Editor, Gazette-Journal:

A man spends his life working hard to achieve success, no silver spoons, at the expense of no one else, and making no enemies. He spends months in due diligence searching for the right community offering appropriate protections and services. The man finds the perfect place in the perfect community for his family and invests his life’s achievements into the waterfront dream home envisioned since childhood. He continues to invest in improving his dream, keeps to himself, and plays by the rules imposed by Wetlands boards and Chesapeake Bay boards and county boards, all the while realizing that they protect the greater good. Everything was going too well for the man so God decides to throw the man a curveball by having the devil himself move in next door.

The man is me, Tim McCulloch. With the stroke of a pen, Tommy Norment’s bill SB 1190 takes my life’s work and throws it away by allowing a constituent and my next-door neighbor to rezone residential property to Water Commercial Industrial without any scrutiny or due process. The Greg Garrett Oyster & Seafood Company will be able to have six full-time employees conducting the operations required to support thousands of oyster enclosures from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily without any control by our local authorities. County officials were not allowed to offer input on this bill because Norment doesn’t really care about its impact on me.

Tim McCulloch

Yorktown, Va.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Senate Bill 1190, which would expand the definition of agricultural production activities in the "Right to Farm Act" to include the practice of aquaculture, was introduced by Sen. Tommy Norment (R-Williamsburg) on Jan. 12 and referred to the Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources. No further legislative action on this proposal has been taken at this time.