By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Last week, the city council of Lookout Mountain, Ga., voted to accept an agreement with Dade County Water Authority and Covenant College whereby the town will take over a small sewer system that Dade and Covenant have been juggling between them for decades.

 “We’ve been hammering it backwards and forwards for several weeks now, trying to work out an agreement,” said Doug Anderton, Dade Water Authority manager, reached by telephone on Friday. “The big thing that we’ve worked so hard on is getting funding for this.”

In question were the sanitary arrangements for the Flintstone subdivision, an enclave of some 32 houses within Dade County on Lookout Mountain. The Flintstone subdivision – not to be confused with Flintstone, Ga., an entirely separate and geographically removed entity – is served by one of the few sewer systems in rural Dade, where most houses rely on septic tanks. 

In an unusual arrangement that evolved from the community’s history and geography, said Anderton, the Flintstone subdivision is currently billed for sewer services by Dade Water, but Covenant College is responsible for maintaining the system – an increasingly difficult and costly operation as clay pipes laid in the 1940s succumb to the incursions of tree roots and the ravages of time.

The town of Lookout Mountain will assume responsibility for the system only after a $500,000-plus renovation brings it up to par with the city’s own sewers, said Anderton.  “The question all along has been how it can be renovated to make it compatible with Lookout Mountain’s system so their people would be familiar with how to maintain it,” he said. “That’s what we wanted, is to build it like they’ve got their existing system, so they’d be willing to take it over and run it.”

Bill Pickering, the Lookout Mountain city attorney who worked the agreement out with Anderton, Covenant College representatives and Dade’s county attorney, Robin Rogers, set it out before the council at its Dec. 17 meeting, explaining that it would cost the city nothing and that any of the three parties could walk away if funding arrangements were not satisfactory within 30 days of opening bids. “It’s a huge win-win for the city,” he said.   

Under the deal, Dade Water will contribute $50,000 toward the renovation and Covenant College $150,000, with the balance made up by state and federal funds obtained by a grant writer hired by the college.            

If it sounds as if Dade and Covenant are eager to get shed of the sewer – well, they are. “It’s gotten to a point now where that whole system is totally in shambles,” said County Executive Ted Rumley, interviewed last week. “You have people with sewage backing up in their houses.  I mean, it’s common.”

To understand how Covenant came to be responsible for a county sewer – to understand, in fact, how there came to be a sewer at all, in a county where they are not thick on (under?) the ground – it is necessary to go back to World War II

The Flintstone community was built by the U.S. Air Force during World War II.  .  “It was not really a base,” said Rumley.  “What it was was a radar station.” The station’s lofty position atop Lookout enabled it to scan and identify passing aircraft, he said.

Trenton, Ga., may sound like an unlikely target for German or Japanese bombs, but Rumley points out that there was a solid basis for positioning the radar station on Lookout: It was strategically close to Oak Ridge, Tenn., home of the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb, and also to a powder factory in Chattanooga that produced most of the TNT used by the U.S. and Great Britain during the war.

In the little community built to house personnel for the radar station, the dwellings were too close together to accommodate separate septic tanks, and that’s how Flintstone came to have the rudimentary sewer system that has made messy problems for later residents.

The Air Force dismantled the radar station after the war.  Dade County operated a small elementary school near the site, and thus the sewage system became the property of the county school board.

During the 1980s, Dade closed that school. Covenant College, meanwhile, had moved to the mountain during the 1960s, establishing its campus on the site of the luxurious old Lookout Mountain Hotel, and by then was processing its own sewage. Covenant agreed with the Georgia Environmental Protection Department (EPD) to take over maintenance of the Flintstone sewer as part of a deal allowing it to increase its own treatment levels, necessary because of expansion.

And that – with the sewer technically owned by Dade Water Authority but serviced by the college – is how matters have rested since, in an arrangement increasingly unsatisfactory to all concerned. 

Under the agreement made last week, the new owner of the system, Lookout Mountain, Ga., will maintain it, but Dade County Water Authority will continue to bill residents and then reimburse the town.  “We do that for Covenant College, and we’ll continue to do that for Lookout Mountain,” said Doug Anderton. 

He explained that this is because Dade Water supplies water to the Flintstone community, and sewage charges are based on water usage.  The assumption, he said, is that if a resident goes through 5000 gallons of water a month, those 5000 gallons make their way into the sewage system sooner or later.     

Why is the problem finally being addressed only now?  Rumley described backup problems for homeowners every time it rains hard, and pointed out that 2009 has been a rainy year.  “It’s gotten to the point where you can’t not fix it,” he said.

Anderton agreed that the weather had a lot to do with it, but added that the availability of federal economic stimulus funds was another big factor.  “It was the right time to secure enough funding to renovate the system,” he said.

Both denied that the move had anything to do with the projected needs, if any, of Chapelbrow, a proposed retirement development near Covenant College.  Chapelbrow has been the subject of much discussion in recent months at Lookout Mountain City Council meetings, but now seems to have reached an impasse there. 

Be that as it may, the fact that unglamorous considerations such as sanitary arrangements are key to development may be evidenced by the example of Wild Moon/The Preserve, the project by developer Southern Group at Johnson’s Crook in Rising Fawn.  Southern Group was issued a Dec. 31 court date by the Dade Health Department for failure to comply with the state tourist permitting regulations.  As reported earlier by The Sentinel, a major factor in the Health Department’s beef with the developer is septic tank requirements.

In fact, before the advent of Dade’s subdivision ordinance, adopted just last month, the only rules the county had in place for development were those of the health department regarding septic arrangements.

The sewer system in Trenton proper is operated by the city government, said Ted Rumley, while the Dade County Water Authority operates a line out to Jenkins Park and the Senior Center.  Another system in Wildwood goes to a Chattanooga wastewater facility.

And until something drastic happens, says Doug Anderton, the rest of the county will remain on septic tanks.  “Unless there’s an influx of grant money, it would be difficult to sewer a rural area, and terribly hard to make it affordable to a customer to pay for it,” he said.