Originally published in The Anderson Journal. Story by Anna Mitchell. Reprinted with permission.
ANDERSON, SC - A few cars pulled into the parking lot of the Big Water Marina last week under sunny, calm skies – a contrast to the previous weeks’ storms. Dozens of sailboats, their masts reaching 30, 40 feet into...
Originally published in The Anderson Journal. Story by Anna Mitchell. Reprinted with permission.
ANDERSON, SC - A few cars pulled into the parking lot of the Big Water Marina last week under sunny, calm skies – a contrast to the previous weeks’ storms. Dozens of sailboats, their masts reaching 30, 40 feet into the air, floated almost stationary on glassy water.
Owner Jane Davis looked out over her property and assessed the upcoming season. Across the cove, a 10-foot ring of red clay gave evidence of the two-year drought Anderson County has endured.
“We need rain every week,” she said. “But the lake is coming back nicely. I’m looking forward to it.”
Every part of Davis’ 25-year-old business relies on Hartwell Lake being full. When the water is low, recreational boaters get nervous, she said, and stop coming. When those boaters stop coming, she sells less gas. And fewer boating supplies out of her store. Fewer boats pay her the $5 ramp fees or the $43 monthly boat-parking fee. And fewer boats need maintenance in her shop.
Two months of no rain last summer – coupled with four weeks of continued power generation at the Hartwell Lake Dam’s hydroelectric station the previous spring – saw lake levels drop to not-quite historic lows this year.
It was a case, once again, lakeshore real-estate broker Mike Gray said, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers placing power generation before the greater economic needs of recreation in this region.
Anecdotally, men such as Gray – who sells fewer houses when the lake is down – and women such as Davis – who sees fewer retail and rental sales – know that the lake’s drop is bad for business.
But no one so far has taken the time or expense to quantify just how much lake levels correlate to sales in Anderson County, let alone the five other counties in South Carolina and Georgia that border the southeast’s largest manmade water hole.
Without such evidence, Gray said, arguments to the corps that the economic well-being of Anderson County and other communities ought to take a primary role in decisions about lake levels hold little sway.
The economy around Hartwell Lake includes indirect beneficiaries such as the two new grocery stores, a bank, a hardware store and banks that have opened up at Whitehall Road and State 24 in Anderson within the last year – minutes from the widest part of the lake. Similarly, the town of Hartwell, Ga., has major retailers such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart that don’t generally pick locales with just 4,300 residents.
“A lot of things are happening in Hartwell, and it’s an absolute direct influence of the lake,” said Gray, who spoke at a Rotary Club meeting there last week.
Michele Dipert, president of the Hart County Chamber of Commerce, said a low lake means fewer visitors, though she had no statistics to prove that.
“It affects the whole area,” she said.
Over the past several weeks, Gray and Burris Nelson, a commercial and retail sales specialist with the Anderson County Economic Development Office, have traveled to all six counties along Hartwell Lake to pitch a $200,000 study of sales-tax revenues and property sales that correlate to Hartwell Lake. The study, which would be headed up by the Strom Thurmond Institute in partnership with a research division of the Corps of Engineers, would examine 10 years of sales and the impact of varying lake levels.
Among other things, the study would reveal for the first time how much lake real estate exists in each county and how much there is in total. Over 40 weeks – possibly starting this spring – the Institute’s Michael Mikota will study revenue from 1997 to 2007 at marinas, boat retailers, hotels, restaurants, gas stations, rental lake property and outdoor recreation stores. He will also look at fluctuations in development and sales of lakefront property.
“You will know the value and the tax base,” Gray said.
He said the long-term scope of the data will help confirm whether money is actually lost – or just delayed in exchanging hands – when lake levels are down. He said real estate seems to continue to appreciate in value even while it sits unsold. When the water comes up, the price has, too. Also, real estate sales are less frequent in low-water years but tend to be lucrative because they involve expensive properties on deeper water.
“People want to live next to water,” Davis said, “and Hartwell Lake is a big blue spot on the map.”
The corps is putting up $100,000 in planning assistance funds for the study; the rest would have to come from stakeholders interested in its results.
Gray asked the Anderson County Council for more than $34,000.
Anderson County is largest by population and by lake frontage of all the counties that border Hartwell Lake.
“Anderson has always been the hub,” Gray told council members last Tuesday. “If we get this amount from you folks and – I hope you round it up – it would be enough to begin the study.”
Councilmen Bill McAbee and Michael Thompson later said they strongly supported the expense if it could help the local economy – and believe they have the votes on council to see it through.
McAbee has the most lake frontage of all the County Council districts (more than half), and Thompson is second.
“When the corps built the lake, their purpose was flood control,” McAbee said. “The economic impact of the lake is much greater than that because of the change in the economy nearly 50 years ago.”
“We are approaching budget time, and we could make it part of the budget and see how the dollars line up,” Thompson said.
Among the lake economy’s attractions, Thompson said, is the out-of-town sales-tax dollars it brings into Anderson. The county is currently considering placing a 1-cent-sales-tax-for-roads referendum on the November ballot.
Incredibly, Corps of Engineers analysts estimate 10.5 million visitors come to Hartwell Lake annually. The potential revenue could be in the hundreds of millions annually.
By contrast, savings against flood damage were estimated at a total of $13.7 million from 1962 to 2000. The corps’ other purpose in operating the dam – power production – has created more than $330 million in power sales to the Southeastern Power Administration since the dam fired up in 1962, though its hydroelectric generators are used only to sell power during hours of peak demand. The dam produces a fraction of power produced at Duke Energy’s Lee Steam Station or Oconee Nuclear Station.
Oconee Nuclear Station, for instance, produced 15.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually, on average, from 1973 to 2000. Hartwell Lake’s annual average is 468 million kilowatt hours – 3 percent of Oconee’s mark.
“Last January (2007), the corps brought the lake down four feet and then had to cut back,” Gray said. “It took them four or five weeks to do that. And I’m sure they got some power generation. You see how long we are living with it.”
Depending on the results of the Strom Thurmond Institute study, Gray said, he’d like economic development (retail and property sales) added to the list of authorized purposes for Hartwell Lake, along with flood control, hydropower, recreation, water quality, water supply, and fish and wildlife management.
Davis said it’s been a quiet winter at the Big Water Marina.
“Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself, I just think, ‘Thank God I’m not on Lake Lanier,’” she said.