Sewer Or Septic?
Sprawl's Infrastructure

At their Feb. 3 meeting, ACC Commissioners discussed whether building a new sewer line in eastern Clarke County would damage the "greenbelt" - or whether not building it might end up polluting nearby creeks and rivers.
There is general agreement that the presence of county sewer lines increases land values and development pressure in an area. Subdivisions can be built using only septic tanks, and some have, but the individual tanks add to costs and can give trouble over time. If a sewer line does go into the largely undeveloped areas east of the airport and of Cedar Creek subdivision, it would be near the edge of the AR or Agricultural-Residential zone, the "greenbelt" which many want to protect. Subdivisions are allowed in the "greenbelt" but must either be built on lots that are 10 acres in size or larger, or according to strict guidelines for "conservation subdivisions" that limit grading and set aside greenspace.
According to Public Utilities Director Gary Duck, the Shoal Creek sewer line has been planned since 1995, and current plans reflect 20-year population growth estimates for the area. The Shoal Creek line would run along the boundary of the rural zone, and according to Duck is designed to serve existing and future growth in the Shoal Creek drainage basin. Nearly half of that basin lies in the rural greenbelt. But after the new land use plan passed in 1999, plans for all sewer lines that would have actually extended into the greenbelt were scrapped, he said.
That doesn't satisfy Commissioner David Lynn, who says that putting a sewer line next to the greenbelt would threaten the very protections that the land use plan and conservation subdivision ordinance were designed to give it. "Nothing's more long-lasting" than infrastructure, he told Flagpole, and the political pressure on future commissioners to increase greenbelt densities could be hard to resist if a sewer line were in place.
The land use plan, Lynn said, should guide not only zoning, but also spending on infrastructure. "He asked why spend $7 million for a new sewer line bordering an area where only low-density development is planned.
Commissioner George Maxwell echoed Lynn's sentiments when he argued, "there are more people in Clarke County than those that are going to build big houses on 10-acre lots." Some Clarke County residents still don't have county water lines, he said. Maxwell said that to make this a better place to live, "Let's focus our attention on the whole of Clarke County."
But much discussion among commissioners centered on potential problems with septic tanks if the county doesn't run the new line. NE Georgia Health District officials estimate that 1.4 percent of backyard septic tanks in the county will overflow, at least temporarily, in a given year. They describe state standards for septic tanks as "a work in progress." The failure of numerous septic tanks in East Meadow subdivision required existing homes to be tied onto sewer lines at public expense even though those tanks had been inspected by the county health department when they were initially installed.
Representatives from Athens Grow Green Coalition questioned whether septic tanks are a big water pollution problem, and pointed out that Shoal Creek is not on the state's list of impaired waterways (as it might be if leaking tanks in the area were polluting the stream). Jenny Culler of Upper Oconee Watershed Network told Flagpole her experience suggests more problems with overflowing sewer lines than with septic tanks. Gary Duck of ACC Public Utilities confirmed that sewer lines "do have overflows occasionally" due to stoppages, often caused by roots or grease accumulation.
Commissioners decided they needed more information and postponed a decision on the Shoal Creek line. They also moved toward providing county water service to additional Clarke County neighborhoods. Water service has been a sore point for residents in the northern part of the county who feel they were promised it when the city and county governments were consolidated in 1991. Recently, commissioners directed county staff to develop a SPLOST (sales tax) proposal to be submitted to voters next November, which would "provide water service to all residential neighborhoods not currently served, with priority being given to low- and moderate-income areas."
Commissioners also decided that standards proposed by county staffers for locating and marking pedestrian crosswalks need further discussion and public input. BikeAthens president Dorothy O'Niell disagreed with the guideline that mid-block crosswalks should be at least 300 feet from a stoplight, and suggested some changes in signs and pavement markings. Commissioner David Lynn agreed that the 300-foot rule "flies in the face of what we did on Prince" in installing new crosswalks.
Kris Boudreau asked commissioners to improve enforcement of traffic laws, saying that traffic tickets can pay for enforcement costs, but that most drivers "blow right thru" crosswalks if they see a pedestrian approaching. "We've got a strange culture here in Georgia," said Commissioner States McCarter. "They believe that cars have the right-of-way... We've got a culture to change."

John Huie

John Huie is still trying to find the questions to life's persistent answers.

