AT ISSUE NEXT WEEK: Church wrestles with what’s best for unspoiled land
Next week, At Issue looks at the sale of the Simpsonwood property.
For 40 years, the Simpsonwood Conference and Retreat Center in Peachtree Corners has meant a peaceful, secluded, tree-covered place for professional development, worship or retreat. Ludie Simpson’s only requests, when donating the 227 acres of land to the North Georgia Conference of The United Methodist Church, were for the land be kept intact and income from the acreage be used to maintain the accompanying chapel.
Seven years ago, amidst trying financial times, the North Georgia Conference began discussing the need to sell the property to manage operating losses of as much as $750,000 annually. With the organization carrying $6 million in debt, and the need for an estimated $2 to $3 million in renovations to the property, the organization must make sound financial decisions.
Residents near the property have attempted legal action to prevent the sale to a private developer. Most are hoping to sway the North Georgia Conference to allow Gwinnett to purchase the land for protection as green space.
Some would argue the church has a responsibility to its membership to obtain the highest bid possible for such valuable real estate. Residents, and those that remember the Norcross schoolteacher who donated the land along the Chattahoochee River, hope the church can meet their financial demands while upholding Miss Ludie’s intentions.
What do you think? We’d like to hear from you.
— Karen Huppertz for the AJC
A year ago Decatur began revising its 1988 tree ordinance, a process that took seven months and underscored the diversity of opinion regarding urban forests including the government’s role in maintaining them.
Fundamentally the new ordinance sought the very difficult balance between the rights of individual property owners and collective community goals. A new ordinance was deemed essential because studies revealed Decatur had lost roughly 700 trees, or 4.1 percent of its canopy — that is, the foliage spread over the city — in the last 27 years.
But a huge factor driving the new ordinance was escalating tension between Decatur’s old neighborhood sensibility and contemporary construction.
With 19,000 people living within 4.2 square miles, Decatur is one of Georgia’s most densely-populated cities. A number of neighborhoods are nearly a century old, and the city was mostly built out by the 1960s. Almost all of the city’s contemporary residential construction consists either of renovating an old house or razing a home entirely and replacing it with much larger homes often called “McMansions.”
New home builders are often accused of ruthlessly cutting all trees in their wake or at least indirectly killing healthy specimens with construction’s stressful impact on a tree’s root system. Conversely, longtime residents have been accused of standing in the way of progress.
Not long after the 18-page tree ordinance took effect in July, the city hired India Woodson — its first full-time arborist. Her official title is landscape infrastructure coordinator. Woodson said she believes contemporary development can and must co-exist with Decatur’s old neighborhood foundation.
“Think about it,” she said, “these new homeowners are going to want a certain quality of life. They’re going to want a green house, they’re going to be attuned to the entire green movement. That means they’re going to want trees, at the very least for the shade and for the reduction in their electric bill.”
One of the document’s enduring strengths, Woodson believes, is that developers are required to present a tree conservation plan.
“What we now understand,” she said, “is that trees aren’t something that [return] after development ends. As we get more high-density development, particularly as we go vertical, we need to look at trees before the process of construction and not after.”
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