A Lake Wylie group isn’t officially concerned yet. One man fears they’ll be too late.

If someone is going to discourage Duke Energy from selling land near Catawba Nuclear Station, it won’t be the Lake Wylie Marine Commission.

The commission voted Monday night not to send a letter expressing concern for the potential of overdeveloping land along Concord Road. It isn’t that commissioners are fine with the possibility. They just don’t want to overstep their bounds, they said.

“I’m uneasy with it,” said Commissioner Neil Brennan. “There is the potential for something to go wrong, but there’s also laws and rules on sedimentation.”

Chairwoman Lynn Smith has been on the river since before there was a nuclear station, by several decades. She’s a “river rat,” the colloquial term for generations of people who’ve lived and played on Lake Wylie. Her vote not to send the letter shouldn’t indicate she wants more development. Only that the commission isn’t going to dabble in hypotheticals.

“We don’t like the development anywhere, if you’re a river rat,” she said.

Don Clarke with Catawba Nuclear Neighbors addressed the commission Monday night. His group is worried Duke will sell 348 acres, something the company announced intentions for earlier this year, to a developer who then will clear cut the property for high density development. Clarke’s group has myriad concerns including the single road onto their peninsula and public safety, but with the marine commission he focused on an issue they know well.

"Our issue here is safety and evacuation, but that’s not what we’re focusing on here,” Clarke said. “Their charter is the protection of the shoreline.”

Property along Concord Road is steep and surrounded on all but one side by Lake Wylie. To put in enough homes to warrant what he believes will be a high asking price, Clarke said a developer would have to clear the property all at once and level it out considerably. Meaning lots of disturbed soil with all kinds of options for getting into the lake.

“It slopes in all directions toward the water,” Clarke said. “If we had a serious rain event here, there's about a two-mile drop. Recontouring major areas can create a major disaster.”

The commission need look no further, he said, than to the massive sediment spill that occurred on Aug. 20 at a Mattamy Homes site in The Palisades, immediately across a cove from Lake Wylie. More than a half dozen residents came out Monday to talk or ask about the event, with many saying it was the largest breech of sediment in the lake they’d ever seen. Clarke said that site was clear cut right along the water, as he worries land along Concord Road will be. Silt fences were put up there, but they failed.

“We just saw what it can do,” Clarke said. “Obviously this is happening. It's not hypothetical.”

The marine commission has three members each from the counties surrounding Lake Wylie — Mecklenburg and Gaston in North Carolina, York in South Carolina. Two of the three York County members cast the only votes in favor of sending Duke the letter. Commissioner Ellen Goff, a board member with the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, made a motion for it and got a vote of support from Commissioner Blanche Bryant. The other commissioner from York County, George Medler, sided with the group voting not to write one.

“We’re all concerned about the water,” said Medler, who spends as much time on the water as anyone at the Commodore Yacht Club. “We all want to do what we can to protect it.”

The problem for some commissioners is, there is no plan yet. The group typically reviews planned development impacting the water and provides comments or, when necessary, approvals. As they did Monday with a walking trail proposal in Belmont crossing a stream, and a wastewater pipe set for lowering by a utility. The commission would see a presentation for any mass development on the Concord Road peninsula before it occurs.

By then, Clarke argues, it will be too late.

“Once a developer buys this property with the idea of putting however many homes on it, he’s not going to be very responsive to our concerns,” Clarke said. “He bought it on that basis. The time to do this is now. That's what we're trying to get out.”

Clarke’s group would like to see the land become a preserve of some kind, perhaps with remaining lakefront lots sold for top dollar so Duke can get some revenue from it. The group just doesn’t want high density development.

“What they're looking for is a blank canvas,” Clarke said of developers. “All those trees and all that contour, that's not conducive to building homes.”

There are a little more than 100 homes in the area now. Most are former river cabins or estates. Clarke said coves off the peninsula there are some of the cleanest in the lake, because Duke set aside so much property for the nuclear station and surrounding it. The land has been largely untouched for decades.

“We need to start making a stand on this,” Clarke said. “This is the last opportunity to protect a huge area of land.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2017 at 12:38 PM with the headline "A Lake Wylie group isn’t officially concerned yet. One man fears they’ll be too late.."