Bring back the county’s earlier ordinance

Forget the storage tank regulations and get the soil testing requirements for commercial sites with undergound caves

By WILLIAM SNOWDEN Editor

Everybody wants to protect Wakulla Springs and the aquifer that provides our drinking water.
Everybody.
County commissioners too – though they get blasted by citizens who feel they aren’t doing enough to stop threats to the water as presented by the proposed Inland gas station at the intersection of Bloxham Cutoff and Crawfordville Highway.
The controversy is on hold right now as county commissioners have passed a resolution asking for Florida Forever to buy the property from Southwest Georgia Oil for conservation.
Although the county staff did present an ordinance that would have created more stringent requirements on the site – such as deeper soil borings to determine what was underground, along with studies by specialists to look at if the land was suitable for development. Much of the proposed ordinance dealt with siting of petroleum storage tanks, which the state Department of Environmental Protection told staff would be a pre-emption of its authority.
DEP told the county that they could take over tank inspections for 2 years and then they could start passing tank regulations – something the county is not inclined to do.
Ultimately, the county threw its collective hands up and walked away from the proposed ordinance.
(A citizen-written ordinance was later proposed but it was rejected by commissioners because it proposed setbacks from the underground caves and nobody – at this point – can certify the limits of those caves, which are 100 feet and more underground. For setbacks to be legal, a surveyor above ground needs to be able to put up stakes with red flags that mark the edge of those caves.)
I propose the county salvage the other part of the ordinance  that dealt with more stringent requirements. Have the requirements be invoked for commercial development on land where underground caves have been identified.
For example, divers with the Wakulla Karst Plain Project mapped underground caves along the corners of the Bloxham-319 property. That would invoke the more stringent requirements as sensitive lands without having to do an above ground survey of underground caves.
I don’t know if it would work, I only make the proposal and ask commissioners to consider it.

William Snowden is editor and publisher of The Wakulla Sun.


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