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Safe artificial slopes
legislation is sidetracked, but North Carolina budgets more
money for accurate mapping of the western mountains and
talks about greater protection for them
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc.
Murphy, N.C., July 31, 2007 – About once in every 100
home-starts, the construction of a new domicile high up in
the mountains here in Cherokee County starts in fill dirt –
loose, porous and deadly dangerous. As soon as the building
inspector spots this shabby work, he makes the contractor
tear out the footings and rebuild them farther up the
mountain on solid ground.
Then the building codes kick in, and they get tougher and
more stringent the higher you go in the mountains. That’s
what Silas Allen, Director of Inspections for Cherokee
County Building Inspectors, told me in his office today.
So although it was aimed at regulating bad homebuilding
here in the mountainous west, and this is as far west as you
can get in North Carolina, House Bill 1756, the “Safe
Artificial Slope Construction Act,” wasn’t even needed here
in Cherokee County.
However, before this bill’s death in a committee of the
state House of Representatives, it caused considerable
alarm. So much that the state representative from here
employed strong language and the Mountain Lakes Board of
Realtors went as far away as Massachusetts to get help, all
to be sure they stopped HB 1756. And they did.
Roger West, a contractor and a Republican, is in his
fifth term in the House and represents District 120, which
includes Cherokee, Clay, Graham and Macon counties,
according to his page on the statehouse website.
“This is the ‘Vacate Western North Carolina’ bill,” West
said, according to the June 22, 2007 edition of the
Asheville Citizen-Times.
Joan L. Posey, owner of ERA Carolina Mountain Homes
here, is the president of the Mountain Lakes Board of
Realtors, which has 300 members. Her office is on U.S. 64
west of Murphy and next to the Grizzley Bear Restaurant,
whose incorporator was apparently unaware that this is no
habitat of that particular species of bear. I went to see
Ms. Posey to tell her face to face that I wanted the
Realtors’ side of this issue so my article would be fair. I
said I possessed an email message that had been sent
statewide by Rick A. Zechini, who is the director of
governmental affairs for the North Carolina Association of
Realtors. “Do you have the April 20 one?” Ms. Posey asked.
I answered, “Yes.”
“Legislation that would dramatically affect construction
in the mountain regions of the state has been introduced in
the State House,” Zechini wrote to Realtors across the
Tarheel State.
“HB 1756 Safe Artificial Slope Construction Act would amend
the Residential Property Disclosure Statement to include
landslide hazard areas… We are in the process of researching
it further… We have requested an analysis of the legislation
by the Boston law firm of Robinson and Cole.”
The bill would “add significant, costly and unnecessary
delays,” the New England law firm and Zechini wrote. “It’s
complicated and technical… Local governments don’t have
enough inspectors… They lack standards and criteria… It’s
not clear how property owners would discover whether their
property is in such an area, because the western part of the
state hasn’t even been fully mapped yet.”
The bill is buried now, like all of a family’s former
belongings inside a onetime mountain home that went
careening down a slope during a landslide caused by remnants
of a hurricane. Yet this issue is far from over. A
legislative study committee could decide to re-introduce a
bill like this in 2008. This first try faltered, yet debate
of it helped lead the legislature to include in the 2008 and
2009 budgets $185,000 a year to continue North Carolina
Geological Survey work.
This is a state project you could say is long overdue.
It is to update 1957 North Carolina mountain topographical
maps that cite 1929 geodetic vertical datum. Newspaper
coverage about this mapping will keep alive the idea of
writing for the governor’s signature a law prohibiting the
building of homes that could slide down. Yes, this year’s
bill is smoking rubble, but it has rekindled fears that new,
tougher regulation of mountain homebuilding may be coming
out of the state capitol in Raleigh sometime in the next few
years.
If it did and public opinion were swayed here enough
for the Cherokee County commissioners to adopt the ordinance
called for in the law, then it would improve the prospects
for the future of the Hiwassee River. Everything stirred up
on the slopes moves downhill into the water and turns it a
different color – and it’s not pretty.
