GAINESVILLE – Hall County is looking to return to parity with its neighboring counties when it comes to setting regulations for erosion control at sites where new development is underway, but Gainesville’s Dale Caldwell wants commissioners to stop and reconsider that move.
Caldwell is Headwaters Director at the Gainesville office of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, and he addressed the Hall County Commission during its work session Monday afternoon. He is concerned that Hall County’s plan to loosen restrictions governing how many acres of land can be disturbed for construction purposes at any given time during development might not be in the best interest of the Chattahoochee River.
According to the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper website: “Chattahoochee Riverkeeper is an environmental advocacy organization dedicated solely to protecting and restoring the Chattahoochee River Basin.”
Caldwell sees relaxed regulations potentially leading to more sedimentation of the river basin and the reservoirs impounded on it.
“I can show you case after case after case where the fifty acre rule does not contain sediment to the sites,” Caldwell said. Caldwell said Hall County’s current regulation limiting disturbed areas to twenty or less acres was a much more effective and protective method of erosion control.
Hall County Director of Public Works and Utilities Srikanth Yamala explained the county’s reasoning for making the change to current policy as follows: “EPD (the Georgia Environmental Protection Division) since 2008 has been allowing developers to grade up to fifty acres. However, we have a requirement at the local level since 2003 that a developer could only grade twenty acres at any given time.”
(Note: Local jurisdictions may exceed state regulations, as is the case with the current Hall County code, but they may not be more permissive than state guidelines.)
“We looked at eight surrounding jurisdictions and none of them had this particular (20-acre limit) requirement,” Yamala continued. “As with anything Hall County does, we’re always trying to look at certain things to see if they are working well, or if they are causing some unintended hardships on the development community.”
“We are just trying to ‘house-keep’ and clean up the code and make it more relevant to 2020,” Yamala added.
But Caldwell brought to the attention of the commission that the situation of Hall County being the only county in the region with tighter regulations than called for by the state was about to end. He read from a news story about a neighboring county looking at more restrictive measures, measures almost identical to those currently in place in Hall County.
“I’d like to read to you what’s on the table for Forsyth County to adopt within the next month,” Caldwell began. “’On property totaling twenty-five acres or more, no land disturbance permit shall be issued…to allow for the disturbance of more than twenty acres in a single contiguous area.’” Essentially identical, Caldwell pointed out, to current Hall County code.
“I don’t want to see us working backwards while our neighbors are working forward,” Caldwell said.
The resolution being considered to change current Hall County regulation requires two public hearings. The first public hearing will be when the county commission meets Thursday evening. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. at the Hall County Government Center. The second public hearing will be held at the same location three weeks later on August 13.
