2012 COUNTY-BY-COUNTY WATERSHED HIGHLIGHTS:
CLAY COUNTY, N.C. – Volume 2
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Hayesville, N.C., Feb. 11, 2013 – Stinging. That’s how to describe the criticism of Laurel Creek Property Owners Association’s application for a vehicle easement to a mountaintop private hideaway deep inside the Nantahala National Forest, to wit:
–“The revised environmental assessment is still grossly inadequate and should not be used as the basis for any decision by the U.S. Forest Service. The Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition implores the USFS to suspend its decision on this project until other reasonable alternatives to the Fires Creek watershed… are thoroughly investigated.” – Callie Moore, Executive Director
— “The EA presents an overly narrow project purpose, fails to consider the no-action alternative, presents the public with a predetermined conclusion, ignores reasonable alternatives, unevenly applies criteria in prematurely dismissing alternatives and insufficiently assesses potential environmental impacts. Accordingly, the Forest Service should withdraw this project.” – Austin D.J. Gerken of the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of the Sierra Club, the Western North Carolina Alliance, the Wilderness Society and Wild South.
AN EASEMENT FOR the vehicles of eight of the 311 million Americans would track to the rim of the Valley River Mountains at the Clay County-Cherokee County line.
Laurel Creek members themselves alone would have vehicle access to a private in-holding where they say they plan to build five primitive cabins.
So hikers would have the strange experience of encountering a detour high up inside a national forest that takes them around a subdivision of sorts, at a crest.
Naming itself for one of many streams there, the Laurel Creek group began in 2006 to buy parcels on 42 acres within a onetime logging site. On 800 acres, F.P. Cover & Sons Tannery harvested hemlock to use in making saddles.
“The inholding is a tract of land that was never obtained by the federal government,” explained the Forest Service.
AT ONE OF THE Interfaith Power and Light group meetings at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, we watched an Al Gore global-warming film – and a moving thing it is, with vivid detail of a genuine threat.
Yet the group was surprised to learn that from that sanctuary about five miles to the southeast as the crow flies, a mountaintop is being removed. It’s not in the arctic and it’s not in West Virginia and it’s not in eastern Kentucky, it’s here.
Moving snail-like in appeals court is Judge Selina M. Brooks’ upholding of N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources 2008 extension, the ninth, of Harrison Construction Co.-Division of APAC of Alcoa, Tenn., to shear off the top of Shewbird Mountain for roadstone.
The Alcoa firm is a subsidiary of a company in Ireland. The attorney Tom Stark of Chapel Hill, at some expense, is arguing this in behalf of his parents, Rev. and Mrs. Rufus Stark, who live on the aft, shaky side of the mountain. And by their own accounts, they’re no spring chickens.
Clay County has $750,000 from the federal and state governments to add more sewer lines and pumping stations. At this writing, it was hoping for more by interpreting a clause in the Golden Leaf grant application form defining use of its North Carolina tobacco lawsuit settlement money for community improvement. The first thing to buy when becoming a county manager is a good magnifying glass.
This board of commissioner’s predecessors (well, a majority of two of them) adopted the first comprehensive plan for future growth of any N.C. county in this watershed, in the initiative being led by the N.C. Department of Commerce.
So progress is possible among three. And the last three-member commission in 100-county North Carolina consists of Stephen (Doc) Sellers, chairman; Dan McGlamery and Dwight Penland.
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.