No storage, improvements allowed within 100-foot zone

Peachtree City staff has compiled a revised ordinance that will help protect water quality at the city’s two reservoirs: Lake Kedron and Lake Peachtree. The ordinance also forbids private improvements from city-owned greenbelt areas.

According to the proposed ordinance, the lakes would be surrounded by a 100-foot undisturbed buffer area encircling the lakes where no vegetation could be removed or planted.

Also, the city would prohibit any impervious surface from being built within a 150-foot buffer encircling the lakes. In addition to banning new paved paths, the new rules would also forbid any septic tanks and septic tank drainfields.

The same buffers and associated rules also would apply to perennial streams leading to and from the lakes, according to the ordinance.

The ordinance defines the buffer zones as being measured from the “normal pool level” of the lakes. Residents will be allowed to walk through the buffer areas and greenbelt sites, according to the ordinance.

Residents will also have to remove storage areas from the buffer that some have used to keep boats, trailers or campers. Improvements such as concrete benches, fire pits or other equipment are also banned from the buffer zone.

Also residents could not use any herbicides, pesticides or other chemicals in the buffer, according to the proposed ordinance.

The city would allow residents to perform “limited activities” in the buffer zone if they get a permit from City Hall first. Those approved activities would include, with a number of restrictions:

• Thinning or limbing up selected canopy trees;

• Selective maintenance of shrubs and forest undergrowth;

• The cutting down of dead trees if the tree presents a significant threat to citizens or property;

• The cutting down of diseased trees to prevent further transmission of the disease. The determination must be made by a registered landscape architect or arborist;

• Hand removal of trash and noxious weeds; and

• Adding native vegetation to the buffers from a list of acceptable plants and trees on file with the city;

If any removal, pruning or planting is planned in the buffer, the citizen must submit a plan by a registered landscape architect or arborist that must specify exactly what vegetation is to be removed, limbed up or pruned, the ordinance states.

The ordinance would not apply to any lots which have plats that were recorded without watershed protection buffers and setbacks. That in effect grandfathers buffer issues on the west side of Lake Peachtree, which is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

The ordinance also grandfathers in any existing cart paths that encroach on the buffers under the new ordinances’ impervious area requirements.

The changes must first be adopted by the Peachtree City Council before they can be enforced.

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