A Mountain Divide Over a Road Tax

Upper Bull Run Paved; Group Peeved

Skip Cranshaw said he sees a dangerous precedent in the community's small civic association working with the county to raise taxes. (By Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post)

The newly paved roads of Bull Run Mountain were supposed to bring some refinement to this rugged community with sweeping views of Prince William County's farms and battlefields. Instead, they're likely to bring a lawsuit.

A group of disgruntled property owners is moving to sue the county after it raised their taxes to help pay for last summer's $1.5 million paving operation on the community's roads. The project coated 7.4 miles of steep, badly eroded gravel roads with a tar-and-chip surface designed to reduce maintenance costs and improve safety.

But less than a year later, parts of the road need repair. And the group fighting the tax increase argues that the county had no right to raise the special levy in the Bull Run Mountain Service District from 10 to 12 cents per $100 of assessed value.

"The whole thing was mishandled," said Joseph Blatter, one of three Bull Run residents who say they are planning to sue.

It's the principle of the matter, said Blatter, whose group wants the Service District redrawn.

"It's a fairness issue," he said. The Prince William County supervisors "exceeded their authority to make us pay for something we don't get any use out of."

Nestled along the Fauquier County line in the Haymarket area west of Highway 15, Bull Run Mountain is a long, low ridge on which the first cabins and vacation homes were built in the 1950s. Since then, the rustic setting has steadily attracted homeowners looking for a departure from the region's subdivisions and strip malls.

But as the community grew, new calls arose for its famously rutted, dusty roads to be paved. District supervisor John T. Stirrup Jr. (R-Gainesville) and the Bull Run Mountain Civic Association -- whose dues-paying membership includes 32 of the community's roughly 800 property owners -- worked out a deal to finance the road paving on the upper portions of the mountain. The two-cent increase on the special levy was unanimously approved last year by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.

Blatter and his group argue that residents who live on the lower part of the mountain shouldn't have to pay the Bull Run Mountain Service District for road maintenance on the upper portion -- roads they don't drive on. They already paid to have their portion of the community paved in the early 1980s without financial help from residents on the upper mountain, who benefited from the work nonetheless, Blatter said. The roads on the lower section are maintained by the state, not the Service District.

Skip Cranshaw, who lives on the upper part of the mountain, said he sees a dangerous precedent in the community's small civic association working with the county to raise taxes. He's been battling the association for years, having successfully fought in 1994 to block it from collecting mandatory dues on property owners who didn't want to join.

"The civic association represents their members only," Cranshaw said.

Stirrup resists this narrow view of community improvement. "None of us lives in a vacuum," he said. "It's a matter of public safety. And the property values on all the homes in that community have increased."

Stirrup also rejected claims that insufficient public notice was given before the tax hike, pointing to a well-attended public hearing in the community and another before the Board of County Supervisors.

James Murray, a longtime Bull Run Mountain resident and current chairman of the community's road committee, said opponents of the special levy increase don't understand the nature of the problem -- that the gravel roads could not sustain the community's growth. "Taxes were going up to maintain the gravel roads," he said.

Paving them to cut maintenance costs, Murray insisted, "is the only hope of the tax ever going down."

As for the repairs, some are under warranty from the road contractor. The most troubled areas along erosion-prone switchback portions of the mountain will be asphalted, Murray said, using funds obtained through the six-year special levy increase.

In the meantime, Cranshaw and Blatter have circulated a letter to some 200 property owners on the lower portion of the mountain stating their case and requesting donations to help pay for the services of the international law firm they've hired, Reed Smith. They've spent more than $12,000 in attorney's fees, and their attorney, Sally Gillette, has warned that they can expect $75,000 to $100,000 in litigation costs if the dispute continues.

The firm sent a letter to Prince William County on the group's behalf March 1 but has yet to receive a response.