at her feelings as a human being annoyed by other humans who think they’re special.

All things considered, Hayden said it made sense to convene representatives from all agencies involved in the dispute and file a formal complaint against the Inn. She suggested giving the Inn a “fill-in-the-blanks violation of notice,” a pre-drafted letter the agencies could just fill in with the violations they’d inevitably discover. Hayden and Zopf agreed they would pay the Inn a visit in a few days. The trustees sat back in their chairs with evident relief. A decision had to be made, and it was.

This decision reached, about 98% of the people at the meeting got up and gathered their belongings. “You’re welcome to stay for the rest of the…” Mucher began, but the attendees filed past him and went back outside. Snatches of their conversation could be heard as the door swung open and closed. The first part of the September 9 meeting had taken one hour and fourteen seconds.

A Visit to the Inn

The Inn was apparently subject to intimidation in the days following the September 9 meeting. Someone pounded on door in the middle of the night, and guests reported what sounded like guns being shot off right next to the house.

Things did not improve from there. Five days after the trustee meeting, on September 14, a contingent of county and township functionaries paid a visit to the Inn. The Owens travelled down from Michigan to lead the zoning and health code inspectors on what they thought was a “fact-finding mission” to determine what aspects of the Inn needed to be brought up to code. Instead, Owen said, they were surprised to find themselves served with a cease and desist letter, just as Hayden had suggested.

The letter said the Inn had two weeks from that day to scale back its operations or it would be shut down. The inn could have no more than five guests in its current incarnation, nor could it host any events. It also had to stop its activities as an art gallery (or venue of any kind), as it also violated statutes defining what constitutes a home-based business.

Eric Owen promptly called the Yellow Springs News, as he knew a reporter was at the Trustees meeting and wanted to provide the world with this most shocking update. He and Deirdre and the Farrars and his mother Luisa were sitting outside on deck chairs when the reporter arrived, gobsmacked by the morning’s events. Owen related what happened with the impassioned but disjointed cadence of someone thinking aloud. After a few minutes he paused and held out his lit cigarette.

“Look what they have me doing,” he said. “I don’t even smoke.”

The agencies’ letter effectively meant he would have to turn the B&B into a hotel, he said. In order for the Inn to host the number of guests it had been, Owen would have to install steel doors, fire dampeners, hood systems in the kitchen, and a 150,000-gallon cistern for a sprinkler system in his house, an expense he simply could not afford.

The CCC was basically a “lynch mob” that had their “tentacles” in county and township agencies. This was nothing like the community he used to know, he said. He said Greene County were toadies following the regulations created by and directly benefitting the worldwide hotel industry. Owen’s mother compared the Inn’s situation with the policies of the fascist regime she lived through as a young woman in a prison camp in Yugoslavia.

“Where I grew up, they would kill you for speaking up. If that were the case here, I would still speak up about the Inn,” she said.

But the caretakers got to work making two of the five rooms unavailable. They had to remove an illegal downstairs bathroom and take out some beds as a show of good faith that they wouldn’t secretly accommodate more guests than they were allowed. Jody Farrar said she had to call and tell people they couldn’t have their wedding at the Inn. The guests went from angry to devastated, she said, as some people had already ordered decorations specifically to go with the property.

All of this after the largesse the Inn has shown the area, Owen said, like the free use of the Inn for area cultural affairs and “at least 50 meals and $400 in wine purchased in town” by guests of a recent event.

They’d just have to wait and see if the Inn would still be sustainable.

The Second Meeting – September 21, 2015

 

Tempers ran high at the subsequent trustees meeting two weeks later. If the previous meeting was noteworthy for its attendance, this one was exceptional. Supporters of the Inn said it was their duty to show up and testify on the Inn’s behalf, as they were deliberately excluded from the previous meeting. The CCC was there to advocate again for their position.

The trustees filed in from the corridor. Trustee Lamar Spracklen wasn’t at the previous meeting, but he was this time. He sat down in his chair and stared out at the room. He looked like a grizzled boxing instructor commanding someone to punch a side of meat, and he had a bandage on his face that stretched from his lip to his cheekbone. His eyes scanned the crowd, like he was just waiting for someone to ask what happened. Gochenouer was at the table, and so were Crockett, Silliman, and Zopf.

Chris Mucher stood up, and with little official township preamble addressed the crowd. There was a slight tremble in his voice.

“If anyone thinks they’re in the wrong place, they’re not,” he said. “This is exactly where you want to be. This is a public meeting of the Board of Trustees.”

The Inn’s supporters were ready to go. A neighbor named Dan Rudolf spoke, lauding the operations of the Inn and saying he was not bothered by the occasional noise. His speech was delivered with an eloquence that bespoke serious conviction, or at least a lot of time rehearsing the delivery. Innkeeper Bil Farrar, tall, with a wispy red beard and long red ponytail, stood up and added his piece. He tried to make the difficult argument that the neighbors were being un-neighborly – a subjective characteristic that was hard to objectively prove, and a point that was difficult to understand because his speech was peppered with phrases like “maybe it’s not your job to promote community” and “losing the opportunity to eat potato salad with the Lithgows[3],” on top of referring to the proceedings as a “plot.” By the looks on the faces of the other attendees, the strength of his case was dampened by the profligate use of these rhetorical illustrations. Nevertheless, their abundance spoke for the seriousness of his convictions.

