By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
Moore County has changed more in the past five years than in the previous two generations. Think about what that actually means for a moment.
An anaerobic digester, a utility-scale solar farm, a tiny-home vacation community, and now a proposed 42-unit affordable housing townhome complex on Main Street — plus waves of out-of-state residents settling into a county that has never had to think very hard about what it means to absorb strangers. All of this, essentially at once, in a place where — not long ago — the most significant land-use question your neighbor might raise was where to build a barrelhouse or a cattle barn.
That old Moore County ran on relationship and a shared societal contract. You knew who was building, you knew why, and you trusted — rightly or wrongly — that their interests were your interests. Everyone understood that you had a right to do what you wanted on your own land as long as you didn’t hurt anyone or the environment. Nobody needed to parse vested rights doctrine or commission an independent engineering study. You just knew.
That county is gone. Not lost, exactly — the people are still here, the values are still here — but the landscape it operated in has shifted beneath our feet. And the institutions built to govern the old Moore County are being asked, almost overnight, to govern a new and often complex one.
Has the county’s response to some of this change been awkward? Yes. Stumbling forward at times? Probably. Our planning and zoning apparatus was designed for a place where development meant your cousin wanted to put up a house on family land — not a place where a developer from outside the county needs a formal ruling on whether exterior decks count toward a square footage cap. These institutions are learning in real time, in public, under pressure — building the plane while flying it, as the saying goes. We should collectively cut them a little slack.
And I want to be clear about something, because I don’t think it gets said enough: extending grace to those institutions is not the same thing as allowing their oversight to be characterized as one-sided or unevenly applied.
Zoning ordinance language is dense, technical, and genuinely difficult — even for me, after more than twenty years of covering local government. The men and women sitting on our planning commission are volunteers. They are doing the work of $350-an-hour land use attorneys on their own time, in a folding chair, under fluorescent lights, while their neighbors watch from the back row. And they are holding their own. For that, they deserve considerably more gratitude than they receive — and at least a little benefit of the doubt when the language gets hard to read.
Do they occasionally make honest mistakes or misunderstand? Sure. But that’s far from malicious application of existing law.
What they do not deserve is to have that imperfection weaponized — or to have routine oversight recast as something close to institutional persecution.
{Editor’s Note: Tabitha Evans Moore is the editor and publisher of The Lynchburg Times, an independent digital publication covering Moore County, Tennessee. The opinions expressed here are hers and not representative of The Lynchburg Times.}
ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT PERSECUTION
I’ve covered the Retreat at Whiskey Creek closely since it began. I’ve been present at every MUD Board, Planning Commission, and Metro Council meeting where it has been discussed. I’ve reviewed public records, meeting minutes, and supporting documentation. And I want to say something plainly: all that Moore County has done to developer Chip Hayes is enforce its rules. That is not the same thing as persecution.
Asking a developer to finish Phase 1 before expanding to Phase 2 is not bad faith. It is asking a developer to keep the promises he’s already made before accepting new ones. That’s just common sense.
The burden of proof in development runs one direction — from the developer to the public body, not the reverse. Assessing and navigating the infrastructure demands, traffic impact, utility strain, and long-term risk of a private commercial venture should not happen on the taxpayer’s dime. It is entirely a developer’s responsibility to make an affirmative, credible, independently verifiable case that his project meets every applicable standard. The county declining to spend taxpayer dollars to validate or rebut a privately commissioned bridge study is not negligence. It may simply be the county saying: you haven’t cleared the bar yet.
If Moore County is going to spend $5,000 of its already limited budget, I’d rather it go toward improvements at the Little League fields or new equipment for an ambulance — not to underwrite the due diligence of a private developer.
Moore County property tax records — public documents — show outstanding unpaid taxes associated with this project in the amount of $3,778.90 including interest as of the writing of this piece. The due date on those eight parcels was February 28, 2026. That is not a rumor. I have the documentation, or you can view it yourself here. Based on that fact alone, public officials have every right to demand that existing promises be kept before moving forward.
ABOUT THAT BRIDGE ENGINEERING STUDY
A structural assessment of the private-access bridge at 975 Main Street has been cited as evidence that the bridge is safe for construction equipment and emergency vehicles. The assessment was completed by Bhegani Engineering of Franklin, Tennessee — a firm engaged and compensated by Hayes.
This newspaper obtained that document through a formal public records request to the Metro Moore County Planning office. It is a one-page letter addressed to the owner — meaning Hayes — not to any county deliberative body. It was filed administratively. It was not presented before a planning commission, a Metro Council, or any other public body where officials, residents, and opposing experts would have had an opportunity to examine and question it. A document filed with a planning office is not the equivalent of engineering testimony entered into a public proceeding. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction matters.
Having reviewed the letter carefully, I want to tell readers what it actually says — and what it does not.
The letter concludes the bridge is “structurally sound and code-compliant.” What it does not produce is a load rating in tons or a per-axle weight limit — the standard units Moore County Highway Superintendent Shannon Cauble says she uses when evaluating bridge capacity. The letter instead expresses capacity in kip-feet of bending moment, a unit Cauble says she is not familiar with in her work. It references the 2024 AASHTO bridge design specifications without identifying which specific load rating method was applied or what vehicle classification governed the analysis. These are not minor technical footnotes. They are the methodology questions any independent reviewer would ask before accepting the letter’s conclusions.
The letter also recommends an optional retrofit — welding steel plates to two interior girders — citing long-term protection against “fatigue, creep, and ongoing construction activity.” The engineer states the retrofit is not required for current code compliance. Readers may draw their own conclusions about why a durability enhancement against ongoing construction activity is recommended if the bridge presents no concerns about ongoing construction activity.
