Fair / 58° F
Polk planning board chooses 25-percent slope as threshold for engineering studies
Published 5:36pm Monday, August 13, 2012Vote split 4-3
The Polk County Planning Board has chosen a 25-percent slope as the threshold for requiring an engineer to conduct studies prior to building.
The planning board met Thursday, Aug. 9 and approved the 25-percent threshold in Article 24 of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), which deals with regulations for steep slopes. Members Lisa Krolak, David Smith, Susan Welsh and Harry Petersen voted in favor of the 25-percent threshold while members Bill Ennis, Wayne Horne and Lee Bradley voted against.
County engineer Dave Odom attended the meeting to answer questions.
Odom reviewed studies done on a home he engineered in Polk County.
Ennis said the planning board is wrestling with what percentage of slope to set as the trigger for some additional requirements and asked Odom’s opinion on what that slope should be. The studies required at the threshold Polk County ultimately chooses will include a geotechnical analysis and report and a hydrology report.
Odom said Thursday he was literally pulling a number out of a hat, but if the slope is less than 20 percent he feels there’s no need to call on an engineer unless there are other issues such as drainage.
“That’s just pulling a number out of the hat,” Odom said.
Ennis said, unfortunately, that’s what the planning board has to do.
The planning board has been discussing what percentage of slope should require an engineer since receiving a recommended unified development ordinance (UDO) from the UDO committee earlier this year. The UDO committee recommended that the county take out elevation requirements from the county’s mountainside and ridgeline protection ordinance (MRPO) and choose a slope factor instead.
The county’s MRPO restricts any commercial building at elevations 1,650 feet and above, which includes all of Saluda Township.
The UDO committee recommended by a split vote that the percentage of slope requiring an engineer be 30 percent or above.
Ennis, Horne and Bradley said they would be comfortable with the 30 percent threshold, but the majority of planning board members disagreed and approved 25 percent as the planning board’s recommendation to the Polk County Board of Commissioners.
Ennis said out of 140 incidences of slope failures in North Carolina, there was only one occurrence at a slope of between 20 and 29 percent. Ennis said he thinks 20 percent is a little radical. [See page13 for a letter to the editor from Ennis.]
“The threshold I’m concerned about is when the owner needs to start paying for an engineer,” said Ennis.
Smith said in his research of 21 other areas with ordinances most stopped development completely at 25 percent. He questioned where the 30-percent recommendation came from and called it an arbitrary number.
Welsh said from Smith’s research, it looks like 60 percent of the 21 ordinances set the slope threshold at 25 percent.
“There again that’s a significant number of ordinances choosing 25 percent,” said Welsh.
Smith added that 98 percent of the 21 places set the threshold at 25 percent or lower and that he randomly searched steep slope ordinances using Google and chose the first 21 he found.
A majority of residents making public comments regarding the recommended slope threshold said they were pleased the board chose 25 percent.
Resident Bob Tobey said he is very pleased the majority chose the lower number. He said he and his wife own land that can be developed and that is why he wants a lower number.
“I think if we have less homes on our hillsides we will have more valuable property,” Tobey said.
He said our local people are smart and aren’t building on 25 percent slopes anyway. He said the people coming to Polk County looking to build a mountain home want a little acreage and a view if they can get it, and they don’t want that view of the mountain to be covered with homes.
Mill Spring resident Jay Davies mentioned a couple in Macon County who left Florida because of a hurricane and thought they’d be safe in their mountain home. He said the Macon County house slid off in the rain and they died.
“We don’t want anyone in Polk County to suffer that,” Davies said.
Polk County Commissioner Renée McDermott read an email from Ruby and Jerry Drew. The Drews said they were victims of erosion from a building site in Asheville.
“It is better to put protections in place than fix after the fact,” the Drews said. “It was a real mess to clean up.”
