Still Hope for Haw River State Park?

I had thought that the issue of the development and golf course next to the Haw River State Park Environmental Center at The Summit was a done deal, so it was with some relief that I read Ed Cone's reference to the matter in his blog today. Ed references an alert put out by Citizens of Haw River Park. Apparently there is further opportunity to make our thoughts and views known to our "never saw a development they didn't like" County Commissioners. I plan to do that, and will be writing the Citizens group to ask how best to do it.

We need another golf course like we need a hole in our head. We have opportunity to have a very real and significant State Park right here in our own county, protecting one of the few remaining undeveloped river and creek basins we have left, a Park which will bring people from all around to our county. The hope and plan was that the state would be able to purchase easements upriver and up creek from The Summit and from the confluence of the Haw River and Mears Fork, eventually having a "Y" shaped park snaking along the river and creek and their bluffs, providing hiking trails and habitat for ever diminishing wildlife, and further protection for the water draining into Mears Fork and the Haw River.

But no, somebody has a burr up his butt about problems with the golf course down the street, and so we have to have yet another affluent exurban development with fancy golf course. And oh how familiar the rationilizations are - these are very nice developers, and they plan to be sensitive to the river front, and provide a buffer, and if don't allow this very nice group of developers to have their golf course we may end up with something much worse. Oh dear!

Well, no. We can avoid ending up with something much worse. The state and the county and supporters of the park can put forth the money to buy either the necessary easements or to buy the land outright, even through eminent domain of necessary. This is a State Park we're talking about, not a mall.

This development will truncate and castrate the Haw River State Park. It ruins it for the most part. The land in question is a large parcel just up stream from the Summit Environmental Center at Haw River State Park, and separates that Center from the confluence of the Haw River and Mears Fork just up river. For the Park to lose opportunity to buy easements or even buy much of that land will ruin the Park site plan, and chop up the whole Park idea.

So here are the options: A State Park or more big houses for rich people? A State Park or yet another golf course?

You can read more about the Haw River State Park here.

John Young hits the nail on the head in his article in todays News and Record.