The question of whether county emergency vehicles can safely cross this bridge remains open. The county’s insurance carrier has raised concerns about the bridge’s fitness for county vehicles. The Bhegani study has been submitted to the insurer for review. As of publication, no determination has been made.
There is also the matter of what Hayes himself has said on the record. At the August 2025 Planning Commission meeting, Hayes stated: “We’re currently unloading rock at the entrance of the bridge and reloading it into a single-axle dump truck.” When asked directly whether he was using the bridge for concrete trucks, he responded: “We’re bringing concrete trucks, at least smaller ones.” That staging practice is also visible from the public road and documented in Google Earth imagery of 975 Main Street.
Readers are entitled to ask a straightforward question: if the developer’s own commissioned engineering letter establishes that this bridge is fully capable of supporting construction equipment and heavy vehicles, why does the developer’s own testimony — and his own construction operation — suggest otherwise? That question does not originate with this newspaper. It comes from what Hayes said, under his own name, in a public meeting.
And then there is this, from Planning Commission Chair Dexter Golden at the May 5 public meeting, speaking on the record about Phase 1: “They have built and sold lots off Phase 1 with no services to these people — no septic, sewer, water.” The Lynchburg Times reached out to MUD Board Chairman Barry Posluszny, who confirmed that there are currently no active water or sewer customers at 975 Main Street.
WHAT OUTSIDE DEVELOPERS ARE OWED
Here is the thing I want every Moore County resident to understand, because I don’t think anyone is saying it clearly enough:
Anyone with the means to purchase property in Moore County may do so. Anyone who purchases property here is entitled to develop it — within the rules this community has already set for itself. Those rules are not personal. They are not persecution. They are the community’s legitimate, sovereign expression of what kind of place it wants to be and what obligations anyone — resident or outsider — must meet to build here.
Communities across Tennessee and the country are coming to understand the foundational importance of this concept as AI data centers and large-scale outside investment attempt to reshape rural landscapes. Moore County is not alone in having to decide what it owes outside capital — and what it doesn’t.
It’s worth noting that Hayes’s other Retreat-branded developments operate in Grundy County, which has no zoning ordinance — a considerably different regulatory environment than Moore County. The expectations that apply there do not apply here.
Outside developers are not owed expedited approvals because their cash flow demands it. As my grandfather used to say, “Lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine.” Taxpayers are not required to fund engineering rebuttals. Planning commissions are not required to spoon-feed developers their next steps. They are owed a copy of the existing regulations and a fair process — and nothing more.
The distinction that matters — the one nobody seems willing to say out loud — is this: people who live here permanently have a stake in what this county becomes. Outside developers have a stake in what they can extract from it. Those are not the same interest, and our institutions should not be asked to treat them as though they are.
That is not hostility to growth or investment. It’s respect for the people who have loved and stewarded this land for generations.
For the record, I am now and have always been a fan of the idea of a tiny home community on that hill. In full transparency, Mr. Hayes invited me to stay at his Monteagle retreat when he launched the Lynchburg project, and I thought it was a good fit and a genuinely neat idea. No one — including me — wants to drive past a half-finished development every day. It is in everyone’s best interest that Whiskey Creek is completed and enjoyed by people who also love Lynchburg.
The concept of charming, rustic tiny homes scattered up that rolling hill with the covered bridge mural in the foreground is genuinely appealing. Moore County does need more overnight lodging. The economic argument for tourism infrastructure is real and necessary.
But the community gets to decide, through its elected and appointed bodies, what form that growth takes, at what pace, and under what conditions. A developer who arrived after those bodies were already in place does not get to reframe their oversight as obstruction simply because the oversight is inconvenient.
THE QUESTIONS WORTH ASKING
How does a small county govern itself through change at a pace it wasn’t built for? How does it protect the people who live here permanently from the consequences of decisions made by people whose primary interest lies elsewhere? How does it extend grace to its own imperfect institutions while still fairly holding developers to the standards those institutions exist to enforce?
Those are the questions worth asking about Whiskey Creek. Not whether Moore County has been unfair to Chip Hayes. The record, honestly examined, does not support that conclusion. In fact, public officials created an entirely new zoning category — R-3, for high-density residential projects — in an attempt to be accommodating. There is a Sketch Plat Checklist, Preliminary Plat Checklist, Construction Plan Checklist, Final Plat Checklist, and Sample Performance Bond on pages 80–87 of the Subdivision Guidelines book that explains exactly what must be done to develop in Moore County. It is not the all-volunteer planning commission’s job to hold anyone’s hand through every step of it.
Moore County residents have watched this project closely. They’ve sat in the meetings. They’ve heard the arguments. They’ve read the numbers. And by and large, they’ve reached their own conclusions without being told what to think — which is exactly how it should work in a community that still trusts its own judgment. What the record does support is this: families bought lots in a development that promised them a community. Some have built homes. As Planning Commission Chair Dexter Golden stated publicly on May 5, those lot owners currently have no septic, sewer, or water service. Whatever else is true about this project — the engineering studies, the zoning disputes, the bridge questions, the Phase 2 fight — that fact sits at the center of it. And no amount of economic projection or sympathetic framing makes it disappear. •
About The Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is owned by Lynchburg native Tabitha Evans Moore, a professional journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering Moore County. She writes deep human interest pieces that reflect what makes this town special — and investigative journalism that holds folks accountable. If you have a story you’d like her to look into, email editor@lynchburg-times.com.