Cullowhee community activists have finally made headway in a push to create a community land-use plan to regulate growth and development in the area.

Jackson County commissioners will discuss two sets of proposed planning regulations at an upcoming workshop at 2 p.m. on June 17 in the county’s Justice and Administration Building.

One of the items being considered is a new ordinance that was written addressing groundwater recharge in the county. 

Regulations previously existed as part of a larger ordinance but have been separated out into their own draft ordinance. The recharge ordinance addresses issues like requiring impervious surfaces for development to ensure precipitation can be re-absorbed by the ground.

The other item on the agenda is a set of proposed changes to a section of the county’s subdivision ordinance that dictates how much of a development must be left in open space. The proposed changes are generally less stringent than what the county currently has on the books.

Although the changes have been approved by the county’s planning board, any changes to the laws must be passed by commissioners. The drafts of these ordinances were completed last fall, but commissioners have not taken them up until now. A public hearing on the proposed changes could be held as early as the commission’s second meeting in July and voted on that same day. 

A mountainside in Macon County once destined for a housing development is now destined to be a community forest area comparable to the arboretum in Asheville.

The Hall Mountain Tract is a 108-acre swath of land overlooking the Cowee mound — a sacred Cherokee site — and the Little Tennessee River. Local conservationists and Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal members have been pushing hard since 2005 to save the site from becoming a large subdivision.

Jackson County Planning Board members discussed axing part of the steep slope rules aimed at protecting mountain viewsheds.

The viewshed provisions stipulate new mountainside construction should  not be readily visible from public right of ways or public lands.

Macon County is weighing whether to relax its existing rules that ban fill dirt in the flood plain.

The county’s planning board is split on the issue and struggling to find mutual ground to stand on.

Tom Anderson barely batted an eyelash when he plunked down $300,000 in cash for a tiny lot along the Nantahala eight years ago in the Mystic River development.

The Jackson County Planning Board voted last Thursday to eliminate a pivotal component of the county’s steep slope building rules.

The planning board wants to do away with a controversial limits on how many homes can be built on steep slopes. It is one of the most stringent parts of Jackson’s steep slope rules, and the most stringent of its kind in the region.

A large residential development proposed near Western Carolina University could boost Cullowhee’s revitalization movement and cater to the region’s professional crowd seeking an outdoor lifestyle, but its proximity to the Tuckasegee River has also attracted criticism from area environmentalists.

Jackson County’s planning board is knee-deep in a page-by-page rewrite of the county’s steep slope rules — a controversial process that seems destined to rekindle past disputes over protecting the mountainsides versus stymieing development.

A sweeping slate of mountain building regulations passed by Jackson County commissioners nearly six years ago were both commended and condemned as some of the most restrictive in the state. They took aim at unsafe building practices on steep slopes, but also reined in over-zealous development some feared would mar the mountainsides.

SEE ALSO: Changing the rules: Jackson re-writing development standards amid new economic realities