SPRINGFIELD — Thursday’s public work session at the Effingham County Administrative Complex proved to be quite productive.

Effingham County residents and stakeholders gave the Effingham County Board of Commissioners exactly what it wanted during a 2 1/2-hour discussion — helpful input on managing growth and its impact on maintaining a high quality of life. It appeared that each of the approximately 50 attendees who wanted to speak did.

“It was really a breath of fresh air,” District 2 Commissioner Roger Burdette said Friday. “Everybody had good comments. They were constructive. Nobody was up there just being angry, which isn’t constructive. 

“We had some really good suggestions that made a lot of sense. I was impressed. I think it was a good start to what we are trying to do here.”

Effingham County ranks in the top three percent nationally in terms of population growth. 

“Ten years ago, we were roughly at 52,700 residents here in Effingham County,” County Manager Tim Callanan said during the work session. “The most recent update, which was in March the year after the (2020) census, we were at 66,741. That’s 27 percent growth, or 15,000 residents, in just approximately 10 years.”

Nearly half of Effingham County’s 30,923-member workforce is employed in Chatham County. Only 9,592 stay in the county to work, making poor traffic flow and road safety major concerns among the crowd. The loss of trees to residential and warehouse developments was also a chief worry. 

The board embraced Rita Diaz’s suggestion to make green space a standalone category for the county’s comprehensive master plan. 

“I’d never really thought of green space in that way,” Burdette said. “I don’t know how many other municipalities or counties do that type of thing but that’s a great idea to categorically just filter that out and have its own set of principles that are more friendly to the environment.

“I think that’s a great idea.”

Currently, green space is a small feature of master plans that are being created or updated in the following categories: 

— Transportation Infrastructure

 — Water, Sewer and Reuse Utility Infrastructure

— Storm Water Utility System

— Facility Condition and Utilization

— Park Facilities

— Solid Waste

— Land Use and Zoning Code Review and Modernization

— Updating the County Comprehensive Plan

Green space is a concern because housing developments are gobbling up large chunks of property in the county, especially in Burdette’s district. There have been 680 building permits issued in FY2022, which is close to the record total of 2009.

“Obviously, we don’t have an even distribution of population in the county,” Callanan said. “Most of it is closer to I-95 and the Chatham County border.”

Despite the housing boom in the county, residential land use accounts for just 13,031 acres. 

“There are 10 times as much agricultural property as there are residential or industrial,” Callanan said.

The board’s efforts to keep up with growth has been hindered by a lack of funds. The tax digest ($2,504,458,101) hasn’t mirrored population growth. It is up 24 percent since 2009 but remained below the 2009 level for nearly a decade in the wake of the Great Recession

 “We had a massive decline in revenues even though the population continued to grow,” Callanan said. “Because we were in a recession, (the board) did not respond by raising millage rates and so, therefore, we were having to cut back on things, mostly deferred maintenance and that sort of items during those low years, and we are still digging ourselves out of a little bit of a hole when it comes to getting our infrastructure back up to par but we are getting there.”

Effingham County government responsibilities include providing Emergency Medical Service, 911 emergency dispatch, emergency preparedness, parks and recreation, road infrastructure and maintenance, water and sewer service, county correctional facility, animal shelter, development services (planning, zoning, code enforcement, permitting and inspections), sheriff’s office and jail, assessor, tax commissioner, court system, justice, coroner and voter registration and elections.

Callanan noted that tax revenue didn’t rise 24 percent since 2009 like the digest. That is because of millage rate rollbacks.

“... we are behind the eight-ball now so this relatively new board is on here and we are looking at all the future, the rapid growth that we’ve got, and we’ve got to figure out how to meet it,” said Wesley Corbitt, board chairman, during the work session. “That’s why we want your help and your input. You can throw a rock at us tonight — that’s OK, we can handle it — but we want to hear what we need to hear, not what you think we want to hear.

“We can make better decisions when we hear what we are supposed to hear.”

Voters recently boosted the board’s ability to tackle transportation needs by passing TSPLOST, a one percent sales tax that can by used solely for transportation purposes. It is expected to generate $45 million over the next three years.

“We’ve chose to go out and get the bonds so we can get the money, get the contracts going, finish the (Effingham) parkway, finish the safety, the roundabouts. You are going to see a lot of work there,” Corbitt said.

Highway safety is one reason Burdette thinks a moratorium should be considered in parts of the county, including the “bottleneck” in the Hodgeville Road/Kolic Helmy Road/Ga. Hwy 30 area. 

“It’s getting to the point where people can’t get out of their driveways,” Burdette said Thursday. “Now it’s a safety issue rather than just a hindrance or an aggravation of traffic so that’s when I had the idea of a moratorium.”

Early in the work session, Corbitt predicted that the 680 active building permits will result in about 4,500 more cars on Effingham County roads. There are 1,700 available lots for homes in District 2, Burdette said.

“We’ve got a big problem now and it’s coming,” Burdette added.

At a minimum, Burdette thinks the board should find a way to slow growth in “pressure points” until all the county’s master plans and some key road projects are completed.

Some of the commissioners voiced a wariness of the term “moratorium” but agreed that there might be a way to slow growth in hot spots of growth. Burdette noted that only one member of the audience spoke against a moratorium.

On Friday, Burdette voiced support for a three-year halt on development.

“I will be the first one to stand up and end it early if we can see light at the end of the tunnel a little bit,” he said.

Another immediate county problem is water and sewer capacity. A shortage of water availability recently prevented it from landing a Gallo wine processing site, thereby costing it a major taxpaying industry. 

“That would have been some wonderful jobs for some folks, probably a very clean business in our area ...,” Corbitt said. 

The county’s wastewater treatment plant is limited to 500,000 gallons due to the capacity to discharge onto spray fields. Expanding spray field capacity could increase water treatment capacity to 1 million gallons per day.

At the end of the work session, Corbitt vowed that residents would have additional opportunities to share their thoughts and ideas.

“A lot of times we don’t have all the answers,” Burdette said Friday. “I will be the first one to admit it. We are not supposed to have all the answers.

“We are supposed to work with the people.”