Big legal fight drags on for Mountain Park

What price lakeside tranquility? For Mountain Park, it easily tops $1 million.

The city of 500 people, one of the tiniest towns in metro Atlanta, has amassed more than $1 million in legal bills over the past four years, fighting to restore environmental health to its two lakes, Garrett and Cherful.

The lakes are the geographic and cultural center of the rustic, deeply wooded community in north Fulton County, the reason many people choose to live here.

The federal lawsuit, filed in October 2005, was intended to protect the lakes by forcing developers in upstream Roswell to take responsibility for filling the water with harmful sediment. Many people say they thought it would be over by now.

Instead, 700 filings later, the city and several developers remain engaged in a complex legal battle, with the companies arguing the city is blaming them unfairly for its environmental damage.

Three years after the case was launched, the water is still clouded, and many townspeople question whether they should have taken this route.

Cissy Cannon, a 24-year resident, worries the fight will bankrupt the city. “It’s one thing to sue, thinking you’re going after deep pockets,” Cannon said. “It’s another when those deep pockets drag a lawsuit out, knowing you don’t have the money.”

The city has no commercial tax base and just 250 homes. As people in Mountain Park like to say, that’s smaller than many Atlanta subdivisions. To put its legal tab in perspective, the city’s annual budget is about $600,000. The city’s homeowners have already absorbed a 43 percent tax rate increase to help pay for the litigation.

Those who support the lawsuit say clearing the lakes will be even more expensive.

In 2005, a city consultant estimated the price of dredging and disposal at $3 million. Sometime in early 2009, a U.S. district judge may determine who is responsible.

Mountain Park blames the developers who built three upscale and upstream neighborhoods in neighboring Roswell, in addition to a major renovation of the Brookfield West Country Club golf course.

Its lawsuit accuses the companies of violating the federal Clean Water Act by failing to use proper techniques to control soil erosion on their sites.

The companies, meanwhile, say Mountain Park is blaming them unfairly and argue they either did not contribute to the sediment in the city’s lakes or that the city cannot prove who deposited what.

The developments are the 250-acre Lakeside at Ansley subdivision, the 70-acre Huntington Park and the 7-acre Enclave at Brookfield.

Woomer Construction, a company that developed some homes in Huntington Park, is among those fighting the allegations.

“Though the [city] has employed various expert witnesses and done a myriad of studies, it has no evidence at all that Woomer contributed any silt to the lake, or, if it did, to how much,” attorney George Duncan of Atlanta said in a court filing.

Deborah Anthony, an attorney for Chatham Neighborhoods, a developer of Lakeside at Ansley, said the company had acknowledged just one incident in which sediment escaped.

“The lawsuit reflects a much larger charge than that,” she said. “What we think we have done, we want to be responsible for.”

Of the original nine defendants, only the companies responsible for renovating the golf course have settled with the city, said Martin Shelton, an Atlanta environmental attorney who is representing Mountain Park. The 2007 settlement amount is confidential, he said.

Although, in court filings, the remaining companies say they aren’t responsible for the silt that has choked off oxygen to the Mountain Park lakes, Shelton is confident the city can prove they are. And if the city wins, he said, it can recover its attorney fees.

Restoring the lakes shouldn’t be the burden of local taxpayers, said Claire Johnson, a former City Council member who continues to work on the lawsuit. In 2005, a biologist hired by the city determined the two lakes — particularly Lake Garrett — had layers of recently deposited sediment. Redwing Environmental found Lake Garrett had more than 36,000 cubic yards of sediment. To put that into perspective, Shelton said, a dump truck can carry about 10 cubic yards.

Redwing estimated it would cost about $725,000 to dredge the sediment, and an additional $800,000 to $1.8 million to dispose of it.

“I don’t think the taxpayers of Mountain Park should have to pay a dime for what developers did,” Johnson said.

For many people in the town, the battle has become wearying, said Jim Wright, who was mayor when the city decided to sue and who helped sell the fight. Now, he said, he wishes he had understood what the city faced more clearly.

“I just wanted the people to come and get the dirt out of the lakes,” he said, expecting that the city would have compelled developers to settle to avoid court. “It didn’t happen that way.”