Lake Adger resident Sky Conard said erosion is a problem at Lake Adger. She mentioned the eroding banks of the lake and the filling up of the county’s reservoir. Conard said the depth of the water at the dam used to be 87 feet and it is now at 37 feet. She also mentioned it took rescuers a long time to find the most recent drowning victims at Lake Adger because of the thick debris in the bottom of the lake.
“If the USGS (United States Geological Survey) is telling us that 25 percent is a threshold then this is what we need to use,” Conard said.
Dave Maxwell and Burt Baer also said they agreed with the 25-percent threshold, saying the county’s resources need to be protected.
William Day was the only person from the public to disagree with the planning board’s decision. He said the county has a system in place called a building inspections department that is quite efficient and doesn’t take risks. He said if it’s not in their two-inch-thick codebook the inspectors won’t allow it, and the system Polk County has works.
The next planning board meeting will be held tomorrow, Wednesday, Aug. 15 at 5 p.m. at the Womack building in Columbus. The board plans to review all the changes to the UDO draft made so far and could vote on the majority of the document this week.
The planning board also has a meeting scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 22 and could also hold a joint workshop with commissioners to review the draft.
The planning board will send a recommended draft UDO to commissioners for final approval. Commissioners have set Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. as a public hearing and special meeting to hear public comments and possibly adopt the majority of the UDO. The planning board has decided to work separately on Article 25, which deals with ridgelines.
Our disgust with the UDO comes not from the simple fact of life that some regulation is needed. It just goes too far with a mass of new regulation at enormous costs in the future to property owners. Our disgust comes from a government here locally which has for generations engaged in just the exact abuse of our county with heavy equipment and grading which the UDO is confronting as an issue now using Chocolate Drop as the never ending example and ignoring the corruption of local government in its myraid of forms which has got away with this using the local corrupt good old network since Polk County began. It is simply not ethical to use as your long list of justifications all the landslides and floods, including Chocolate Drop, when in fact most of your long list of justifications was caused by the activity and corruption of government in one form or another. Chocolate Drop is an isolated instance by one individual developer. NOW, using it as impetus, the same government which did exactly what the Chocolate Drop developer did for years, to build I-26(far far worse matter), to build and maintain the Railroad for 135 years (far, far worse matter), to build and maintain 176 over Saluda Grade(far, far worse matter), and on with a near endless less and I did not start on utilitys or lakes such as lake Lanier or the 1916 flood. On top of that you got the simultaneous instance when Chocolate Drop disaster occurred on the INTENTIONAL USE, CREATION, AND STILL UNREPAIRED LANDSLIDE AT MILEPOST 39 ON THE RAILROAD WHICH WAS USED BY THE CORRUPT LOCAL GOVERNMENT WHICH YOU CONTINUE TO COVER UP, WHICH YOU USE AS PART OF YOUR JUSTIFICATION FOR THE UDO.
THE UDO IS A BAD THING FOR POLK COUNTY PERIOD, IN EVERY WAY, AND IT IS JUSTIFIED BY A CORRUPT GOOD OLD BOY LOCAL SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT POLITICS ONGOING FOR YEARS WHICH SEEKS TO REGULATE LOCAL CITIZENS WHILE IT DOES AS IT PLEASES……….DOING FAR, FAR WORSE THINGS ON AN ONGOING BASIS IN THE NAME OF GOVERNMENT…………THAN CHOCOLATE DROP EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE.
You sir are the PROBLEM.
I REMAIN YOUR DISGUSTED localnative………..and it appears I am the only person in this county left who notices our corrupt local government good old boy system which is once again, as many times before, determined to impose new burdensome laws upon us while ignoring the real problem………the real problem is our corrupt local government. Always has been.
