If people can’t build on certain portions of their property, then they shouldn’t be expected to pay taxes on that portion of their property. Property owners must be compensated for the taking of their property.

Relevance?

Thunder Pig that makes no sense. I can’t build a house on top of the stream and springs on my mountain. The county certainly isn’t going to deduct that portion of the land off my taxes. That would also mean in suburban subdivisions with building setbacks from property lines the unbuilt land without house on it would have to be deducted from taxes.

There is a soil test for the septic drain field and a soil compaction test for the foundation. What is wrong with identifying land prone to landslides? Are you opposed to building codes?

Try a better argument. And don’t buy a house high up in Maggie Valley. Just sayin.

Thunderprig needs to educate himself on the issue of instability based on readily available soil survey data.  But I doubt he’ll bother.

The relevance, Bill Smith, is that this person writing at BlueNC, and people of a similar political persuasion, want to use limited cases like this to prevent people from building homes on their own property where slides may have the potential of occurring only on a geologic time scale. On a geologic time scale, this entire region was above the tree line, as the Appalachians were once higher than the Himalayas.

A member of the Macon County planning board, of a similar political persuasion of the writer at BlueNC, said that perhaps 20% of the land in Macon County should be off limits for housing construction due to both the risk of landslide and what was called ‘the fallout zone’ where debris from a landslide could travel down slope and could cause damage to a house not even on a slope.

This would amount to the taking of private property by regulation and the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution says that the taking of private property cannot occur without just compensation. My position is that a proportional lowering of property taxes needs to occur as compensation for the private property being deemed off limits for potential home construction. For example, if I owned 50 acres of land, and 45 acres of it were declared by regulation to be illegal to build a house on, then my property taxes on that land should be reduced accordingly.

At Peek’s Creek…there was no housing on the slope where the slide started. The houses destroyed and damaged were thousands of feet down slope.

Davyne, contrary to your repeated attempts on this website to paint a picture of me as an ignorant person who just spouts off nonsense off the top of my head, I have studied the maps of Macon County produced by the NC Geological Survey and have spoken to geologists concerning these maps. I even have had digital copies of them for several years. This includes the Slope Movement Deposits Map, the Stability Index Map, and the Downslope Hazard Map. I have sat for hours in packed meetings where these maps (and more) were discussed with great passion by those who said they should be strictly adhered to as a foundation for future regulation and those who don’t agree with that assessment (Many of those hours are posted online on my main You Tube Channel). This issue played a big role in flipping the political majority of our board of county commissioners from Democrat to Republican in the 2010 election and will again play a big role in the 2012 election.

The area marked in red in the following map are the areas where some don’t want people to be able to build houses. That is 24% of the land area in the county. Many people have lived in houses on this land for generations.
Map: http://twitpic.com/716n9v

The map was produced by the NC Geological Survey with many caveat, including the following: “This predictive mapping is not intended to be a substitute for a detailed, onsite analysis by a qualified geologist or engineer.”

In fact, Davyne, my main motivation to begin recording and posting videos of the meetings of local governing boards was inspired by my outrage over the removal of a person from the planning board based on political motivations. That member was willing to stand up for the rights of property owners in Macon County.

The local media was silent on the matter, mainly because they were themselves Lefties who wanted to use the steep slope issue as a smoke screen for keeping homes from being built on what they called a view shed. They believe that their sense of beauty overruled the right of private property owners.

That was when I decided to start covering these meetings and posting the full video of the meetings online (on my own dime, thank you) it was so people could see for themselves exactly what was going on, not edited for length or through the biased coverage of the local media.  People can watch the videos and decide for themselves what to think about what happened at these meetings.

So, Davyne, I do think, and I do have legitimate moral and philosophical motivations for doing what I do. And, unlike the Cylons, I do actually have a plan. :p