The lead sponsor of House Bill 1756 was Rep. Ray Rapp
of Mars Hill. A Democrat, he represents the 118th District
comprised of Haywood, Madison and Yancey counties. He is
also the mayor of Mars Hill and dean of Adult Access at Mars
Hill College. Rep. Phillip Haire, a Sylva attorney, and
three other Democrats joined Rapp as sponsors. According to
Bill Eaker, senior environmental planner for the Land-of-Sky
Regional Council in Asheville, the technical guidance for
this bill came from Rick Wooten of the NC Geological Survey
and Marc Pruett who is Haywood County erosion control
program manager. [I left computer and phone messages for
Rapp at all his locations and stated my topic. He didn’t
answer me and considering the pummeling he took on his bill,
that’s not surprising.]
THE INSPECTOR ARRIVES AFTER THE CUT AND THE FILL
W. David Sumpter III, an attorney, is a
soft-spoken member of the Cherokee County Commission.
Nevertheless, it is he who usually gives the most cogent
summary of some dispute before the group. Everyone stops
whispering and kibitzing, and strains to hear. During a
July 23 public hearing about property taxes, there was a lot
of grousing about taxes in general. Then came one of those
moments when everyone strained to hear a typical Sumpter
summation.
“The issue here tonight is, ‘What is the proper tax levy
upon citizens to provide basic services,’” he said.
In the mountain counties, it’s politic to keep alive as
long as possible a minimum amount of government. This
profoundly affects environmental regulation. Here in
Cherokee County, there’s no general land plan and no local
erosion and sedimentation ordinance. An activist who
occasionally writes in the Andrews Journal newspaper calling
for reforms in Cherokee County government is always careful
to type “z-----” in her stories with hyphens for the last
five letters rather than spell fully that abhorred word
“zoning.” All of Cherokee’s mountains are impressive yet
fall below the 3,000-foot minimum elevation for enforcement
of the 1993 Mountain Protection Act, according to David
Hilton, owner of David Hilton Realty and a Town of Murphy
councilman. (To add a last-minute exemption effectively
disabling the very spirit and intent of a bill – this, too,
could occur if a safe artificial slopes bill ever makes it
to conference committee.)
CHEROKEE COUNTY’S offices spill out of the blue marble
courthouse down city streets and into old storefronts. In
two of them on Valley River Avenue that used to be the
locations for Richard Howell’s meat market and the Murphy
U.S. Post Office, Silas Allen and his building inspectors
hold forth. I asked him about HB 1756. He said he had not
heard of it, and asked for my copy to make one of his own.
“It’ll be a long rocky road to get anything adopted,”
Allen said. “It will have to come down from the state.”
“From what I see, it’s rare to find a home site on these
artificial slopes… The cut-and-fill method is used, but the
cut is where the house goes, and the fill is where the road
goes…. The footings for the structure have to be established
so they are not on fill dirt. If they are, then the house
has to go farther back up the hill… I would say that one in
one hundred uses fill on a portion of the house foundation.”
I once was talking to Logger Dennis Curtis about this and
he said: “The houses around here are usually up on top, on
solid ground. It’s the roads that cause the trouble.”
Silas Allen echoed that point of view.
“When we get to the site, we start adopting the
(building) code to it,” Allen told me. “But we don’t get
there before the cut-and-fill operations. Most of that’s
already been done. Only rarely do people buy property and
begin the planning stage soon enough.”
HOW TO AVOID DISASTER AS BUILDER OF A MOUNTAIN HOME
There are plenty of resources for would-be homebuilders
to consult to be sure their dream-home site up here on these
slopes is suitable. The Hiwassee River Watershed
Coalition’s “Recommendations for developers, builders, and
grading-clearing contractors” would be the first I’d insist
my builder check before driving a nail. It’s on page 46 of
the new Lake Chatuge Watershed Action Plan released in May;
the coalition’s phone number is 828-837-5414.
Western North Carolina Tomorrow produced the very
useful “Mountain home
guide: 11 factors to consider before you buy or build,” and
it is available from Silas Allen’s office. Before cranking
up, every bulldozer driver ought to be made to read the USDA
Natural Resources Conservation Service booklet: “The
Layman’s Guide to Private Access Road Construction In The
Southern Appalachian Mountains or the USDA Forest Service,
National Forests in North Carolina booklet: “Road runoff
control: Simple measures to control runoff from gravel
mountain roads.”
Finally, the North Carolina Geological Survey’s web
site has chilling photos of the destruction of Buncombe,
Macon, and Watauga county homes in landslides associated
with Frances and Ivan. Those were 2004 hurricanes that
reached these mountains with plenty of deadly force
remaining in them. This website is
http://www.geology.enr.state.nc.us .
* * *
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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