The less regulation we have, the more we get to do what we want. While I’m totally sympathetic with the people who feel like “it is my property; I’m entitled to do with it what I want”, I think we all need to ask our selves a question. How far are we willing to see our neighbors go doing what they want before we object? Can they set up a meth lab with all the associated coming and going, robberies, etc? No, we hope to be protected from that. Can they take a bulldozer to their land and strip off all vegetation so that in the first big rain the entire slope comes down the hill and takes out our house, etc? A bit trickier, I guess. Can they sell their 1/2 acre on a narrow 2 lane road right next to our residential area to Walmart/Sams Club/Home Depot, etc? Sqwack!!! But can we stop them. How far are those others allowed to go to make a fast buck by stepping on us little guys, then leave the area while our taxes go up to widen the road, our insurance goes up (or diappears) to replace our house (while we camp in a motel room we can’t afford.
In my humble opinion, all of the above constitute a form of theft that we little people deserve to be protected from.
So before you get caught up on the “liberty” band wagon, think hard about whose liberty is being protected – the fat cat who wants to make a killing and is paying to get you all stirred up, or yours?
SmartysMom
p.s. We weren’t happy with the lay of the land on the back of our property so hired a bulldozer guy to modify it slightly. It was not even a 20o slope. That was 2007. We’ve been working mightily since then to keep the whole goldurn hillside from washing down the hill, holding our collective neighborhood breaths, as it were. I drive by a lot much steeper than ours on Pea Ridge rode with fascination watching what has happened since it was cleared. I don’t think we can count on people knowing what will work and self regulating. History (have we forgotten Chocolate Drop so soon!?) doesn’t bear that out.
The UDO as proposed regulates the county as if it was an incorporated area. I simply find it amazing that this legislation has got along this far and to be to the point of obvious approval regardless of what anyone thinks now, at this late stage. About 95 per cent of the land in POlk in unincorporated and classified as UNRESTRICTED still in 2012 with very little local regulation in comparison to this UDO which can only be described as SWEEPING in terms of the amount of change and scope it provides to create an enormous alarming local government machine of enforcement pushing out into the county at large with the kind of restrictions on property owner use and at large changes WHICH NOW ARE ONLY FOUND INSIDE DEVELOPMENTS WHERE PEOPLE BOUGHT PROPERTY TO BUILD BECAUSE THEY WANTED RESTRICTIONS. While proposed to protect farming, in reality there is not much farming going on in Polk in relation to in the past and this UDO will be a big blow to folks who just want to clear some land for a big garden. It says no clearcutting which throws timber out the window and it looks like if you plan on building a home in the future UDO will assure it has trees hanging over the house! It literally brings the interpretation of a local inspector into every move a property owner will make in our future and IT ENDS PROPERTY RIGHTS AS WE NOW KNOW IT.
To put a period to the disgust every property owner must have for the UDO is the simple fact it leaves out the activity, as proposed, of all kinds of special uses like cell phone towers and all the activity of incorporated areas of polk county already, (the towns), and we all know how the towns demands for resources have spilled out into the townships demanding water and caused endless erosion problems. To add to the ridiculous aspect of the UDO, it uses in the ongoing process we see of the planning board the very real historical problems caused by local goverments and the towns as JUSTIFICATION for why this is needed in the first place. It is a case of the towns now impose on the county outside folks the same regulation inherent inside the incorporated area of the towns. We can read between the lines to clearly see, in the proposal, the ink will not be dry on the UDO before local government will grow enormously with a whole new layer of government to enforce it which we will see both fees and new hires to support. Guess who will pay for all that regulation? Guess who will benefit? The folks who imposed UDO will benefit. They are not telling the whole story. It leaves out regulation on the very folks who in the history of POLK caused the most erosion and landslide, flood, you name it problems.
UDO IS A BAD IDEA AND IT IS A CORRUPT PROCESS BY A LAME DUCK COMMISSION INTENT ON IMPOSING THE TOWN IDEALISM OF REGULATION ON POLK COUNTY AT LARGE.
POLK COUNTY MUST WAKE UP AND STOP THE UDO.
I remain your, as always, very disgusted with local government and good old boy politics locally……..