Noise Problems
Can Neighbors Help?

A community advisory board may be one of the results of a public forum held on Feb. 2 at the Athens-Clarke County Library to discuss a permit application made by Louisiana-Pacific Co. The company operates a mill in Jackson County, near the Clarke County border.
Several people who stood to ask questions of the panel made up of LP and state Environmental Protection Division representatives expressed interest in joining a community advisory board. A show of hands from members of the audience also reflected support for the creation of such a board.
The 14-year-old LP mill primarily makes oriented strand board products for construction uses, including energy saving radiant barrier sheathing. The company has applied for a permit to replace the mill's dryer burners, rebuild the board press and upgrade other features of the mill. According to Philip Shoults, regional operations manager for LP, this would increase the mill's production rate and efficiency. It would also mean an increase in particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and phenol released by the mill. Because the annual emissions are not predicted to be over 250 tons per year, the mill would still be classified as a minor source of pollutants.
The main form of pollution neighbors of the plant complained about at the forum however, was noise pollution. Bill Justice, whose home is about two miles away from the mill, said the noise generated by the mill had improved since 10 years ago, but that it had gotten much worse in the past few weeks.
"Usually it's early in the morning" that the noise is the worst, Justice said. He said he believes the sound is from processing wood at the mill and that he is annoyed by it because he is retired and would like to be able to sleep in.
Philip Shoults says the company has improved its practices drastically since the early 1990s. There were several environmental violations at LP sites, especially in Colorado, which led to the firing of the CEO and two executive vice presidents in 1995. Since then, according to Shoults, improved policies and employee training have led to a sizable drop in notices of violation and earned LP recognition from the EPA as an environmental leader.
Shoults says the mill has 149 employees and pays about $6 million annually in wages and salaries.

Aaron Jollay

Aaron Jollay is a local freelance writer.

Cool, Clear Water
River Damage Can Stop

If technology exists that can reduce or eliminate massive fish kills and habitat destruction in our nation's waters caused by power plants by 90 percent or more at minimal cost, should the government require it? That is the question the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must answer in a ruling expected to be announced later this month.
To cool their massive boilers, America's aging coal, nuclear, oil and gas power plants use more than a hundred trillion gallons per year, mostly from the nation's rivers – leaving a legacy of fish kills, altered river flows and bathwater-temperature discharges that inflict lasting damage on America's waters. Now the EPA must decide whether to mandate the use of available technology that can greatly reduce this damage.
Power plants from eight Southeastern states collectively withdraw approximately 57.2 billion gallons of water per day. Georgia's Plant Hammond near Rome withdraws a reported annual monthly average of 483,000,000 gallons per day from the Coosa River. In comparison, the average Georgian uses about 168 gallons of water per day.
The stakes of the EPA decision are outlined in a report authored by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and released Feb. 4 by more than a dozen environmental organizations, including Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), from around the nation. Entitled "Wounded Waters," the report documents the large footprint of power production on water quantity and quality, exploring the different types of power plant cooling systems currently in use and their environmental impact.
"EPA has an opportunity to live up to its name and require modest upgrades at power plants that are not using intake-reducing technology," says Armond Cohen, Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force. "It would be a shame if number crunchers at OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and not the professional staff at EPA made such important decisions about protecting our nation's waters."
In 2001, EPA's professional staff recommended a rule that would require power companies to adopt technologies that reduce their water use by 90 percent or more in sensitive habitats, noting that they were cost-effective. However, after lobbying pressure from power industry officials, John Graham, the Bush Administration's environmental rule reviewer at the OMB, overruled EPA staff recommendations in favor of a weak proposal under which utilities could avoid any new technology installation altogether and allow killing 20 to 1000 times more fish per megawatt than new plants.
"There is still time for EPA to do the right thing," says Cohen. "Administrator Leavitt can and must resist political pressure from the electric power industry and mandate that grandfathered power plants deploy readily available technology to reverse a half century of damage to our nation's waters."
Closed-cycle, or recirculating, systems reduce water withdrawals by 90 percent or more and can significantly reduce harmful plant discharges. This technology is neither exotic nor expensive and is used in 47 percent of existing power plants today. Dry-cooling is another method that avoids significant water intake, and its cost and benefits should be further analyzed. None of Georgia's power plants use dry-cooling.
The cost of implementing these technological upgrades is minimal. The EPA's own figures suggest that mandating recirculating cooling on all plants would result in increased power costs to average residential customers of well under a dollar per month.
For more information or to access "Wounded Waters," go to www.cleanenergy.org.

