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Stafford land-use lawyer Clark Leming handles most development cases in fast-growing county

February 20, 2005 1:08 am

Former Stafford County Supervisor Ferris Belman knows Stafford County's land-use rules and processes as well as anybody.

Much of the county code and modern land-use practices were put into place during his 15-year tenure. And he made dozens of land-use decisions every month while a supervisor.

But last year, when Belman needed to rezone a half-acre to make up for parking spaces his store lost during a road expansion project, he hired a pro: Clark Leming.

"I could have probably done it without his help, but to cross all the t's and dot all the i's, it's better to turn it over to somebody," Belman said. "Clark knows the county code and the zoning code inside and out. That's the reason I chose him."

For the past 15 years, Leming has represented all of Stafford's big-name developers and many with smaller land-use concerns.

At Planning Commission meetings, it's not unusual for the attorney to represent every single applicant on the agenda. He feels right at home in front of the Board of Supervisors, always trading pleasantries and sometimes cracking jokes with those behind the bench.

Leming's legal footwork has brought Stafford Marketplace, the big-box retail center on Garrisonville Road. He's the one who guided large neighborhoods such as Augustine and Embrey Mills through the county's approval process.

He handled a suit that led the Virginia Supreme Court to overturn a downzoning in Spotsylvania County. And he has been wrangling with Stafford County for years over controversial development plans in Widewater and Crow's Nest.

Leming, 51, said he never set out to be a land-use attorney. He was born in South Carolina and was educated at Rollins College in Florida, where he studied to be a teacher.

He later got a doctorate in political science from Emory University in Atlanta and a law degree from Catholic University in Washington.

He started his law career as a civil-rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Education in Washington.

That's where he met his wife and law partner, Patricia Healy.

"When [President Ronald] Reagan came in, I knew for certain I didn't want to work for the government," Leming said. He decided to become a country lawyer.

His father lived in Fredericksburg and was able to show him some land in nearby Stafford. He and Healy bought a place in North Stafford.

"My first office was in the in-law suite of an old farmhouse," he said. "People had to come down a dirt road to see me."

That was in 1985. In those days, there was no zoning going on in Stafford County, so Leming and Healy made their money on domestic law and criminal defense.

Leming didn't have his first zoning case until he decided to move out of the old farmhouse, and he had to rezone some residential land to commercial to make way for his new office.

Early in his career in Stafford, Leming defended a video store owner who was being prosecuted for renting out X-rated movies. The experience led him to challenge Daniel Chichester for the commonwealth attorney's job.

Chichester hadn't faced a contested election since he took over the job from his father in 1971.

Leming charged that Chichester used poor judgment in prosecuting his client and that investigating consumer-fraud issues would have been a better use of the commonwealth attorney's time and resources. But his soft-on-porn stance didn't resonate well with voters. Chichester beat him 8,737 to 3,155.

That was Leming's only bid for elected office in Stafford, but he and Healy have remained active in politics. And they've taken some flak for that involvement.

"There's always a perception that there's something that goes on behind the scenes," Leming said. "We are straight arrows. We try to be pretty careful about not even presenting the appearance of a conflict of interest."

In the early '90s, Healy served as campaign chairman for North Stafford Supervisors Belman and Bob Gibbons. Gibbons appointed Leming to the Stafford County Utilities Commission.

Last year, members of a preservation group, Save Crow's Nest, began complaining that having a developer's agent on the Utilities Commission constituted a conflict of interest. Leming disagreed, but he was not reap pointed.

Healy served more than a decade on the Board of Zoning Appeals. Leming said she never participated in cases that he argued before that board, but she had to step down in 1999 when a legal opinion from the attorney general barred her from serving on a county board that dealt with clients her firm was representing. Healy ran for School Board the same year she stepped down from the BZA. She won the election and was later appointed chairwoman by her fellow board members. She still holds that post.

The two have never been officially censured for violating conflict of interest codes, but supervisors were aware of how the situation looked to some constituents.

"I don't want to make it sound like developers are crooked or anything, but they are there to make money so you have to be careful with them," Belman said. "And you have to watch the lawyers representing them because they want to win for their client. I'm not trying to say they are crooks, but it's their job."

By the early '90s, developers had discovered Stafford and supervisors felt intense pressure to sign off on new developments.

In the first half of the '90s, Stafford approved Westlake, Augustine, Autumn Ridge and Brentsmill. Leming was involved in each project.

"Some people say I'm responsible, but I never voted for a single rezoning," Leming said. "I'm a middle person. Personally, I'm not pro-development or anti-development."

These days, as supervisors grapple with providing infra structure and services to those projects approved a decade ago, there's a lot of second-guessing the previous board's actions.

Leming said project approvals were hard-fought, even back then.

"The Board of Supervisors were no pushovers," he said. "Negotiations were long and protracted. We had a rampant anti-growth contingent on the board and it was not easy to get things through."

That's the way Belman remembers it, too.

"We didn't roll over and play dead for him," Belman said.

Still, Leming acknowledges that everything gets more scrutiny now, with the anti-development movement gaining traction each year.

Leming said the Democrats, who in the early '90s had been the pro-growth candidates, began favoring slow-growth policies. And the voters supported the change. By 2002, six of the seven supervisors who served in 1999 had resigned, retired or been voted out.

The new board downzoned residential areas and is now trying to downzone agricultural areas. It also quadrupled proffer guidelines and started charging more for plan reviews and application fees.

Board members have flatly refused to consider any kind of major residential rezoning. In one case, the board is having to defend its refusal to rezone in court.

But for Leming's business interests, that's not exactly bad news.

"The more anti-development the board becomes, the more people come to me," Leming said.

"You might think people would look at Stafford and say, 'We give up. We'll go somewhere else,' but that's not happening."

Right now, Leming is actively working on two major rezonings: the Silver Cos.' Sherwood, a proposed 2,950-active adult community near White Oak, and Garrett Development Corp.'s Widewater, which would be a nearly 6,000-home new urban community in North Stafford.

He's also trying to broker some sort of development deal for Crow's Nest, a 4,124-are peninsula between the Accokeek and Potomac creeks in eastern Stafford. And he's helping several other developers make the most of the zoning presently available.

"He definitely has more business than he ever has," said David Beiler, a former supervisor who considers Leming an adversary. "As it's gotten tougher to get things through, people come to realize that he is the inside man and he can get things done."

To reach RUTH FINCH: 540/720-1622 rfinch@freelancestar.com