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COUNTY-BY-COUNTY REPORTS:
NO. 2: UNION COUNTY, GA
Union County’s Lamar Paris
unifies 16 north Georgia counties to gain relief from
mandatory 150-foot stream buffers
The Hiwassee River Watershed
Coalition aids in Georgia’s historic shift to a series of
options that call for increasingly tough Best Management
Practices, as builders creep nearer the water’s edge
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc.
Blairsville, Ga., July 2, 2007 – Actual
day-by-day compliance with the state Department of Natural
Resources’ (DNR) rules for the protection of public drinking
water supplies in the Georgia mountains, where lie the
headwaters of the Hiwassee River, seems nearer to becoming
a reality today.
Lamar Paris, sole commissioner of Union County, has led
16 mountain counties to successfully lobby DNR for the
revision of a rule that he and others abhorred. Most north
Georgia counties had never adopted the buffer requirements
in their ordinances, according to Callie Moore, executive
director of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition. Yet it
loomed on the horizon as Dr. Carol Couch, director of the
Environmental Protection Division, began tougher enforcement
of state environmental planning criteria. That’s what Lamar
Paris told me in my interview with him today.
It represented a big victory for Paris’ “Extreme North
Georgia Coalition” (which reflects those commissioners’
geography, and probably not their political views) when the
DNR board voted June 27 at a meeting in Atlanta to endorse
“proposed amendments to Criteria for Water Supply
Watersheds.” These include adding alternatives to the
state’s requirement for 150-foot buffers on both sides of
streams.
The alternatives were described by Debbie Gilbert in the
Gainesville, Ga., Times after a special April 24 meeting of
the DNR board in Gainesville. According to Gilbert’s
article, the local governments “have the option of choosing
a 50-, 75- or 100-foot buffer as long as they agree to adopt
various ‘best management practices’ for protecting water
quality.”
(Lamar Paris pointed out to me today that a 150-foot
buffer “also remains an option.” Yet for the life of me, I
can’t imagine any North Georgia county choosing that one.)
You can download the water supply watershed amendments
endorsed by the Georgia DNR board. The best management
practices required include: implementing a public education
program; re-planting the 50-ft buffer with native trees and
shrubs; adopting a stormwater ordinance; inspecting septic
tanks every seven years; disclosing development restrictions
on survey plats and deeds; and gaining/maintaining
certification as a Local Issuing Authority. The Hiwassee
River Watershed Coalition believes that any of the options
offered by the new rule will protect water quality in north
Georgia’s streams and lakes better than the 150-foot setback
– IF the requirements are properly implemented and
enforced. Callie Moore plans to work with Towns and Union
counties to make sure the rules are effective in the upper
Hiwassee River watershed.
Fully a fourth of the 16 mountain counties in Lamar
Paris’ coalition lack the all-important Local Issuing
Authority status. While commissioners in this minority of
counties may earn praise from grizzled old-timers on the
local scene for making a show of distaste for big
government, the fact is that those counties miss out on
grants. Would-be builders in them have to apply to the
state Environmental Protection Division for permits and
variances, according to a table on the web site of the
Georgia Soil and Water Conservation Commission. As you can
imagine, these permits and variances take time to process.
[On April 12, I visited the Watershed Protection Branch near
Hartsfield Jackson International Airport where this work is
done by Georgia EPD. I asked to see variance applications
for 25- and 50-foot vegetative buffer enforcement for the
last five years. They brought me 20 boxes, and I wrote
madly in my notebook for hours. I will summarize what I
learned about the non-LIA entity of Towns County, Ga., in a
later article for this web site.]
In addition to narrower buffers, at least four other
aspects of the June 27 Georgia DNR rules changes are not
without controversy. Here they are:
§
A perennial stream isn’t one that flows
throughout the whole year. Rather, it has “base flow and
direct runoff during any period of the year”. This verbiage
endorsed in Georgia on June 27 contradicts the perennial
stream definition of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which
anyone could Google. [While Paris does not agree with this
definition, he and the coalition believe that EPD will use
common sense regarding enforcement of these stream
segments.] Recently, the Corps lost a case with a similar
issue dealing with “waters of the state”, where a judge
determined that drainage ditches and intermittent streams
did not fall under the purview of the Corps.
§
As soon as a county adopts an ordinance with
these new rules, it can grandfather in “those structures
existing, under construction, or for which a complete
application for a land disturbance permit, building permit,
or similar government approval has been submitted as of the
effective date of the ordinance.” (I don’t see anywhere the
words “anyone contemplating building a house,” which must
have been in a draft version because Gil Rogers of the
Southern Environmental Law Center pointed out to the DNR
board April 22 that the proposed rule revisions could
grandfather in any person thinking of building along a
stream “50 years from now.”)
§
Perennial stream corridors within a seven-mile
radius upstream of a governmentally owned public drinking
water supply intake or water supply reservoir are covered by
the rules. Some of those involved wanted more; some wanted
less.
§
‘Effective impervious cover” is limited to 10
percent for large developments (greater than 5000 square
feet of impervious surface) under the 50-foot buffer
options. (An example of impervious cover is asphalt parking
lots that strip-mall builders routinely pave from their
store step-offs to the streets.)
This action, helped along by Lamar Paris, came four
days before Carol Couch’s Georgia Water Council published
its draft Statewide Comprehensive Water Management Plan on
July 1. The latter was mandated by a 2004 law to help the
legislature get ready to debate water management in 2008. I
don’t see anywhere in the draft plan any language saying
rules are set in stone, so a year of work by Lamar Paris and
his coalition may or may not be wiped out by some statute
next year. He is third vice president of Association County
Commissioners of Georgia, so will be president in 2010,
which may be when the General Assembly achieves what really
is intended to be a write-through of the 1989 Planning
Act. The Water Council document is nine megabytes and you
better have a lot of printer paper on hand once you find it
at
www.georgiawatercouncil.org
“Our buffers need to be fair and enforceable,” Paris
testified at an earlier DNR board meeting Dec. 6, 2006 in
Atlanta, according to Norman Cooper’s coverage more than a
month later in the North Georgia News. That was one
carefully prepared story.