Owen’s eyes were sparkling with a barely-containable desire to speak. He leapt up. Did the Township know the position he and Deirdre were being put in? he asked.

“We’re basically vagabonds,” he said. “We have no house; we sleep when there are free rooms in the bed and breakfast.” He already worked eighteen hours a day, he said, and now he had to deal with this.

“If the neighbors wanted a gated community, why don’t they just create a gated community?” he asked.

He wasn’t inherently opposed to code, he said, and every time he was asked he tried to square his property with it. But the changes the Inn had to make were difficult to understand thanks the unclear information given by the Township and the fact that county and Ohio codes didn’t always line up. It was tough to tell which code took precedence, he said, but either way, he felt the Inn was being ganged up on.

“I don’t know what club you’re part of,” Owen said.

“I don’t have a club,” said Mucher. “This has absolutely nothing to do with any other department or political subdivision.”

“I mean the club we’re being beaten with,” Owen said.

More testimony was heard from Bob Bingenheimer, who had a letter to the editor entitled “Glen House Closing Shows Worst of People and Government” published in the paper earlier that week, though its incendiary title was changed to something less acerbic. Another innkeeper in town offered her take on the issue, arguing against the necessity of strictly following the owner-occupancy requirement for small-scale B&Bs.

Here trustee Spracklen weighed in. He sympathized with the Owens and told of his own troubles running his own B&B. He is the owner-operator of another picturesque area inn, and his B&B necessarily operates under the auspices of the same township code. Spracklen’s establishment had recently come under fire for serving a breakfast far too large for its permit, and he sarcastically explained how the Health Department demanded significant upgrades to the kitchen.[4]

“Don’t make me laugh or my tape’ll fall off,” he said, touching his bandage.

(A few weeks later he would basically be in Owen’s position, pleading his case to the Health Department and visibly trying to stifle his irritation at their inability to understand why he should just be allowed to do what he wants to do.)

The CCC was there and pleaded their case anew, going point-for-counterpoint with Owen’s. The argument got more convoluted as more people weighed in. There was a circuitous discussion of what defines traffic on the circle, and then a discussion on the nature of socializing itself. Mucher stepped in and gave a ten-minute warning, mentioning again that no real or enforceable resolution would be coming from this meeting, or the next one, or any future meetings. A change to the zoning code required advocating for the change before the Zoning Commission, who would render their expert opinion and eventually suggest a change for the trustees to vote on.

The public debate portion of the Sept. 21 meeting ran for the next ten minutes, and the trustees wrapped it up. There was not much more to say, and little that could be done at that moment. The attendees once again got up and left as soon as the debate session was over, the two sides avoiding further interaction and leaving the building to fume together or in private.

Ultimately, the case added up to this: because the Owens had more than five guests, because it was shown that the Owens are registered tax-payers in Michigan, because the property is zoned residential, and because they didn’t have the appropriate health, fire, and food licenses, the Glen House Inn would have to limit its bed and breakfasting operations to those allowed in residentially-zoned properties. The mandates of the letter signed jointly by the Greene County Combined Health District and the Miami Township offices were not up for debate – code was there for a reason, and that reason could not be selectively enforced, no matter how fascistic or unfair it may seem. There had to be some structure, and that structure was outlined in Miami Township Code.

“That’s the most dramatic thing about being a trustee – whether you like it or not, changes happen,” Crockett said. “Our job is to try to make the best decision for the majority of the people in the community.”

A decision had been reached on September 14, and it stood.

Update, Spring 2016: An article about this controversy was published in the Yellow Springs News not long after the second Board of Trustees meeting. The article presented an overview of the debate and reported on the cease and desist letter, suggesting the Inn was shut down as a result. Richard Zopf was quick to point out was not the case. He wrote a letter to the editor that said the article made the Zoning Inspector look bad and misinterpreted the township’s position. The Inn was not closed down, he pointed out, it just had to stop its violations. He maintained that this was his position all along – all of the suggestions he had ever given, all of the leniency he’s shown the Owens – were all in the interest of getting the Inn in compliance with Code. He, in his duty as Zoning Inspector, was simply trying to follow the letter of the law. He admitted he had been lenient in the time he allowed residents to comply, but no more. He had been taken advantage of by both sides, he said, and from that point on was going to be strict in his definitions of what was acceptable and not.

The Inn reduced its operations within the fourteen days demanded by the letter and has stayed at that level ever since. Its available rooms are booked fairly consistently. (It was determined that the Owens did have residency in Ohio, as the Inn was their registered address and Ohio law does not specify a length of time required for residency.)

