Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition keeps its keel squarely in the main current of water quality issues and sets new goals for its future
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Hayesville, N.C., Sept. 22, 2014 – The protection of the environment here in the mountains is never for the weak-hearted, in waters smooth or choppy. In reviewing some recent setbacks for the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition (HRWC), you shudder for a moment and then you simply see these developments for the challenges that they really are. Here are examples:
Between North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund’s 1996 startup at $100 million and last year, HRWC received $4.5 million in grants from that Raleigh creation of a long-ago, environmental-minded state government. CWMTF was gutted during the recession and the current General Assembly and Gov. Pat McCrory, have made even further reductions leaving it with a shadow of its former budget supplemented by income received annually in Raleigh from the sales of personalized license plates.
The same General Assembly has slashed the N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources budget by 40 percent. Worse, the legislators “mandated that every safeguard on our state’s waterways and drinking water be allowed to expire unless regulators go through a burdensome process to re-adopt each one of them,” according to Derb Carter of the Southern Environmental Law Center in a New York Times op-ed article in June. How does a water-quality non-profit keep its sails filled amid swirling winds like that?
A local landmark now is emerging that appears immune to up-to-date information about pollution. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is constructing its Valley River Casino and Hotel at a site near Murphy, N.C., to the west of here. The gaming casino’s grand opening is planned for next year. However, the Valley River, an important Hiwassee River tributary, is polluted by bacterial contamination and excess sediment, according to HRWC monitoring and state data. U.S. tribes traditionally are environmental-minded. Yet the admittedly preoccupied Eastern Band has beaten no drums for water quality here at this writing. It’s silent so far on plans to help an experienced non-profit such as HRWC clean up the namesake river.
The government of the county where HRWC maintains its offices has de-funded it. This non-profit’s offices are in Cherokee County in the town of Murphy. However, a majority of the five-member county board of commissioners nixed support for HRWC. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what happened,” Callie Moore, executive director of HRWC, said at her group’s annual meeting at Hinton Rural Life Center here. “The county manager told me that he had put the amount ($5,000) in the budget because he felt he had the votes for it (for fiscal 2014-15).” It turns out he did not and the tiny support dried up. “For the entire time that we have been in existence (19 years), we were funded by representatives in four counties,” Moore recalled. (They are Clay and Cherokee in North Carolina and Towns and Union in north Georgia). “They formed this coalition yet the counties’ total peak (of support for HRWC) was only eleven percent of our operating budget in recent years. The greatest concern we have is that Cherokee County government has ceased to participate.”
Let’s drill further into recent developments: In June, Gov. McCrory signed state law 2014-4, the Energy Modernization Act. It empowers oil and gas exploration by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The state of (for now) stunning mountain beauty will see some counties immediately west of Raleigh become first to be fracked. A section of the statute provides that 61 days after a General Assembly session in January 2015 has adopted and Gov. McCrory has signed into law 109 rules, then oil and gas exploration can begin. Will fracking also happen out here in the mountains around Hayesville and Murphy? I try to keep an ear to the ground and never have heard any inkling of doubt that the oil and gas juggernaut can make happen what it wants to make happen.
Concerns and solutions
In her “State of the Water” address tonight, Moore identified HRWC’s four major concerns. They are (1) excess sediment; (2) excess nutrients; (3) pathogens; and (4) “too much runoff” – and that latter is the carrier for the first three, isn’t it?
To combat them, here are steps HRWC is taking:
It’s working with the city of Hiawassee, Ga. (yep, spelled differently than the river’s name) for that county seat of Towns County to remove nutrients from its Wastewater Plant treated discharge into one of the most beautiful Hiwassee River reservoirs here named Lake Chatuge.
It put to good use a U.S. Appalachian Regional Commission grant and launched greater public access to streams. “We’re going to do more when we find more landowner partners,” Moore said.
It and The Ridges Resort here are working on stormwater best management practices for minimizing runoff into Lake Chatuge.
It convinced a farmer along the Hiwassee River to switch to no-till crop-site prep of the soil, and
HRWC has made progress in guiding cleanup and replacement of breaking and failing septic systems. “This has been the biggest success of the grant program that grew out of our 2007 Lake Chatuge Watershed Action Plan,” Moore said.
Last year HRWC got the ball rolling for Southern Environmental Law Center’s successful administrative appeal affecting this watershed. Out here, expect anything and be surprised by nothing. There’s a brazen bid for a sort of cabin subdivision high up inside the Nantahala National Forest. It’s sought by eight families along Phillips Ridge at a 50-acre inholding somehow never incorporated into the federal set-aside in the 1930’s. The families’ site drains the stream with the highest water-quality rating, Fires Creek. There’s hope as U.S. Forest Service has been directed to study alternatives for the route of a private easement to the unincorporated Laurel Creek Property Owners Association’s land straddling the rim of the Valley River Mountains (WATR column, Oct. 13, 2013).
To be more than ‘splashes’ and ‘screams’
You wince as you think about how 51 persons attended an event like tonight’s upon which can rest efforts preserving a U.S. environmental locale dear to Americans everywhere. The most encouraging sign for me was that HRWC will continue to forgo the perennially adversarial “Riverkeeper” model common in the Appalachians.
HRWC “is not your typical non-profit that just goes and splashes headlines all over something we don’t like,” Moore said. “We don’t just scream when something is going on that we think is wrong. We also praise good things that happen.”
“Reforms come slowly up here where ‘public men… encourage the supine fatalism of ‘what must be will be,’ and so drug the highlanders back into their Rip Van Winkle sleep,” Horace Kephart wrote in “Our Southern Highlanders” in 1913. That was 101 years ago.
HRWC’s Moore seems undaunted. “My ultimate goal is to have a full-time program coordinator on staff to work on all our lakes,” she said.
A courageous staff of three envisions more giant efforts such as teaching the people here to “shade the streams” – to plant more trees along the banks. This will also incur the need to further teach the indiscriminate backhoe buccaneers of these highlands how it’s harmful to straighten streams meant to meander.
About 540 households and businesses are on Moore’s mailing list and about 200 are paying members. “It only costs twenty-five dollars, and you can go more than that if you like, and we hope you will… With more resources, we can tackle more problems.”
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.