The Cherokee build in Cherokee County, delaying mitigation work
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, Cherokee County, N.C., July 1, 2014 — The Crying Indian is the symbol for U.S. Indian tribes’ passionate concern for the environment. Well, there’s plenty to cry about here where the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is constructing the $109 million Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino and Hotel set to open in 2015.
This attraction will enter the competition for southeastern United States’ disposable income along with – sort of in an ill-defined tandem — the same tribe’s 1997 Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel in the Qualla Boundary reservation three counties to the east of here.
Each gaming undertaking has entailed a good bit of alteration of the environment. When the dust has settled and each is steadily, grindingly doing what Michael Gerson of the Washington Post calls “wringing dollars from a public vice,” then will the tribe’s heralded affinity for the land and water return to the fore?
The Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition (HRWC) based here is head and shoulders above any other environmental non-profit in its ability to help guide a tribal recovery of environmental advocacy. I mean the head and shoulders of water scientist Callie Moore, who has kept the non-profit afloat amid choppy waters.
WITH HRWC’s KNOW-HOW and assistance, the Eastern Band should use its considerable influence with state government to help save the N.C. Ecosystem Enhancement Program (EEP).
The EEP is the enabling agency for statutory off-site mitigation at some future time to make up for, or try to make up for, the environmental harm now being done at the casino site upon a vanishing low-rise mountain east of Murphy.
That EEP has that role is affirmed in state law. It guides the cynical off-site mitigation at some later impulse and location. This is available for lawyers to read in the state code and in paragraph two on page A5 of ClearWater Consultants’ “Environmental Permitting, Cherokee Casino” document by that Hendersonville firm’s Rebekah Newton and dated June 3, 2013.
Newton’s math for the number of battered acres of harmed non-riparian wetlands and linear feet of stream channel then is verbatim in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ general permit to Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise (TCGE). The latter federal document also dated 2013 is what authorized TCGE’s start of work at 777 Casino Drive here.
Site prep by heavy equipment began with, well, a vengeance. The state can’t wait. Thanks to a 2011 tribal compact the previous governor wrung from Principal Chief Michell Hicks, North Carolina can address serious budget shortfalls with 30 years of rolling percentages of gross revenue from the two Harrah’s Cherokee casinos. Both have the coveted Class 3 status with live table games, opiate for the bleary eyed of the gambling nation.
EEP is the key facilitator for all this to make it legal. Yet N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources’ director John Skvarta III cut a third of the EEP staff in March of this year. Skvarta is Gov. Pat McCrory’s appointee to this key environmental role. It appears the state’s left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing in environmental matters.
The Cherokee County commission needs Callie Moore and HRWC to report regularly on EEP’s fate; the state’s further cuts (Skvarta was a frequent critic of the agency earlier in private life); and whether off-site mitigation will even occur. If not, a gambling critic will be able to assert in court that TCGE is in violation of its permit.
THE OFF-SITE MITIGATION should occur in mid-county, in my opinion. It should be done to amend the polluted streams around the former Clifton Precision plant and a onetime state prison camp that now is (with far better structures and more concern for the land and water) Tri-County Community College. The tribe and county commission need Callie Moore to report regularly on federal and state monitoring of these sites about which Moore has worried and fretted almost alone for years.
NEXT, CLEAN UP the Valley River. It’s an impaired stream – making it incongruous for it to be a part of the gaming tourist attraction’s name. Fix that, TCGE, while working hand-in-hand with HRWC plus federal, state and local government.
Thirty-eight possible non-working septic systems in the Valley River valley turned up in TVA aerial images, in 2004. The county Health Dept. Environmental Health division has a tiny grant to start going to these homes and offering to clean up – on a sliding scale. Somehow re-build those septic systems and keep that fecal coliform out of the Valley River.
A woeful auto salvage junkyard expands in size daily — old fender by old carburetor –along the Marble Creek beneath an abandoned hundred-year-old railroad trestle. This Blue Ridge environmental horror is hidden by trees a few hundred yards from the bridge and roadway into the future Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Hotel and Casino. They parallel each other, gaming palace and auto salvage eyesore, upon the surface of the Earth.
Neglected open-dump front yards dot this county. In 2010, the county government quietly rewrote its Solid Waste Plan. It dropped what was honorary language satisfying some grant application and purporting to have established that county authorities would move in and clean up front-yard open dumps.
Once there was a time when Principal Chief Michell Hicks’ speeches and op-ed articles affirmed repeatedly how the Eastern Band is a sovereign nation. That’s not heard or read very much these days. Thanks to the heroic 19th Century efforts of a tribal leader named John Welch (who is buried rudely just off the impoundment of the county landfill here), the casino and hotel are rising upon a combination of tribal trust land and fee-simple private land, 116 acres in all.
The surrendering of sovereignty that has accompanied each gaming-casino startup nationwide is on pace here. The TGCE has a USACOE permit and millions in N.C. Dept. of Transportation dollars, with more to come. What will all this mean for non-trust land near the casino along U.S. 19-129-74 in this county that avoids general planning like the plague?
The Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition is best suited to help the tribe play catch-up. Like Job in the Bible, HRWC is battered but doggedly faithful to a spirit of ecological reform. It’s beset by reductions of state and county funds.
Yet amid rancor and uncertainty, HRWC is ready to help restore passionate emphasis here among the Native Americans and whites… emphasis on the natural beauty of the mountains, soil and streams.
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.