Cherokee and Graham County folks seeking info about Corridor K will be interested in this news article below. Twelve environmental issues within a 35-mile radius around Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Hayesville, N.C. A mountain being taken down, stone by stone; federal finding sets stage for Laurel Creek suit; new legal thrust arises here -- opossum protection By Tom Bennett Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition Hayesville, N.C., July 23, 2013 -- At the Hayesville Quarry, five miles southwest as the crow flies from this fellowship hall, an Irish multi-national corporation is removing Shewbird Mountain from the face of the earth. It has multiple renewals of its North Carolina Mining Commission permit and it is disemboweling the mountain core. Once 2,900 feet on world maps, Shewbird will vanish faster if Cement Roadstone Holdings of Dublin, Ireland -- through its Charleston, Tenn., subsidiary Harrison Construction-Division of APAC Atlantic -- were to win an important Tennessee Dept. of Transportation contract. Long sought, the latter would be for the four-lane U.S. Appalachian Regional Commission Corridor K of asphalt road widening, bridges and tunnels through Tennessee’s Ocoee Gorge, a U.S. environmental landmark. The latest draft environmental impact study has been described in public meetings as being in work by a San Francisco engineering company and was projected on TDOT’s web site as scheduled to be ready by 2013. North Carolina was one of the first states to achieve the aggregation of GIS data and photos to publish flood insurance rate maps (FIRMs). This county’s map of that type shows how the town of Hayesville’s sewer line is in the floodplain and will need to be moved, according to a legal notice this month in the Clay County Progress. Not a character in “Happy Days.” a FONSI is a federal acronym. The one for a road easement awarded this year by US Forest Service Southern Region in Asheville to eight persons who make up the unincorporated Laurel Creek Property Owners Association is eye-catching. It finds no significant impact will come from their road easement. This would take only their vehicles up to the rim trail above the outstanding waters of Fires Creek, which the finding forbids them to operate for commercial gain. They plan four primitive cabins at their 41-acre inholding. It’s way up inside the national forest on Phillips Ridge in the Valley River Mountains on the Clay-Cherokee county line. Before the establishment of the Nantahala National Forest, this land was the hemlock-tree farm for the Cover Tannery to use the hemlock branches to bust hair off cattle hides. Hemlock’s good for that, but what a starting premise for a future altering of the pristine national forest! This FONSI sets the stage for Southern Environmental Law Center to sue. The latter is in Asheville and it has filed a long letter objecting to the road easement. Streams around the Hayesville Quarry’s Shewbird Mountain no longer show up in aerial photos. They don’t exist anymore; soil pushed off into them filled and obliterated them. That’s what lies ahead for Pleasant Valley. This verdant place lies between the Robbinsville Ingles and the Snowbird Mountains at the Appalachian Trail high up at Stecoah Gap. Were a N.C. leg of Corridor K ever to be built, it could (if NCDOT gets its way) include two tunnels from which thousands of metric tons of stone would be spread at the ironically named Pleasant Valley. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrote NCDOT in March 2009 refusing to support tunneling, and this stalemate continues three years later. What’s called the “Corridor K Coalition” on P&J Road in Robbinsville seemed a 180-degree turn by Graham County citizens who earlier opposed N.C. Dept. of Transportation project A-9 B&C. So when the seeming grassroots Corridor K Coalition turned up in the N.C. Secretary of State corporation data in December 2012, with an address on 191 P&J Road, it was unexpected. Then I found in the same Secretary of State’s data that 191 P&J Road is also the address of Phillips & Jordan highway contractors. This firm that worked the recent wash-out on N.C. 441 in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park operates a “fleet of over 850 heavy equipment vehicles,” its web site states. The sale and break-up of TVA, recommended by the Obama White House this year during sequestration’s start-up, could -- depending upon what utilities acquire its parts – alter aspects of environmental oversight of Lake Chatuge. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act signed by U.S. tribes and President Reagan in 1988 permitted gaming casinos if the tribes would accept and work toward model environmental standards. The current Environmental Protection Agency site about these current model programs of the tribes heaps special praise upon the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ work at the reservation on the Qualla Boundary near Bryson City. This EBCI program even includes the recycling of the food waste from the restaurants of Harrah’s Casino. Someday when EBCI operates a casino near Snap-On Road in east Murphy, and widens the reach of its environmental emphasis, this could yield important results. The town of Murphy’s ongoing decision to do no recycling, just scoop and toss everything together despite a major upgrade last decade of the N.C. Solid Waste Act, and Cherokee County’s tiny but determined start-up program, will appear lacking in comparison with the Indians’ efforts. The local agencies will gain an incentive to begin mining the recycling gold at the county landfill that’s located seven miles east of Snap-On Road. To increase traffic to the Murphy casino, EBCI will face two legacy decisions. The first will be to concur in a NCDOT A-9-A path from east Andrews to Stecoah Gap that crosses the Trail of Tears. Tatham Gap is the scenic pass through which the Snowbird Cherokee were led under guard to Fort Delaney (future Andrews) and then to Fort Butler (future Murphy.) The second legacy decision will be to concur in Cherokee County government’s purchase of additional land to extend to the west the county airport runway. (Grandly re-named Western Carolina Regional Airport in 2009, it lacks any log of takeoffs and landings, a county spokesperson told me). Why is additional land purchase an important legacy decision? The landowner of the potential runway-extension site is the same family that bulldozed a Cherokee town-house mound to scrape the original 1946 airstrip. Tribes weakened sovereignty by signing the 1988 act, according to Steven Light and Kathryn Rand in their 2005 book, “Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise.” Here at Murphy this tribe will compromise further as it accepts environmental regulation not by EPA but by the N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Water Quality. The tribe elected not to build and operate a wastewater treatment plant for its new casino, and instead hook onto the town’s plant that is regulated by the state. Murphy WWTP has a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit for up to 1.6 million gallons a day (this is not a misprint) of treated wastewater into the Hiwassee River, and has plenty of capacity. The real-estate bust of the last decade did not produce as many homes and toilets as hoped. This year’s N.C. bill forbidding any enforcement of environmental regulations more severely than the national standard comes on the heels of 2012’s go-ahead for a study of, then the beginning of, fracturing the earth’s crust for gas and oil, or fracking. But I believe the most significant recent law affecting the N.C. environment is the 63-section Regulatory Reform Act of 2011, filling 13 screens on my desktop when I open it in the General Assembly legislation click. This landmark act by the assembly GOP majority, after more than a century of Democratic control, is a sweeping alteration of N.C. environmental law. An entirely new trend in U.S. legislation, opossum protection, is a primary 2013 focus of the legislators who represent this Episcopal church in Raleigh. Both the state representative and the state senator are authors of bills dropped in the hopper almost immediately this year. Their intent is to make sure Clay Logan still can, each New Year’s Eve, slowly lower a live possum in a cage, thereby spoofing New York City’s Ball Drop. The animal protector group PETA will have a hard time stopping the possum drop if the two local measures are signed by Gov. Pat McCrory. Rep. Roger West of Marble and Sen. Jim Davis of Franklin are canny politicians. They see the votes they’ll get next election by having sponsored these bills. West and Davis are, well, playing possum. * * * Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., is a retired newsman and Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer. E-mail him at farblumtn@gmail
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 21:34:31 +0000
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