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All in Good
Time
Towns County, Georgia, formed before the Civil War, adopts
building codes and mountain protection
The Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition's Lake Chatuge
Watershed Action Plan becomes the blueprint for
environmental reform at the top of Georgia
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Hiawassee, Ga., Feb. 21, 2008 –
Towns County, Ga. has the state’s highest peak and its
county seat of Hiawassee is an amiable town hugging the
7,000-acre Lake Chatuge amid a bowl formed by mountains.
“Here is perhaps the most splendidly striking mountain
scenery upon the face of the globe,” wrote surveyors in 1836
who can be forgiven for their hyperbole, for they may never
have seen the Alps or the Sierras.
The spectacular beauty of scenery anywhere on the Earth
and the protection of water in its rivers and lakes don’t
always go in hand. However, Bill Kendall, the 70-year-old
sole commissioner and the governing authority in Towns
County, has worked to achieve a marriage of these ideals.
He led his county to adopt a building code with
mountain protection that became effective Jan. 1, 2007.
Then tonight I watched as the former school superintendent
brought the county farther into the modern world. In a
public hearing that was a required second reading of an
ordinance, Kendall edited four sections to add enforcement
language putting in real protection for the mountains and
Lake Chatuge.
Forty minutes into the meeting in the little blond pews
of the county court chambers, after the lengthy reading of
the document by the County Attorney Rob Kiker, Chairman
Kendall called for questions.
“Hearing none, the ordinance now stands adapted as
read,” Kendall said. And that’s how it’s done in one of the
10 counties of Georgia that are the last in the United
States with sole commissioners. Since Kendall achieved
these reforms, the sad fact is that dozens of his
predecessors came and went without doing so.
People are used to things staying the same. Rob Kiker,
the county attorney, looks fit and up to the legal
challenges a county is likely to face in the wake of
Kendall’s action. He adopted building codes 152 years after
the county’s incorporation, and building setbacks that are
protective of water quality 66 years after its primary
topographic feature, Lake Chatuge, was formed when the
Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the Hiwassee River just a
few miles south of here.
James Goodwin, the county building inspector, watched
with the fixed gaze of someone who has his work cut out for
him. Callie Moore, the executive director of the Hiwassee
River Watershed Coalition (yep, the town is spelled
differently from the river and the coalition), appeared to
be in shock while achieving one of the high points of her
career as a water scientist.
“We’re going to do number eighteen there,” Bill Kendall
told Moore in a phone call last year. He was reading the
Lake Chatuge Watershed Action Plan document she
wrote, and which made its debut in May 2007. The “Number
18” that caught Kendall’s eye is one of the specific
management recommendations found on page 50 of the plan that
need to be taken in order to begin real protection of the
lake.
As the months passed, Kendall paid for more copies of
the document, relied on it as his blueprint for action, and
made sure he had Moore at his side each time he met publicly
with developers and townspeople.
How do rivers and lakes survive to be enjoyed by new
generations of Americans? Through dedicated people’s hard
work, that’s how. I have written in this space before about
the perils prior reformers have faced in a conservative
setting such as Towns County. However, the spadework by
Kendall and Moore over the past 10 months reached a
climactic moment in this meeting when Bob Keyes rose to
speak. He represented the Towns County Homeowners
Association.
“We find the ordinance both appropriate and necessary,”
Keyes said.
Before pronouncing his decision, Kendall saved the last
word for Callie Moore. She was called on to take the
microphone and answer questions that some Towns Countians
had raised about the code. She easily covered several of
the questions, and then came to one in which a reluctant
citizen said the ordinance would have a negative effect upon
this county of 10,315 at the top of Georgia.
“There’s going to be a much greater negative effect if
we do nothing and algae in the lake keeps increasing,” Moore
said.
Commissioner Kendall permitted himself a little smile,
and the debate was over in Towns County regarding its new,
verbose and historic code. It is entitled “Ordinance
providing for Georgia State Minimum Standard Codes for
Construction Together with Procedures for Administration and
Enforcement of the Building Codes of Towns County as Adopted
on September 21, 2006 and effective January 1, 2007.”
“Sayonara!” is what I expect readers to say when the
column turns to the nuts and bolts of an ordinance, but here
they come, anyway:
The affected area and activities are “site preparation,
landscaping, water management, soil erosion and
sedimentation devices and construction of any improvements
on land 2,200 or more above sea level and with a percentage
slope of 23 percent or greater for 500 feet horizontally, or
any crest, summit or ridge top” and construction “on any lot
of tract of land within 50 ft. of the 1926 ft. elevation
above mean sea level of Lake Chatuge.”
Furthermore, building permit applicants have to submit
a plat. A hand drawing is all right for a single-family
residence not in a subdivision. (I told you these are the
bare minimum Georgia standards.) You can’t cut more than 50
percent of the trees on lots above 2,200 feet. No building
is permitted within 50 feet of the Lake Chatuge’s 1,926-foot
mark, which is the full pool level of the TVA lake. Permits
have to be renewed annually, if not acted upon.
I once watched as a wealthy red-faced partner of a
giant silk-stocking law firm in Atlanta lost a lawsuit in a
metro Atlanta city because, the Superior Court ruled, the
applicant had not first gone to the city governing authority
before firing off a lawsuit. This, too, will surely occur
in future years in Towns County. Lawyer Rob Kiker has
wisely included the stipulation that anyone appealing must
go in order to the Towns County Building Appeals Board; the
Towns County Governing Authority (guess who that is, it’s
the sole commissioner!); and then the courts.
The frustrating thing about it is, until court costs
are recovered, the few hundred persons in the county who
bear the tax burden will have to pay Kiker to defend the
county against lawsuits shooting straight into the courts
that, once any judge has read this ordinance, are going to
be defeated.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community west
of Murphy is a board member and a volunteer for Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
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