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Wedding business may try freebies

Neighbors' complaints of loud receptions in a residential area have closed down a business, but the owner isn't ready to concede.

By BILL COATS
Published February 13, 2005

LUTZ - If David and Teresa Barnett can't operate Camelot at the Lakes, a commercial wedding business at their home on Lake Hobbs, they'll let couples get married there for free.

"We feel sorry for people," David Barnett said Friday, after the Hillsborough County Code Enforcement Board found him guilty of violating his neighborhood's residential zoning. "We spent a lot of money fixing this place up. People have heard about us. We'll let people have weddings free of charge."

"Complete strangers?" he was asked.

"Well, they'd have to make an appointment with us, and we'd have to approve their wedding on our property," Barnett said.

Neighbors have complained for two years about loud wedding-reception music rolling across the 60-acre lake on Saturday evenings.

One of them, Meredith Wester, doubted that the county was any likelier to approve free weddings than paid ones.

"I would hope that people will still conclude that there's a business being run off the property," said Wester, a lawyer whose firm has been advising the neighborhood. "There are different ways to pay people, and I'd be shocked if (the county) didn't fine him."

Barnett sought clarification on that question in Friday's hearing.

"Is it against the law on my 10 acres to have a wedding free of charge?" he asked. Assistant County Attorney Ken Tinkler said the code board wasn't allowed to dispense such advice.

The board gave Barnett 30 days to stop violating the zoning ordinance, or face fines of $150 a day. That amounted to an order to take down a red sign saying "Weddings," delete any Internet advertising and stop running the business.

The last documented wedding on the property was on New Year's Day. Yet Friday's hearing dealt with a violation in March of 2003.

That case originally was postponed because Barnett applied to have the wedding business grandfathered as legal, contending it predated his property's earliest residential zoning, which the county applied in 1966.

Barnett and two supporters said the business had operated for decades. But they were outnumbered by people who have lived on Lake Hobbs for decades, and said the weddings began after 2001.

The county denied the grandfathering request. The Barnetts appealed to a hearing officer, who asked the staff to gather more evidence. Eventually, the hearing officer denied the grandfathering too. That activated Friday's case.

Barnett readily admitted to the weddings. But he said, "We've stopped the commercial end of it."

Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 12, 2005, 09:06:05]