'A minor little thing:' Macon moved ahead on watershed ordinance revision
The Little Tennessee River runs through Macon County. Hannah McLeod photo
The Macon County Planning Board voted last week to recommend a revision of the water supply watershed ordinance to the county commission. Set against the backdrop of catastrophic flooding in Western North Carolina, and despite public opposition to the change, board members maintain the revision is a minor and will have little impact.
“This one sentence [being removed from the ordinance], I don’t think it will have much effect,” said Jack Morgan, past Macon County planner.
Over the course of the year, Macon County has been considering a set of three revisions to its soil erosion and sedimentation control ordinance, water supply watershed ordinance and flood damage prevention ordinance.
From the beginning of the process early this spring, there has been regular and robust public opposition to the proposed changes. For this reason, even after holding a public hearing on all three proposed changes, Chairman Gary Shields decided to slow down the approval process to allow for more public input and board discussion.
The commission ultimately passed the first of the three revisions at its August meeting, changing the required land disturbance from half an acre to an acre before any plans are required for soil and erosion control on a project.
However, Shields decided to put these other two changes back before the planning board for further consideration prior to approval by the county commission and has said the board won’t take action on the proposed changes until January.
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At its Oct. 3 meeting, the Macon County planning board considered the revision to water supply watershed protection ordinance. The proposed change would remove the clause that says RV parks are not eligible for special nonresidential intensity allocations (SNIA) from the ordinance.
Section 156.32 of the ordinance governs density and built-upon limits in watershed areas. It outlines maximum allowable project densities and minimum lot sizes depending on the classification of the water supply watershed where a development is located. It also outlines other requirements like vegetated conveyances and curb outlet systems.
The last subsection in this part of the ordinance deals with special nonresidential intensity allocations (SNIA). In certain parts of the watershed, “residential uses may occupy 10% of the balance of the watershed, which is outside the critical area, with a 70% built-upon area when approved as a special nonresidential intensity allocation.”
The ordinance goes on to say that the planning board is authorized to approve SNIAs “consistent with the provisions of this ordinance, and such approved projects shall be awarded on a first come, first serve basis.”
However, according to the current ordinance, recreational vehicle parks are not eligible for SNIA. This restriction is not included in the state model ordinance, and this is what planning board members are recommending be removed from the ordinance. Planning board members contend that almost any development could apply for and receive SNIA designation, allowing them to construct 70% impervious surface on a parcel, except for an RV park, and this singling out of RVs is unfair.
“You can put a motor repair shop in the watershed today, and use the 70%, you could put a general store, you could put a convenience store, you could put storage units, you could put any kind of commercial development,” said board member Marty Kimsey. “There may be some uses that are excluded but almost any commercial purpose you can put in the watershed today. It’s just the one thing that you can’t have, which is RV parks. I would argue that there’s a lot of commercial developments that’s allowed in the watershed that’s worse than RV parks.”
Morgan said he didn’t think removing the clause pertaining to RVs would have much effect, noting that the county receives very few RV park development applications.
“They’re not just busting our door down to do that, and not particularly in the watershed,” said Morgan. “And like Mr. Kimsey brought up, I could go out there and put an Amazon transfer station in the watershed and I could concrete and pave 70% of it, but an RV park cannot. I don’t understand how that’s fair .… I don’t understand the fairness of that.”
But experts in the field that are not on the planning board, and members of the public, disagree.
Macon County's planning board met to discuss the ordinance. Hannah McLeod photo
The Water Quality Advisory Committee is made up of nine volunteer members with careers in aquatic management and has been tasked with investigating recommended changes to the ordinances and potential impacts.
At the Oct. 3 meeting, it presented a report on the potential impacts of removing the RV clause from the watershed ordinance. This report was detailed in the Sept. 25 edition of The Smoky Mountain News.
Bill McLarney, chair of the Water Quality Advisory Committee, spoke during the Oct. 3 meeting.
“I’m pleased to be able to say that the recommendations this committee will offer are very much in line with what the wealth of the people of Macon County have indicated they want for their county and from their government,” McLarney said.
Based on the findings in its the report, the Water Quality Advisory Committee recommended the planning board dismiss proposed changes to the watershed ordinance.
“This commission will strongly recommend against the proposed changes to the watershed ordinance,” said McLarney. “From what I would characterize as a very conservative viewpoint, it’s easily predictable that regardless of what we decide here, our local environment will inevitably be subject to new negative impacts as a consequence of foreseeable population growth and of increasingly unpredictable and sometimes more extreme weather. So given this reality, it behooves all of us, including our local government, to do what we can to foresee and prevent increased and novel impacts.”
Part of the argument against removing the RV clause, according to Jason Love, Associate Director of the Highlands Biological Station, is that RVs are not considered a structure in the current ordinance as it is written. Additionally, dense RV parks have large swaths of impervious surface area that don’t allow water to infiltrate into the soil. Love also highlighted waste disposal issues common to RV parks.
“Sometimes RVs require additives to the holding tanks to keep the smell down,” said Love. “Some of those additives can be harmful. In some cases, formaldehyde is used to get those smells down. So, if you do have flooding or some sort of spill into these drinking water watersheds, those are some of the concerns that we had, some of the chemicals in these holding tanks.”
While the committee strongly recommended that RV parks remain ineligible for SNIA designations, the committee said that if the planning board chose to allow RV parks in the watershed it would urge the following.
“RV parks should not be placed in floodplains, whether with fill or no fill .… they need to have robust waste effluent systems in place to prevent spilling .… they would also follow guidelines set forth under cluster developments .… because they really are high density,” said Love.
In his motion to recommend the removal of the RV clause to the county commission, Vice Chairman Lee Walters also said, “along with that, ask that the commissioners send it to the appropriate parties to review and further strengthen RV park permitting to ensure that the requirements for septic system meet or exceed that of any commercial or residential entity.”
Amid the lengthy discussion about the watershed ordinance, members of the public filled the boardroom, two of whom chose to speak during public comment and both of whom urged everyone to consider the reality of what they see as weakening a watershed ordinance amid widespread destruction from flooding caused by Hurricane Helene.
“All of this is very, very important stuff and I really just have one question. Why are we doing this right now?” said one speaker. “Our region has suffered one of the worst catastrophes that I can think of .… This can wait. Our people are suffering.”
While Macon County fared better than other WNC counties to the east, it was not spared the worst effects of natural disaster. On Friday, Sept. 27, Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Lau’s truck was seen submerged in floodwaters. His body was recovered the next day. Lau is the only confirmed death in Macon related to Hurricane Helene.
“Our mountains protect us, but they also funnel all that water into places that people don’t think of as being dangerous,” said Sarah Johnson. “There’s what’s called ephemeral streams. They pop up. They pop up behind my house .… If you have any possibility of preventing it now, now is when you do that. Because I guarantee you that Asheville, Canton, Clyde, the rest of them, if they could go back a little bit and rethink some of the things, they would.”
