FAIR PLAY — Residents of rural Fair Play and the Hartwell Lake area say they are tired of being the Rodney Dangerfields of Oconee County.

They say they are tired of getting no respect, tired of having no voice.

Fifteen community leaders met Thursday at Chickasaw Point to discuss how to organize the communities and individual homeowners into a force with which county leaders will need to reckon.

Ryan Honea, vice-chairman of the County Planning Commission and a resident of the South Union community, said that for too long county leaders had ignored the voices from the southern end of the county.

“We’ve been left out,” Honea said. “Everything (county officials) can take away from this part of the county, we’ve lost, including our voice.”

In decisions about schools, sewer plans, and the recent zoning ordinance, the voices of the people in the southern end of the county had seldom been heeded, Honea said.

Gene Blair, one of the organizers of the meeting, said the goal was clearly a case whose strength would lie in numbers.

“When we go to the county council, no matter who’s our spokesman, they need to be able to say 2,000 property owners, for example,” Blair told the group.

Blair and others compared their goal to the organizations of residents around Lake Keowee who cooperate and often take their concerns to the council as a bloc.

Steve McLeod, former president of Advocates for Quality Development, said his group would provide whatever organizational aid and advice their south Oconee counterparts needed.

Advocates for Quality development was formed in late 2006 as a response to the Monte Lago high rise development proposed for Lake Keowee. The controversy gave rise to the county zoning ordinance, with lake overlays restricting height and density of developments. The ordinance, due to go into effect May 1, faces a key vote on a final amended version at the county council’s first meeting in May.

Some residents of the Hartwell Lake communities have expressed the desire for a similar overlay around Hartwell Lake.

Blair, Honea and Gretchen Fuller, a co-organizer with Blair of the meeting Thursday, stressed the need to make the organization inclusive, and to avoid the perception that it was just the “Yankees around the lake around the lake trying to get their way.”

Honea, an Oconee County native, described that as critical to the success of the proposed organization.

There were a lot of potential members to be had, Honea said, if the right message could be found.

There were, after all, he said, 6,809 land parcels within 1,300 feet —the size of the overlay districts around Lakes Keowee and Jocassee — of Hartwell Lake just within the Tugaloo area.

Gwen McPhail, whose family owns a farm near Fair Play, said, “What we need is a large vision of what we want the southern end of the county to look like.”

There were common interests, McPhail said, and the key was to find what the farmer had in common with the subdivision resident and what the lake resident had in common with the nonlake resident.

A second meeting, aimed at the larger community, is set to start at 7 p.m. Thursday April 16, in the barn of the McPhail farm.