LOCALNATIVE
I live on steep slopes high up on the mountain. Of course I disagree with the 25 per cent value. This is an unnecessary action taken by the planning board. These mountains are very, very stable and very old subgrades and even on the steepest slopes the size of the grading operation needed to construct a home necessitates so little grading activity that adding this need to hire and engineer adds enormous expense to use of my property for the future. Anyone who ever sat on a grading machine to do grading work here will be pleased to explain how hard the ground is and how folks for generations have chiseled out a small patch of level ground on steep slopes and had it remain without any erosion problems or imposing on their neighbors. Demanding everyone spend money on some engineer who uses his college degree instead of that practical knowledge is a pure silly waste of money and is simply motivated by the lasting and ongoing demand of the local towns of Tryon, Columbus, and Saluda to impose their ideas and values on us country folks who live outside the tiny incorporated areas in POlk county. The planning board is made up of folks who do not KNOW anything about our ground here because they never dug in the ground here themselves on any scale and they hire highly paid experts who do not live here and who have only one mission. That mission is to put money in the pocket of engineers. That mission is what our planning board is intent upon. The intention is to make construction of a new home so expensive and so tangled in goverment red tape that very few will be built in the future and local folks who try to get a permit will find just the cost of the permits and the red tape means their land they inherited or owned for many years is now worthless to them. It will increase the tax burden as the government grows endlessly to accomodate the new regulations imposed. Once you get a new regulation then it has to be enforced.
The really, really bad part of this is the corruption inherent in the good old boy corrupt Polk County network which will pass this and will impose it on the many property owners who will look at this with disgust for all eternity. And in the mix of the matter is simple fact at least half of the pile of data used to justify the need for this legislation is its produced by corruption in local government. UDO, as it is being presented, is simply a bad idea because in that pile of data used as justification is a myraid of statistics much of which was created intentionally by local government activity producing the history of landslides, floods, and disaster in the past in the form of roads, railroad, local government water supplys, lakes, water lines and utility work. When you take that justification away about all you got left is Chocolate drop and the simple fact it is visible from Columbus. They cried so loud they drowned out the far, far more serious corruption of the FEMA fraud Milepost 39 landslide CREATED ON PURPOSE BY THE LEAKING WATER LINE OF THE TOWN OF TRYON WHICH JUSTIFIED THE FEMA GRANTS ON THE PACOLET RIVER AND HARMON FIELD REPAIRS. THE TRACKS STILL HANG IN THE SKY AS MUTE REMINDER OF THE FRAUD, COVERUP, AND ONGOING DECEIT OF THE SAME GOOD OLD BOY NETWORK WHICH HAS NOW SET THIS 25% RULE. DO NOT BE DECEIVED. THE PLANNING BOARD SEEKS TO IMPOSE THIS ON US AS PRIVATE CITIZENS WHILE FOR ALL THE YEARS TO COME GOVERNMENT IN ITS MANY FORMS WILL REMAIN EXEMPT, AS ALWAYS……………FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY OF ITS OWN FAR FAR MORE SERIOUS EROSION PROBLEMS WHICH IT CREATES ON WHIM. Planning board likes to point at the citizens of Polk while it ignores government messes and this enormous legislation imposed on us is not the answer. WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO REPAIR THAT SLIDE AT MILEPOST 39 PLANNING BOARD? OUR GOVERNMENT PROVIDED MONEY FOR REPAIRS………..AND THE MONEY WAS SPENT DOWNSTREAM. NOW YOU COME UPSTREAM AND IMPOSE ON US AS CITIZENS TO PAY FOR ENGINEERS WE DO NOT NEED. THE ENGINEERS DO NOT KNOW OUR COUNTY…….THEY DO NOT LIVE HERE. I REMAIN, AS ALWAYS, YOUR DISGUSTED WITH LOCAL GOOD OLD BOY NETWORK POLK COUNTY POLITICS……..localnative.