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COUNTY-BY-COUNTY REPORTS:
NO. 3: 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
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc.
Hiawassee, Ga., August 31, 2007 – Bill Kendall
is the sole commissioner of Towns County and he is 70 years
old. He could be gardening, playing gin rummy or golfing.
Yet he’s reporting to work at the courthouse here on Berrong
Street every work day. A lot of problems are facing this
scenic county, which is high up in the mountains at the top
of Georgia. A problem to be solved needs to take a number
and get in line. Kendall says it is because of his love for
young people that he is especially worried about the harm
being done to Lake Chatuge.
“I’m truly concerned about what we’re going to leave this
oncoming generation,” he told me today in the second
interview I had with him. “If we don’t do it right, they
won’t recognize it.”
Many of the permanent residents of Towns County have
nothing but contempt for land use planning and zoning. That
much has been documented. So this rock-solid opposition to
positive change can be quite a roadblock. Yet I am going to
list below just some of the things that Commissioner Kendall
is doing to improve water quality in the 13-mile-long
artificial TVA lake.
·
To show his unqualified support for helping
the lake, Bill Kendall has put the county government
squarely on record in support of the March 2007 Lake Chatuge
Watershed Action Plan, published by the Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition. (Yes, the city and the non-profit
organization spell differently the Cherokee name.)
“The coalition and TVA developed the action plan
cooperatively with input from citizens, community leaders
and local officials,” states the latest press release posted
on the new web site: www.townscountyga.com
“Commissioner Kendall is committing his support and that
of all facets of Towns County to work with Callie Moore of
the HRWC to develop this plan,” the press release continues.
“It is imperative that we protect this ‘crown jewel of
the mountains’… The ecological health of Lake Chatuge
determines the economic health of Towns County.”
·
To tackle the problem of clear-cutting and
heavy vegetation removal on ridges, Commissioner Kendall
adopted (that’s what happens in a sole-commissioner county,
one man adopts) a Mountain Protection Ordinance in September
2006. You can read it on the new web site.
The ordinance defines a “protected mountain” as one at
2,200 feet above mean sea level with a percentage slope of
25 percent greater for at least 500 feet horizontally.
Before you do any grading, you must turn in a site plan and
get a mountain permit. The planning commission has 45 days
to review your application. Roads are to be designed to
minimize the potential for landslides, erosion and runoff.
No more than 50 percent of existing trees taller than eight
inches may be cut down. Single-family dwellings are
limited to 35 feet in height. The commission can issue a
stop-work order if there is a failure to comply. Anyone
refusing to do so is guilty of a misdemeanor and if
convicted shall be fined up to $1,000 a day. During several
days of interviewing I never heard anyone say this has been
enforced, but it’s early.
·
To take on the fouling of the lake with human
waste, Commissioner Kendall has created a committee of
citizens and public officials. It is trying to do something
about the ongoing problems associated with the sewer system
infrastructure. It’s not working well, and the city needs
to “implement a proactive program for handling reports of
wastewater leaks and spills,” according to the Lake Chatuge
Watershed Action Plan.
The foul water committee has met once at this writing.
“There wasn’t anything decided, and so we’re going to have
another meeting,” Commissioner Kendall told me. For the
time being, if you’re skiing out there on the lake and go
under the water, I wouldn’t take a swallow if I were you.
·
To enforce the building codes, Commissioner
Kendall has hired an inspector. “He’s also trained in
erosion and sedimentation,” Kendall said.
·
To teach his county to stop building
impervious surfaces that shoot toxin-laced water directly
downhill into the lake, the commissioner has paved the
parking lot of the county recreation beach with the porous
system called Geoweb. It is “strong enough for dump trucks
loaded with gravel to drive over but permeable so that
storm-water flows straight down through it to the ground
beneath, rather than running quickly over the structure,
into the ditch and then to the lake,” according to the
Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition newsletter. This work
was made possible by a grant from the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
·
To create what would be quite a unique amenity
up here in the mountains, Commissioner Kendall and the
planning commission amended the subdivision ordinance in
March 2007. While he stressed that it was not a requirement
and “completely voluntary,” he revised the ordinance to
encourage 3-acre minimum lot sizes within developments. A
board of citizen volunteers has also been appointed to
design an “Appalachian Conservation Community” designation
for developers that choose to follow additional site
conservation guidelines.
