BEND, Ore. -- The residents of an upscale Bend subdivision may get the chance to vote on whether their neighbors should be allowed to hang their laundry on outdoor clotheslines.

The question has prompted extensive debate in the Awbrey Butte community, ever since home-owner Susan Taylor recently told her story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Background: Residents hang neighbor out to dry over clothesline

Taylor began hanging her laundry from a rope hung between two trees in the back of her home in order to save energy. The federal Energy Information Agency estimates that clothes dryers account for 5.8 percent of the electricity that U.S. homes use every year.

But Taylor's clothesline soon ran up against complaints that her actions violated the subdivision's rules, which mandate that clotheslines must be screened from view.

Now, the developers of the subdivision, Brooks Resources, plan to meet Monday morning to discuss Awbrey Butte's governing rules, company President Kirk Schueler told The Bend Bulletin.

A 51 percent vote of the subdivision's property owners could change the rule for all, Schueler said.

Schueler said they company is behind allowing residents to dry their clothes outside, but that the question hinges on visibility.

One resident of the butte built an enclosed "drying yard" several years ago to screen laundry he wanted to hang outdoors, Schueler said.

As for Taylor, she said she's "enormously encouraged" by the prospect of getting a neighborhood vote on the laundry-screening rules, and equally encouraged by the dozen or so letters of support she has gotten since the story started bouncing around the world last week.

But in the meantime, she has taken to hanging her laundry inside her garage, with the doors closed, to avoid running afoul of Awbrey Butte's laundry-screening rule.

"This is what drives me absolutely crazy," Taylor said last week. "To be living in the sun and the wind and the low humidity, and I am restricted from hanging my clothes outside unless it is totally hidden?"

Taylor said she used her gas dryer for years until a National Public Radio segment that featured University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood convinced her that the world has only a narrow window of opportunity to slow the ravages of global warming, if everyone pitches in.

"I can't stand it," Taylor said. "We live in a desert. This (hanging laundry on the line) is the right thing to do."