News

TVA money will fund DuPont visitors center, East Fork purchase

Lower Falls is one of the natural attractions on the East Fork. Photo courtesy of Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy.

By Bill Moss, Published: September 6, 2012

FLETCHER — Money from a TVA settlement over coal plant pollution will help complete the purchase of the 8,000-acre East Fork headquarters from the family of former U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, state Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler announced today.

Some of the TVA settlement money will go also to DuPont State Forest to fund a long-range plan and build a visitors center, Troxler said, and the rest will go to the N.C. Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Fund, which is administered by the state Department of Agriculture.
Troxler, in Fletcher for Friday's opening of the Mountain State Fair, outlined plans for using $2.24 million of the $350 million settlement the TVA agreed to spend on environmental mitigation. As part of the settlement, the TVA is sending $60 million to North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky for the states to spend on projects they choose.
The use of the TVA money had become contentious in the Legislature, with Henderson County legislators fighting to make sure it was spent in the west and not in North Carolina regions less affected by TVA emissions. Henderson and Transylvania counties are among 17 counties in the west eligible for use of the money.

Hendersonville-based Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy had not received an exact figure for the amount it would get.

"They had given us a general sense of the amount but they haven't said for sure," said CMLC Executive Director Kieran Roe. "It will be in the substantial six figures."

He said he expected the amount would buy another 200 acres of the East Fork Land, a fraction of 8,000 acres. "Every little bit will help on this acquisition," Roe said. "This is a piece of a much larger effort to pay off the purchase in its entirety."

Troxler also did not identify a specific amount for the DuPont State Forest visitors center. "He did not say how much but it sounded like it would be enough to create a visitors center," Roe said.
Preservation of the Taylor tract goes back to July 2010, when Taylor and is family announced an agreement to sell the land to conservation organizations in phases over six years.
In December 2010 the Conservation Fund bought 786 acres along an eight-mile boundary of South Carolina, a tract that contains a section of the 107-mile Foothills Trail in the mountains of North Carolina and South Carolina.
In February 2012 the N.C. Natural Heritage Trust Fund awarded $4.1 million to the N.C. Forest Service for a second installment, and a month later the federal government designated the East Fork Headwaters as a priority site under "America's Great Outdoors," an initiative to promote conservation.
Among the project partners are the Carolina Mountain Conservancy, Land Conservancy, the Conservation Fund, Foothills Trail Conference, N.C. Forest Service, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The East Fork land owned by the former Rep. Taylor, a banker and longtime lumberman and one of the largest private landowners in Western North Carolina, is part of a vast area of public lands owned by the state or federal government or other public bodies. Among the lands in Transylvania County and beyond are the 14,000-acre DuPont State Forest, Nantahala National Forest, the Toxaway gamelands, Gorges State Park, Table Rock (S.C.) State Park, the Greenville watershed, Caesar's Head and Jones Gap (S.C.) state parks and the 510,000-acre Pisgah National Forest.