Here’s What I Think

Pamela Pritt
Editor

You’ll have to forgive my confusion.

In the last two elections for county commission, both successful candidates ran on a platform that said property rights were sacred.

No one should be able to tell anyone else what they can or cannot do with their own property. No one, they said, had that right.

But sometime in the past few months Commissioners Martin Saffer and David Fleming must have changed their minds. Because now, they don’t want Waco Oil and Gas to expand its quarry at Linwood. They agree with Snowshoe homeowners—not the resort, it hasn’t commented on the expansion yet—that the quarry will be a detriment to tourism and property values in the area. Saffer and Fleming didn’t wait to hear from the quarry owner about his plans. They capitulated to one round of negative sentiment from one side of the issue.

They’ve even had the temerity to tell a property owner in another state they don’t like his plans for his land.

Those homeowners and the commissioners may be right about what quarry expansion in that area will do. I won’t argue about a threat to tourism or to property values.

But that’s not my point.

The point is that Saffer and Fleming were either disingenuous when they campaigned or they’ve changed their minds about property rights.

Which is it?

I actually wrote this editorial last week, but decided to talk to both commissioners and find out why the seeming change in ideology.

Fleming’s response was that the second home community had grown up around the quarry while it lay dormant. Saffer said that Waco needed to be part of the  county’s plan.

What plan?

We don’t have one, at least not yet. And in lieu of one, property owners, while having the responsibility of taking care of their land and respecting their neighbors, can pretty much do whatever they like on their own land.

In my heart of hearts, I am an environmentalist. I don’t like seeing land torn apart. That’s the farmer in me. I was taught to take care of the land and it would take care of me. But I use electricity brought to me by coal-fired power plants and I drive on roads that have beds made from the products of quarries. The roads to Snowshoe Mountain Resort were built with rock from the very quarry that the homeowners now opppse.

Here’s what I think—it’s incumbent on us to take care of our land, but without the structure of landuse planning, I don’t believe that the county commission can have a say in what a landowner can do with his property. Whether anyone else likes the idea of quarry expansion at Linwood, the landowner is well within his rights to use his property as he sees fit.

And by a couple of politicians’ own admissions, no one has the right to tell him otherwise. No one.