land use

Recently I read a new book from UGA Press, GUTEN TAG, Y'ALL: GLOBALIZATION AND THE SOUTH CAROLINA PIEDMONT 1950-2000 by Marko Maunula. Maunula's coming to speak this fall at the Spartanburg County Library, and his visit should prompt a lively discussion.

A few weeks ago I sat through a Spartanburg County Council meeting about land use planning. It was a special session to hear ideas from other communities. The guest that day was a former administrator from Berkeley County who had successfully guided it through a transition to zoning and planned growth. I sat quietly in the back and took notes. Many of those surrounding me were developers, true believers with strong opinions about land use.

I understand special interest groups are hard at work alerting their membership about the series of meetings on zoning possibilities and changes to our Spartanburg County land use ordinances.

I'd like to offer a few talking points of my own and focus on a small part of the changes under discussion with our county ordinances: stream-side buffers.

Last weekend we took a spin 30 miles west of town in what, when I was a child, we always called "the mountains."  We never even called it "the mountain front," and it was only after I took geology in college that I learned to refer to it as "the Blue Ridge Escarpment."

There's a theory that everyone has an opposite somewhere in the world, a person that is you, only it's your dark twin turned 180 degrees. I just spent a week in a vibrant little village in southern Ohio. Boiling Springs, South Carolina, meet Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Spartanburg County Council is contemplating entry into the modern era of land-use planning. As Yogi Berra so famously said, "It's déjà vu all over again."

You see, talk of Spartanburg County land-use planning is nothing new. It came up here a decade ago. There's talk now of a referendum in November with a single question to see which way the land-use winds are blowing.

The thought of what Spartanburg County will look like decades in the future disturbs my sleep. On my worst nights I see a vision of unregulated surreal sprawl as we cling to outmoded ideas of prosperity and growth.

When I was a kid growing up on the north side of Spartanburg one of the AM radio stations I listened to claimed to broadcast "from the banks of the mighty Chinquapin." It made Chinquapin Creek, the largest of Lawson's Fork's tributaries, sound like the Mississippi River.