·
To keep a freeway from being paved through
here, Commissioner Kendall is on record opposing the
talked-about Savannah to Knoxville route called I-3, and
named in honor of the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart
near Savannah. Now there’s a name to adopt as a way to
start the lobbying process for paving a freeway through the
conservative South!
·
Finally, Commissioner Kendall demonstrated the
new emphasis on the environment when he brought students
from Shannon Floyd’s class at Towns County High to a
commission meeting at which land developers would be
present.
The students have a presentation in which they talk about
the need for green space – the ample amount of it you’d have
with minimum three-acre lots.
They recite the quotation that is in the foreword of Zell
Miller’s 1976 book, “The Mountains Within Me.” It is
attributed by Miller to 1836 surveyors. (It’s my own
observation, and not his nor the students’, that John Shaw
and George Kellog were sizing things up for whites after the
Cherokee Indians had been displaced.)
The surveyors wrote in the Cherokee Indian Property
Valuations of 1836: “Here is perhaps the most splendidly
striking mountain scenery upon the face of the globe – an
amphitheater of probably 30 miles in circuit is formed by
the Brasstown mountains and encircling a beautiful and
fertile valley about four miles across, interspersed with
limpid streams and making upon the whole a picture
unsurpassed and rarely if ever to be equaled for the
wildness and grandeur of its scenery.”
‘THEY HADN’T COLLECTED ANY TAXES’
Bill Kendall was the school superintendent of Towns
County for 26 years, retiring in 1998. After the 2005 death
of Jack Dayton, a popular, 16-year sole commissioner, Bill
Kendall decided to seek the office. He won, defeating five
others. Seven months went by until the county achieved the
replacement of its only commissioner.
“A week after Kendall took over, the county bookkeeper
gave him bad news,” Cameron McWhirter wrote in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution edition of Jan. 22, 2006. “Towns
County had only $7,000 left in the bank, and $525,000 in
outstanding bills due in three days. Kendall scrambled to
borrow money from local banks.”
I asked Kendall this week if repayment of the debts was
going well.
“Yes,” he said. “They hadn’t had a tax digest that
previous year. They hadn’t collected any taxes. We’re
operating in the black now.”
‘THEY HAD TO CALL OUT THE NATIONAL GUARD’
In his book “The Mountains Within Me,” Zell Miller
wrote:
“Zoning and planning are
anathema to the independent mountain spirit, but love of the
mountains and the desire to protect them are even stronger
sentiments which, I believe, in the not-too-distant future
will prevail in the form of laws which will give state
guidance and assistance to local government in planning and
directing growth and development for progress and prosperity
in keeping with local wishes while protecting and preserving
nature’s balance and beauty.”
However, this vision was never realized by the one-time
Young Harris College instructor. He was mayor of Young
Harris; state senator from Towns County; lieutenant
governor; governor; and U.S. Senator from Georgia. Despite
all that inner-circle activity by its most famous
politician, Towns County is not a Georgia Department of
Natural Resources Local Issuing Authority, according to the
Georgia Soil and Water Conservation Commission training
handbook. So I asked Commissioner Kendall, “You can’t issue
state Department of Natural Resources permits, is that
correct?”
“That’s correct,” he said.
Towns is the site of one of the best state golf
getaways owned by the state of Georgia and operated by DNR.
It is the Brasstown Valley Resort in Young Harris. Yet the
place where it is located isn’t an LIA, protecting state
environmental statutes and rules. In fact, Towns County’s
mountain protection ordinance has some rules for “state
agencies,” instead of vice versa.
Three different persons I interviewed recall that “Bill
Smallwood” was the name of a man who lived on Frog Pond Road
here in the early 1990s, having relocated from Florida. He
knew about land planning and zoning, he perceived a need for
it here, and so he led in talking up and finally in drafting
a 66-page Comprehensive Land Use Regulation for Towns
County.
