Man Jailed for Lack of Shrubbery

Another white-shoed golfer stepped up to the counter at the driving range, but not just to buy a $4 bucket of balls. Like the others, he wanted a fix on the most prominent ongoing political drama in Fairfax County, Va.

“John out of the pokey?” the man asked.

“Not yet.”

“A shame,” the man said, shaking his head, before heading off.

“John” is John Thoburn, the 43-year-old owner of the Reston driving range who has been imprisoned indefinitely since Feb. 16 over landscaping violations that county zoning inspectors found at the range. Not enough trees and shrubs, the inspectors said, and the grassy perimeter berm may be too tall or too short--impossible to tell because the proper paperwork hadn’t been submitted.

The other prisoners call him “Shrub.”

While the main elements in the standoff are in some ways pure Fairfax--zoning, golf and organized neighbors concerned about property values--the news that a man has been imprisoned for months in a landscaping dispute is reaching around the world.

Thanks to attention from the National Post in Canada, a Portuguese news show, Fox News, Associated Press dispatches and more than a dozen talk radio shows across the country, the https://www.freejohnthoburn.com Web site recorded more than 30,000 hits last month, his family said. Hundreds of donations have been made to a defense fund.

A typical note, attached to a $10 check sent by a woman in Memphis: “Wish I could afford more to help you. . . . Please know that I’m praying for you.”

Thoburn contends that the case has turned Fairfax County into a national joke.

“The county ought to be embarrassed,” Thoburn said in a telephone call from jail Friday. “I must be the first person in America to be jailed for not planting shrubbery.”

The way the world sees the Thoburn case may be quite different from how residents of the county’s tidy suburban enclaves see it, however.

Members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors said they had been deluged by e-mails from across the country and that most urge them to free Thoburn immediately.

The supervisors said they discounted the international coverage and the response to it, however, preferring instead to listen to constituents who tend to demand more zoning oversight, not less.

“The substance is the issue, not the international coverage of it,” said Republican Stuart Mendelsohn.

“Many of the e-mails are saying, ‘Free Thoburn,’ and it’s frequently misspelled, and many are vitriolic and laced with obscenities,” said Democrat Gerald Connolly. “It reflects a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that is complex and not simple.”

Within Fairfax, he noted, his constituents are pushing the county to be strict.

“I’ve got cases in my district of outstanding zoning violations where constituents are cheering the county on for finally getting serious about zoning.”

Democratic Fairfax Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman said Friday that the county is sticking to an important principle.

“For years, the justice system did not take zoning violations seriously,” said Kauffman. “We finally got the judiciary to take action.”

The dispute goes back years. Since November 1997, the county has issued summonses for everything from erecting too many lights to preparing snacks for golfers. After many hearings, Circuit Court Judge Michael P. McWeeny imprisoned Thoburn on Feb. 16 for contempt of court after he failed to comply with long-standing county demands that he ring the driving range with trees and the berm. The county asked the judge for an order allowing it to shutter the range, officials said, but the judge essentially left it up to Thoburn to comply or close--and jailed him for refusing to do either one.

The range is near the Dulles Toll Road and surrounded by large homes on large lots. Thoburn had planted hundreds of trees and built a berm, and the range is nearly invisible from nearby homes. But county reviewers found fault with both the plantings and the berm.

“He is short 146 trees and 124 shrubs,” county spokeswoman Merni Fitzgerald said.