Bengies Wins in Lights Dispute

Monday, July 2, 2012
Volume 123 | Number 187
Online at TheDailyRecord.com
Bengies owner wins $838K in lights dispute
BY MELODY SIMMONS
Melody.Simmons@TheDailyRecord.com
A Baltimore County jury awarded
the owner of Bengies Drive-in
Theatre in Middle River $838,000 in
damages Friday after finding that a
nearby convenience store had polluted
the large outdoor screening area off
Eastern Boulevard nightly with beams
of light.
The trial in the civil case opened
Monday in Baltimore County Circuit
Court before Judge Robert E. Cahill Jr.
Jurors began deliberating on Thursday
afternoon and reached a verdict after
reconvening for a couple hours Friday.
Bengie’s owner D. Edward Vogel
has been fighting against the problem
of outdoor lights interfering with his
movies for years, including unsuccessful challenges to the county’s zoning
code that began in 2003.
In this lawsuit, he claimed that a
nearby Royal Farms store that opened
in December 2008 had consistently
interfered with his patrons’ views of
the screen with lights. He was seeking
nearly $1 million to place a huge barrier between his theater and the store
and damages for lost income because
he said his plans to add a second outdoor screen were nixed because of the
light.
The award will allow him to erect a
25-foot barrier fence that will stretch
850 feet around the drive-in’s perimeter
to block the light, said T. Wray
McCurdy, Vogel’s attorney.
“Tonight, I am going to dedicate the
first show, ‘Brave,’ to T. Wray McCurdy
and his assistant, and the second show,
‘The Avengers,’ to the jurors,” Vogel
said, after the verdict Friday. “I am elated. Six people sat there and decided I
was not crazy, that this was real.”
McCurdy said the jurors found in
FILE PHOTO
Bengies Drive-In Theatre opened at 3417 Eastern Blvd. on June 6, 1956. It is the last remaining drive-in theater in Maryland.
favor of Vogel and Bengies out of support for the drive-in theater.
“These things are going away,”
McCurdy said. “As long as the verdict
stands, it gives him a way to keep going
forward.”
Alan A. Abramowitz, an attorney for
Two Farms Inc., owner of the Middle
River Royal Farms store, described the
verdict as stunning.
“We are shocked by the decision,”
Abramowitz said. “This case was never
about Bengies continuing to exist.
Their profits and attendance have
increased every year since the store
was opened. The questions presented
were, are the RF store’s lights unreasonable to the average person for a reasonable use and if so, was damage
done?”
Abramowitz said Two Farms Inc.
would consider filing an appeal.
Reprinted with permission of
The Daily Record Co. ©2012