Everyone who remembered this spoke of it as a time when the
county dodged a dread bullet.
Bill Smallwood’s draft land-use regulations were aired
in a public hearing at the courthouse. The outcry from
citizens was so great and there was such a commotion that
“they had to call out the National Guard to quiet things
down,” according to Eddie Bradley, a Towns County farmer and
member of the board of directors of the Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
“He was trying to tell you exactly what you
could do with your land, and with the folks around here,
that doesn’t sit well,” Debbie Phillips, a librarian at the
Towns County library, said.
No one by that name is in the phonebook and I can’t
locate the man who had the temerity to advocate land use
planning. I did find the 63-page
draft document. It is on the reference shelf of the PINES
(Public Information Network for Electronic Services)
mountain regional library in Young Harris. It has
provisions that are commonplace.
I believe Smallwood’s experience shows how vigorous
employment of our 1787 First Amendment speech freedom is
still in the offing for the nine Georgia counties still
using the sole-commissioner system of government. The other
3,057 counties in the United States have multi-commission
systems, according to the National Association of Counties
in Washington, D.C.
“There is a feeling here that if there were more people
(on the commission) to have to go to get funding or approval
for something, and if there were a tie, you’d still have one
person making the decision,” said Elaine Delcuze of the
mountain regional library in Young Harris.
‘OH, THAT’S THE MOUNTAIN WITH THE CUT-OUT ON IT’
You can see Bell Mountain from many vantage points as
you drive and hike here in Towns County, and there is an
unsettling aspect to this peak. It has a pit carved out of
the top, a brazen excavation in “the most splendidly
striking mountain scenery upon the face of the globe.”
Mountaintop mining has occurred, of the type common in the
U.S. coal industry and that causes tremendous erosion,
according to the New York Times.
The reference shelf at the regional library in Young
Harris also has the document, “The Bell Mountain Silica
Deposit of Towns County, Georgia.” Here is a record of just
how indifferent to the Blue Ridge Mountains and Lake Chatuge
two men could be.
They were Vernon J. Hurst of the Geology Department of
the Area Redevelopment Administration of the U.S. Department
of Commerce and George R. Horton of the School of Business
Administration of the University of Georgia. They wrote
this 1964 booklet as a guide for someone to go 3,360 feet up
to the top of Bell Mountain and make a lot of money taking
out the silica. They had core samples taken by the ABC
Drilling Company of Greenville, S.C. There is not a word in
there about protecting the mountains or the lake, and they
say on the second page they don’t know where anyone could
sell the silica once they gnawed it off the mountaintop.
“A large market does not now exist for the Bell Mountain
silica,” Hurst and Horton wrote. “The best potential market
is the cast iron trade which offers a large market at prices
around $30 a ton.”
Such ascendancy of economic over environmental concerns
that prevailed about mining then now can shift to the arena
of mountain homebuilding unless people join non-profits like
the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition and courteously go to
work to protect things.
The Mauney family of nearby Murphy, N.C. was investors
in its talc mine, and it was they who tried to succeed with
a mining operation on Bell Mountain in Hiawassee, according
to Councilman Phil Mattox of Murphy. Strip mining for
copper also was going on in nearby Copper Hill, Tenn., so
all-out stripping away of the surface of the earth was a
routine thing in this area. Yet the Mauneys or whoever it
was that went after the silica failed to succeed. It is now
42 years later, and the ugly scar of their work remains in
place. It’s talked about all over Georgia as a rueful
reminder of poor environmental practices in this state, and
yet in the county where it is located, you still can hear it
defended.
“All my life I remember that gap being up there,”
Librarian Debbie Phillips told me. “It’s kind of a
landmark. Everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s the mountain with the
cut-out on it.’ Well, at least there’s not a gazillion
houses up there.”
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
July 2, 2007 – Union County,
GA Union
County's Lamar Paris unifies 16 north Georgia counties to
gain relief from mandatory 150-foot stream buffers
* * *
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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