Sara Barczak

Sara Barczak is Safe Energy Director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which issued this press release.

Bushies Brilliant
Contenders Clueless

Bush must be laughing his ass off. Voters too dim to recall yesterday's news are letting him get away with running on the imaginary successes of a phony record. Lazy journalists are allowing him to run on a patently fictional platform of promises while ignoring the disastrous realities he has planned for 2004. Now Democrats, falling for Karl Rove's silly "we'd love nothing more than to run against Howard Dean" baiting, are about to hand him the November opponent nominee Republicans wanted all along: John Kerry.
Hit the theme from the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show." New lyric: stupidity is what's all around.
By all rights Bush ought to be warming a prison cell right now. His own CIA-employed weapons of mass destruction hunter, David Kay, has given up his WMD search, conceding that there are none. Kay, who supports both Bush and his preemptive wars, thinks Saddam Hussein destroyed them all within six months after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, just as he was supposed to. "It turns out we were all wrong," Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Well, not all of us. Not the millions of people who took to the streets to march against the war. But apparently they don't count.
In a case study of revisionism gone wild, the American media has embarked on a witch hunt against the CIA - the one intelligence outfit that repeatedly warned Bush's war cabinet that there was no solid evidence that Iraq posed any kind of threat. "How could the nation's $40 billion-a-year intelligence apparatus, focused on Saddam's regime for more than a decade, have been so wrong?" chides USA Today. "How did the [CIA] make the leap from suspect intentions to bold claims of existing WMD programs?" asks Newsweek.
The CIA did no such thing. Director George Tenet has obviously struck a Machiavellian deal with the White House. He takes the election-year heat certain to be doled out by Bush's hand-picked investigators into "intelligence failures;" in return, Bush lets him keep his job. Why so-called journalists are going along with this transparent farce is yet another instance of intelligence failure.
Aris Pappas, who worked for Tenet's Iraq intel panel, says that the CIA had "gone blind for three years" after Saddam threw out UN inspectors in 1998. After that the U.S. didn't know what Iraq was up to - or not. "They keep referring to a 'mountain' of evidence,'" says Pappas. "But it was corroborative evidence."
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice didn't ask Americans to go to war - to send more than 500 of our young men and women to their graves - based on circumstantial evidence. They said they were sure; most of us believed them. Moreover, the CIA didn't make the case for war - the Gang of Five did. But thanks to a compliant media, America remains befuddled. A mere 43 percent of respondents to a USA Today poll believe that Bush deliberately misled them about Iraq's WMDs. Perhaps that's because even Democratic leaders are afraid to say what needs to be said: Bush lied about what he knew about Iraq and should be impeached.
Their unwillingness to seize such opportunities is a surefire prescription for a Bush victory in November.
Meanwhile broadcast and print outlets are dutifully analyzing and discussing Bush's ridiculous proposals to send astronauts to Mars, reform Medicare and allow every illegal immigrant willing to work for a dollar per hour into the country. But that's all election-year bluster designed to throw clueless Democrats off balance. The Bushies have big plans for next year, but they're not what you think.
Bush-watchers are arguing whether the White House's renegade neoconservative PNAC pack has next targeted Syria, North Korea or Iran for regime change in 2005. The answer, according to Administration insiders, is apparently none of the above. "Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar represent a threat to the world, and they need to be destroyed and we believe we will catch them in the next year," U.S. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said in January. Pentagon planners are weighing going back to the future - launching an election-year spring offensive in Afghanistan, followed by a full-fledged reinvasion next year. This time we'd send in the 100,000-plus troop complement that would have been required to do the job correctly in the first place.
Afghanistan 2.0 would be a potent issue for Democrats if they were smart enough to do something with it. Refighting the war, after all, would be a tacit admission that Bush & Co. screwed up the first skirmish in the war on terrorism and let Osama, American Enemy No. 1, get away. Since a Second Afghan War would require an increase in overall combat troop strength, liberals could ask where Bush plans to find those extra soldiers. A draft? Two-year deployments of the reserves? Unfortunately guys like Kerry are too busy making fun of the red planet red herring to wave this chunk of red meat at voters.

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the editor of Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.