OPINION: Dogsboro sewage treatment will boost commerce in county

A $500,000 grant comes from the OneGeorgia Authority financing program, and a $1.6 million Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority grant and more than $300,000 in private investments.

Initially, the facility will be available to commercial users only. Residential buildings in the area will continue to depend on septic tanks for water treatment.

Septic tanks are not adequate for most large water users, but are the only choice at the moment. The Ingles store, for example, was originally intended to be a fully developed shopping center, but the septic tank system currently used by the store will not handle the sewage that a shopping center would produce. The water treatment facilities being developed would allow greater use of that area as a retail center. Several other commercial areas between Dogsboro and Hull-Sanford school have failed to find developers due to lack of water treatment. The proposed facility would allow more rapid development of the area.

Madison County lags far behind neighboring counties in commercial development due to decisions made in the past. For a long period of time, the leaders of the county, with the approval of the local residents, opposed any kind of growth in the county. It was their wish to keep the county a quiet rural area depending on agriculture as its primary industry. As a result, numerous opportunities to build a commercial system were rejected.

During the Kennedy/Johnson administrations, a program to develop the Appalachian region then considered the most poverty-stricken area of the nation, including Madison County. There were programs to develop infrastructure available to the county, but the powers that be chose not to apply for them. Several production and processing plants sought to locate in the county, but they also met with local resistance and chose to locate elsewhere.

Shortly after I launched The Madison County Journal, I had a conversation with an official from a national restaurant chain. They wanted to locate a steakhouse in the Dogsboro area. A corner of the Ingles parking lot was left unpaved as a possible location for the store. But company officials dropped their plans when they learned that there are no sewage lines in the area. They said that they could not operate a major restaurant on a septic tank. That lot still sits empty.

A fully developed commercial center around the Dogsboro intersection would greatly benefit Madison County. Not only would it provide jobs for many of our unemployed citizens, it would produce a major boost in the county’s tax revenues, both property taxes and local sales taxes. So keep your fingers crossed that the new effort to build a commercial water treatment plant is successful.

Frank Gillispie is founder of The Madison County Journal. His e-mail address is frankgillispie671@msn.com. His website can be accessed at http://frankgillispie.tripod.com/