Paris “further stated that the extreme size of buffers
(in the previous rule) takes away thousands of acres from
productive use, which could erode billions of dollars in tax
funds and result in a potential economic disaster”,
according to the Dec.6 board minutes.
“He added that the North Georgia counties have 275,000
acres of non-taxable green space (National Forests). He
said green space protects water quality. Placing 150-foot
buffers on thousands of miles of streams running through
un-forested farmland would not improve water quality. The
anti-degradation of water quality could be achieved by
maintaining and enhancing existing riparian buffers.”
‘THE BATTLE BEGAN IN DAHLONEGA’
Any environmental initiative is a tangle of rules,
statutes, court cases and public hearings dating back over
decades. I asked Callie Moore to put this struggle over
buffers in perspective for me.
“The whole real battle began in Dahlonega, Ga.,” she
told me in a March 2007 interview. “My impression is that
it was about eight years ago. Lumpkin County dammed Yahoola
Creek to make a drinking water reservoir, and applied for a
water intake. They realized the lake was going to have to
have 150-foot buffers, but I’m not sure they were thinking
about the streams. Few counties had adopted the rules, and
the state never had enforced them. But now the state has
begun holding up grants. That’s when Lamar Paris of Union
County got involved.”
Georgia is the last state in the nation with
sole-commissioner counties; 11 of them, according to the
National Association of Counties in Washington, D.C. So
there are 148 counties in Georgia with multi-member
commissions. I asked Lamar Paris, what is the most amusing
thing ever said to you at an ACCG convention? He thought
for a minute and then replied, “It was:
‘I wish I could be like you.’”
“I have a different take on government,” Paris
continued. “Hopefully, most people here in Union County
know that the sole-commissioner form of government is the
most accessible, efficient and responsible form of
government.”
A Blairsville native, Paris played fullback and
linebacker for Union County High. Those are two positions
where you put your hardest-nosed player. He graduated from
the University of Georgia with a degree in business
administration. He returned home to take over a small-loan
business his father had started in the 50’s and “develop a
little land.” He coached youth football, served as chairman
of the county recreation authority, and worked with his
neighbor, Bill Meeks, to offer land south of town he owned
that now is Meeks Park, with its verdant ball fields and
hiking trails. When the previous Union County commissioner
decided to try to sell some of the Meeks land for a
Wal-Mart, an upset Lamar Paris decided to get into politics.
He is now in his second four-year term as sole Commissioner.
A COMMISSIONER’S ENVIRONMENTAL EVOLUTION
“I’ve gone through being strictly a property-rights
oriented person to becoming more environmentally minded and
realizing there must be compromises on both sides of this
issue,” Paris told me. That process surely was aided when
he turned to Callie Moore of the Hiwassee River Watershed
Coalition for expertise as he faced taking on Georgia DNR
establishment over 150-foot buffers.
“Callie Moore is an unusual environmentalist in that she
is practical and wants to cooperate with local government
instead of fight with them,” Paris said. “She served on
both the main and the technical committee. The technical one
provided guidance and common sense to an otherwise typically
not common-sense environmental community. The other
commissioners and attorney on our committee were vital, but
without a doubt, Callie was the most valuable member of the
team.”
Union County is an anomaly among counties in the Deep
South because it willingly adopted model state ordinances to
protect land and water. It has these documents on its
website and you could download and read them even if you
were in Rangoon. [Dear website reader, if you can identify
five other counties in Georgia (outside of the Atlanta metro
area) that have gone this far to assert environmental
protection in their jurisdictions, then I will write an
article about it for this site.] The ordinances (among
others) on
www.unioncountyga.gov are as follows:
“Animal Control; Building Regulations; Soil Erosion and
Sedimentation Control; Water Supply Watershed Protection;
River Corridor Protection; Mountain Protection; Wetland
Protection; Flood Damage & Hazard Protection; Junkyard
Restrictions; Parks for Recreational Vehicles; Requirements
for Subdivisions and a Billboard Ordinance that provides
restrictions on the number and location of billboards”
Commissioner Paris decided that his building inspectors
would be in the best position to attend to environmental and
soil and erosion issues, since they are in all the
subdivisions on almost a daily basis. With their
cooperation, he hired an additional inspector and all are
Soil and Erosion certified performing the dual function of
inspecting homes and providing environmental enforcement.
“We are not aware of another county doing this, but it is
working great and gives the inspectors a diversion from only
dealing with home construction, Paris said.”
“Union is by far the best county that we have in the
upper Hiwassee River watershed,” Callie Moore told me. “I
give them high marks. They are a Local Issuing Authority,
so they get star status for receiving funding. They have a
plan for subdivision roads, a building ordinance, a local
sediment control program, and a mountain protection
ordinance. You can see the difference when you drive
through Union County.”
OTHER
COUNTY-BY-COUNTY REPORTS:
April 7, 2008 – Clay
County, NC Petition
filed to halt expansion of Shewbird Mountain mine
Feb. 27, 2007 – Cherokee
County, NC Health
Board appointments end abruptly and an official fears
effluent from improperly installed septic systems could
travel "almost immediately" into the Hiwassee River
Aug. 31, 2007 – Towns County,
GA The
man in the driver's seat of Towns County government goes to
work to try to prevent further harm to the Blue Ridge
Mountains and Lake Chatuge
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek Community west
of Murphy is a Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member and volunteer.
E-mail him at
farblumtn@gmail.com
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