Jody Farrar said it seemed like the authorities were trying to cover their tracks in going after the Inn. There are five B&Bs in the area, she said, but the Inn got “dissected” because the health department realized they were supposed to be monitoring B&Bs but weren’t, and went after one in order to save face. Bil Farrar, speaking with his customary grandiloquence, said “the shrapnel rained down and gave us all paper cuts; we didn’t die but we were severely injured.” Owen said members of the CCC have called them and pretended to be someone looking to book an event to see if the Inn would slip up.

In late March of 2016, a pro-Inn neighbor wrote a letter to the editor to be published in the Yellow Springs News. It was entitled “Unintended Consequences: An Essay About Community, a Cautionary Tale” and decried the Township’s decision, saying that all semblance of neighborly cooperation had been bulldozed by the CCC’s intractable opposition to the Owens. The letter ran almost 3,000 words, and the editor of the News said it had to be cut down by about 75 percent in order to be published. The author said she couldn’t do this, the argument had to be presented in its entirety, and she said was willing to pay the full $800 to run the essay as a full-page ad. The staff of the News was unsure about this proposition, as a mockup of the full-page version of the essay looked a lot like the screed of a maniac demanding its publication in order prevent further tragedy. The News was unsure if they wanted to open the paper up to that kind of thing.

Ultimately, Owen asked the well-intentioned neighbor not to go through with publishing her lengthy missive. He had a prospective buyer for the property and didn’t want to dredge up problems associated with the house. As of April 2016, the house is en route to be being sold and will revert back to its first incarnation as a private residence. According to Owen, it just wasn’t worth it to keep the Glen House Inn going.

“I’ve dealt with this same provincial shit before with my hotel in Michigan,” Owen said, “but this was something else.”

[1] 5.308 Bed and Breakfast Operations, under the following conditions:

5.3101 All operations hereunder must meet the definition of Bed and Breakfast.
5.3102 Are operated totally within the principal dwelling and not within a garage or accessory building.
5.3103 Does not have exterior evidence of operation other than one (1) square foot wall sign as permitted under Section 2.14
5.3104 Shall contain no additional, separate kitchen facilities for guests.
5.3105 Shall provide one (1) off-street parking space for every guest room in addition to the off-street parking otherwise required for the principal structure as provided in each district.
5.3106 Shall permit access to the guest room only through the principal structure.
5.3107 Shall obtain an occupancy permit from Greene County Building Inspection Department prior to the commencement of operations to ensure compliance with all applicable building and safety standards.

[2] 519.21 Powers not conferred on township zoning commission by chapter: Except as otherwise provided in division (B) of this section, sections 519.02 to 519.25 of the Revised Code confer no power on any township zoning commission, board of township trustees, or board of zoning appeals to prohibit the use of any land for agricultural purposes or the construction or use of buildings or structures incident to the use for agricultural purposes of the land on which such buildings or structures are located, including buildings or structures that are used primarily for vinting and selling wine and that are located on land any part of which is used for viticulture, and no zoning certificate shall be required for any such building or structure.

Section B of the above references includes exceptions such as a parcel of land of five acres or less or one located in a platted subdivision containing 15 or more lots. On a lot that is one acre or smaller, zoning may prohibit or regulate all agricultural activities.

[3] Sometimes the Inn was rented out by Antioch College as a home for its special guests, which once included actor John Lithgow and his family. Lithgow’s father was a theater professor at Antioch, and John Lithgow attended daycare in Yellow Springs.

[4] A few years before, a local woman named Nora Byrnes began serving free breakfasts to the community from her home on a residential street. She’d take custom orders and had an impressive buffet anyone could help themselves to. Everyone was welcome, and donations were tacitly accepted. Breakfasts at Norah’s grew to be so well liked that Norah would have between forty to sixty people eating at her house. Friends volunteered as waitstaff, and the breakfast operations began to look like a professional restaurant, though the community-minded approach (everyone sat family style) was said by her fans to engender a uniquely communal environment. Of course, regularly serving food to sixty people caught the eye of the Health Department, who said she was totally unlicensed and had to shut down. The community was in an uproar that her generosity was being circumscribed, and so Spracklen began letting Byrnes use his B&B to host her breakfasts once a week. These breakfasts likewise drew the attention of the Health Department. Byrnes was forced to stop serving breakfast at Spracklen’s inn, but in a case that may give hope to the Owens, Byrnes later appeared before the BZA to lay out her plans to resume serving breakfasts in her own home, and the reasons why she should be allowed to do it. She gave a persuasive interpretation of code, and a dozen or more citizens from the town testified on her behalf about how wonderful her breakfasts are. While the specifics of the BZA’s decision are too lengthy to address, suffice it to say code was creatively interpreted in such a way that she could resume breakfasts at her home in a limited capacity.

“You’re not going to have GFS semi-trucks delivering to your house this time, are you?” asked one BZA member.
“No,” she said.