2011 COUNTY-BY-COUNTY WATERSHED HIGHLIGHTS:
UNION COUNTY, GA.- Volume 1
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Blairsville, Ga., Jan 19, 2012 – Streams such as Butternut Creek that course through high valleys in resort areas of the Appalachians serve dual, and completely contradictory, purposes. The first is to be the crowning element of the natural scene in the lively language of commercial promoters. The second is as tributaries of what Dr. Becky Champion described at last year’s Holman Banquet as our “Blue Collar rivers.”
Blairsville’s $6 million upgrade of its wastewater treatment plant on Butternut Creek is “complete,” Mayor Jim Conley said. I asked, what’s the permitted daily flow? “It will ultimately be up to a million gallons a day,” the mayor replied.
An accident involving a hose at the plant on March 1-2, 2011 spilled 280,000 gallons of untreated sewage into Butternut Creek, according to the North Georgia News. This happened on the eve of that year’s Holman Banquet in this county that produced the first two recipients of the Holman Award (and deservedly so). It’s clear that constant vigilance is going to be necessary everywhere, from now until the end of the world.
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Dept. of Transportation told citizens in May 2011 that in 12-18 months’ time, the agency will have a final proposal for widening Ga. 515/76. The path for a four-lane highway would be from Blairsville east to Young Harris, and it envisions two crossings of Butternut Creek.
“The GDOT must abide by all federal laws, 53 actually,” Norman Cooper wrote in the North Georgia News. These “deal with endangered plants, archaeological sites and other things.”
The water situation here in Georgia is, well, very fluid right now. The last governor put quite a spin on the struggle among three states for the water in the U.S. Corps of Engineers’ Lake Lanier northeast of Atlanta. That chief executive, Sonny Perdue, had lawyers at $355 an hour chatting up a re-do of Geographic Information Systems data. The northern edge of the state of Georgia actually is out in the middle of TVA’s Nickajack Lake in Tennessee, owing to a bungling surveyor’s error long ago, they suggested. Just as fantastic was the notion of a pipeline along Interstate 75 to Atlanta.
No court has entered those waters, so to speak, while the Lake Lanier issue is in a year-long period given USCOE in June 2011 to find an equitable distribution of water that Georgia, Alabama and Florida can accept. There now are 10 regional water councils whose job is to plan for Georgians’ drinking, showering and flushing future.
The Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition’s top priority here is additional support and funding for stormwater best management practices and further habitation restoration efforts in the Butternut Creek watershed. The sprawling Lake Nottely is a resource of rare beauty so important to the happiness of homeowners in The Sanctuary and other subdivisions on the lakefront. It needs a watershed action plan.
THE GEORGIA LEGISLATURE had just convened for 2012 when I called on Lamar Paris, sole commissioner of Union County (and 2010 recipient of HRWC’s Holman Award). He wasn’t sure of the fate of his 2008-09 efforts to make north Georgia stream buffers logical by adding best management practices. At this writing, there is a bill to standardize them statewide.
The late Jim Dobson of Blairsville was a north Georgia agricultural pioneer and first recipient of the Holman Award in 2009. He was followed by his close friend, Paris. “To receive the award meant a great deal to me, but what really made it special was to follow Mr. Jim.”
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.