By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@thecitizennews.com

Residents of the homes surrounding Lake Stevens, on Lester Road off Ga. Highway 54 west between Peachtree City and Fayetteville, say they don't know what to do next.

“We haven't decided what we want to do,” said a frustrated Jim Bass, who has made several trips to Fayette County Commission and Fayetteville City Council meetings in recent months to plead the case of the homeowners.

City Council last week told Bass and neighbor Jerry Darby that there's nothing further the city can do about silt that the neighbors believe is still filling their lake, washed in from construction sites nearby.

Last November, the city Engineering Department placed a stop work order on Stonebriar West subdivision, upstream from the lake, citing erosion control violations. In talks with developer Dan Stinchcomb and builders in the subdivision, the city stipulated that siltation in Stevens Lake be cleaned up before the stop work order could be lifted.

But builders maintained that damage to the lake had been minimal, and offered to pay a consultant to conduct a survey. The city agreed to abide by the survey results, lifting the stop work order if it could be shown that the lake had not been damaged.

The consultant's report said that “there was no significant siltation,” said city engineer Don Easterbrook.

Bass said the consultant was unable to obtain a sample from the part of the lake that had been most severely affected, at the north end where a stream that runs through the subdivision feeds into the lake.

“We're very dissatisfied with the report,” Darby told City Council. The report, he said, failed to show “the silt that's in the lake even now as we speak.”

Bass reminded council that a detention pond dam in the subdivision broke last year, and contended that the earthen dam must have washed into the lake. “It's not there anymore. We know it went in the lake,” he said.

Mayor Kenneth Steele said the city's hands are tied. “The agreement was that a professional would be hired to determine siltation, or not, of the lake, and we would go along with the findings,” Steele said, adding that the consultant was hired by the city, not the developer, and his credentials were unassailable.

“As a city we are kind of in a bind,” he said.

If the residents want to carry their fight any further, it may have to be in the courts.

“You still have your civil rights and your legal rights to pursue things as necessary,” Steele told Bass and Darby.

If the neighbors decide to fight on, said Bass, they'll have to pay about $4,000 to get another survey done. Then, if the new survey shows that there is significant silt in the lake, the two surveys may simply cancel each other out.

“We'll be back to square one,” he said. “We'll get together and talk about it. I don't know what we'll do.”