Questions from a Creek?

Dear Friends,

 

The first of the two Candidate Forums is tomorrow night. It starts at 7 p.m. at the Oconee County Library on Experiment Station Road in Watkinsville. The invited candidates are seeking the chair position and four posts on the Board of Commissioners and the position of coroner.

 

The second Candidate Forum will be held on Wednesday night for the candidates for the chair position and four posts on the Board of Education. It also will start at 7 p.m. and will be held at the Library.

 

Both Forums will end at 10 p.m. Refreshments will be available, and you are invited to bring a plate of cookies and drinks to share if you can.

 

The format will be open so citizens can ask questions of concern to them.

 

Barber Creek, were she able to attend, would have lots of questions of the 10 Commission candidates, I feel confident. Here are some I thinks she would like us to ask for her:

 

1. Friends of Barber Creek is pleased that the design for the Rocky Branch sewage treatment plant will guarantee water treated to a very high standard and will allow the county to hold water in times of flooding. Now we need help from the BOC in setting up an independent monitoring system. Will you commit to working with Friends of Barber Creek to this end?

 

2. Oconee County has never discussed nor adopted a master plan for waste water treatment, though it has commissioned and received draft plans from its consultants. Without a master plan, the County lacks a set of guidelines for the future. Will you commit to discussing and adopting such a plan?

 

3. The two most recent master plans the County received from its consultants recommended the County develop a sewage treatment plant on the Oconee and explore a partnership with Athens-Clarke County to that end. The two existing sewage plants, one on Calls Creek and the other on Barber Creek, either would be phased out over time as this larger plant comes online or be held to current limits. Will you commit to exploring these options openly and aggressively and involving citizens in the discussions?

 

4. The County has admitted that it is considering as an alternative to the Oconee River plant expansion of the Rocky Branch plant from its currently permitted 1 million gallon per days of discharge to a plant four times that size. The County is considering dividing some of the additional discharge between the Apalachee River and Barber Creek, for which it already has the permit to discharge 1 million gallons per day. Will you commit to shelving these discussions until the Oconee River plant option is fully explored?

 

5. The County has never decided how to allocate the increased capacity of 600 million gallons per day of sewage treatment capacity it will obtain with the expanded Rocky Branch sewage treatment plant. Will you commit to an open discussion involving citizens of the county of how much of that capacity should be allocated to residential development, how much to commercial, and how much to future industrial development?

 

6. Oconee County at present is largely served by individual septic systems. There are no plans at present to replace these. As the septic systems age, they represent a threat to the surface streams, particularly Barber Creek, along which many subdivisions have been approved and built. In many parts of the country, owners of septic systems have to obtain certification that the septic has been emptied and is being maintained properly. Not only is that not the case in Oconee County, but the County also has no educational program to inform people of the need to maintain the system or how to do it. Will you commit to developing a plan for septic maintenance in the county and explore the possibility of a certification program?

 

7. Oconee County now has a stormwater ordinance in place for the whole County, but it has very limited staffing available for enforcement once the plans have been approved by the planning staff. Will you commit to vigorous efforts at enforcement of the ordinance and education about what citizens need to do to meet the requirements of the ordinance?

 

8. The County has agreed to join with Walton County on the Hard Labor Creek Reservoir project. That reservoir will be built on a tributary to the Apalachee River and will be filled with water pumped from the Apalachee River. Some of the water will be returned to the Oconee River watershed via the Rocky Branch treatment plant, which will discharge into Barber Creek. Barber Creek feeds into the Oconee via McNutt Creek. Much of the water from the Hard Labor Creek Reservoir will be used in Walton County and discharged into the Ocmulgee River basin. Since Walton County is part of the Greater Atlanta water district, the water could even be used elsewhere in that metropolitan district. Will you commit to develop a plan to offset the effects of the transfer of water outside the Oconee basin so as to protect the Apalachee River and the Oconee River watershed?

 

Of course, there are many important questions for the BOC candidates that do not deal with Barber Creek that also should be asked. I could develop quite a lot on openness in government alone.

 

The future Board of Education will be making important decisions about new leadership, about a charter school request and even about the possibility of reconfiguring the entire system into a charter system. Educational issues also are affected by and affect development, so it is important to ask those candidates about their plans. As it happens, the County's new high school is very near the Rocky Branch sewage treatment plant. So what happens at that plant not only affects Barber Creek, but also one of the biggest investments the Board of Education has made in recent years.

 

I hope to see you on Monday and Wednesday. If you don't have questions to ask, you might consider some variant of those above. I will be moderating, so I don't expect to be asking any questions.

 

Thanks

 

Lee

 

 

Lee Becker

lbbecker@mindspring.com