Congressman Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) has announced a settlement between the National Park Service, Swain County and others bringing to a close the decades-long fight to stop a proposed road through the most remote, wild area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The park service will pay Swain County $52 million over ten years, approximating today’s cost of a county road that was flooded in the 1940s to make Fontana Lake, a 29-mile long lake along the southern edge of the national park.
In the 1960s, the National Park Service began building a replacement
road for Swain County along the north shore of the lake, but abandoned
the project after seven miles due to severe erosion and acidic runoff
that wiped out fisheries in several streams. A number of county
residents continued for decades to push for completion of what came to
be known as "the Road to Nowhere," even though the agency, the
governors of North Carolina and Tennessee, the Swain County Commission
all rejected the project on environmental and economic grounds in favor
of a cash settlement with the county.
“This settlement will bring much-needed resources to Swain County for decades to come,” Congressman Shuler said. “The interest on these funds alone will greatly increase Swain’s annual budget and will help the commissioners in their efforts to create jobs, invest in Swain County schools, and improve the county’s infrastructure.”
As this agreement would extinguish a previous agreement signed in 1943 that required the Department of the Interior to build the North Shore Road, all signatories to the 1943 agreement would need to sign the new agreement. In addition to Swain County, the three other parties to the 1943 agreement are the U.S. Department of Interior, the State of North Carolina, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The new agreement acknowledges that the State of North Carolina and TVA have each fulfilled their obligations under the 1943 agreement. Neither party is obligated to additional action in the new agreement. As such, they are expected to sign the new agreement as well.
The Swain County Board of Commissioners will hold a vote on Friday on whether to accept the settlement offer. As acceptance is likely, a signing ceremony is being planned for 11:30am on Saturday, February 6th to officially finalize the agreement. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will be in attendance, as will Congressman Heath Shuler.
DJ Gerken an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center said the announcement "is the tipping point on the North Shore Road story–the resolution of an historical wrong in Swain County, and protection of the park’s most wild, remote area for the future. It’s also a win for American taxpayers, since the road would have cost several times more than this settlement.
Loading...