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Mayor is right: This one’s truly a ‘win-win’ for all
Sylva used to be the only incorporated town in the United States with a waterfall inside its city limits.
After the four-lane bypass (U.S. 23-74) was built in the early 1970s, the town could no longer lay claim to that title. Dills Falls, once a popular picnic spot and source of town pride, is gone – a victim of progress.
Sylva still owns some beautiful land – the almost 1,100 acres of pristine forest that comprises its former watershed, which is now known as Pinnacle Park. Fisher Creek runs through it, and there’s probably a waterfall or two.
Town leaders decided once, some 85 years ago, to protect the Fisher Creek property to maintain the quality of their drinking water. Once the property no longer supplied municipal water, talk of other uses surfaced, despite the fact that the area had been leased to the Pinnacle Park Foundation with the understanding there would be no extraction of natural resources. Logging, in particular, has been a recurrent theme.
Throughout the past decade, Mayor Brenda Oliver has worked to persuade board members in another direction – a conservation easement that would permanently keep the watershed in its present undeveloped state. Her first attempts back in 1998 didn’t succeed, but her dogged persistence was rewarded last week with news of a $3.5 million grant to the town in exchange for the timber and development rights to the Fisher Creek tract.
If the mayor needed an incentive to convince town board members to become conservation minded, she got a big one. The money comes with only one stipulation: 40 percent must be used on water quality enhancement projects, which can be things the town will have to fund anyway, like stormwater management measures and water and sewer line extensions, or on things it wants to fund, such as greenways.
The phrase “win-win” situation is bandied about rather freely these days, but this time it’s really the only one that rings true.
We appreciate the efforts Sylva Manager Jay Denton, Clean Water Management Trust Fund field representative Tom Massie, Region A’s Bill Gibson, Land Trust for the Little Tennessee’s Paul Carlson and everyone else who worked to make the grant happen – and especially to Mayor Oliver, who had a dream she wouldn’t let die.
There aren’t many wild places left, and, last time we looked, they weren’t making any more.
Sylva lost one natural treasure. Fortunately for us all, the Clean Water fund came through with a grant to help town leaders save this one.
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