Water project raises issues in Statham

Did you attend the same briefing I did?

I don’t really know how UGA Professor Jack Crowley’s class in Environmental Design was briefed before they undertook the study, but their presentation left me empty.

They had a large number of computer-generated slides that, while pretty, could not be read from my fifth-row seat. A visual aid should be used to add to the speaker’s presentation, but just about every student spoke to the slides and seemed not to understand that the audience couldn’t read them.

It wasn’t the slides that really bothered me, though. It was the class’s apparent failure to understand their audience. They had done a marvelous job of developing a number of scenarios by which the Statham Reservoir could be expanded and enhanced to resemble Reston, Virginia, perhaps some place in the middle of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, or at worst, Celebration, Florida. My God, do any of these folks understand what “rural” means to those of us who cherish our lifestyle?

They advanced scenarios by which Statham and its nearby watershed lake could be developed into a monstrosity of walking paths, medium and high density residential areas, commercial and manufacturing sites and farmland on which no livestock could be kept lest their manure seep into the expanded reservoir. They gleefully spoke of how growth could expand Statham and it’s reservoir into a delightful little city where one and all would be served by various levels of residential development, lots of little stores (but no big box stores), and because people should live where they work, plenty of manufacturing and industrial capability.

That last comment has some merit. People should move to where the jobs and conveniences are, not to rural parts of the country where their food is grown.

I think it is time for Barrow County to look at the growth it is feeling and to realize that little of that growth has any benefit to Barrow County. People moved here to escape the congestion of metropolitan Atlanta, Gwinnet County and even Athens. But once they got here, they began demanding the conveniences of the cities, such as a gas station convenience store on every corner, lots of chain places to eat, big box stores to flock to in search of bargains, and, lest we forget, a better highway on which to commute and enough water to sprinkle lawns until little rivers form on their way back to Barber’s Creek.