Cut-rate land sale by DOE angers critics

February 28, 2001

By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel senior writer

OAK RIDGE -- Conservationists, already upset that the U.S. Department of Energy was selling a piece of Clinch River floodplain to boost a proposed residential development, expressed outrage Tuesday at news that the property sold for a relative pittance -- $54 an acre.

"Heck, for the price of dinner for two the other night, I could have bought an acre of wetlands," said Dev Joslin of Advocates For the Oak Ridge Reservation. "I could have traded in one of our cars for the whole 182 acres."

The advocacy group, the Tennessee Conservation League and the Southern Environmental Law Center are among the groups that have criticized the Energy Department for poor land-use planning on the federal reservation.

Earlier, the groups contested the Energy Department's plan to sell the 182-acre parcel, saying the agency's environmental assessment failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. They accused the Energy Department of segmenting reviews for each proposed development without looking at overall impacts on the 34,000-acre reservation.

For those who wanted to preserve the federal land for recreation and research, the transaction was especially painful.

"Certainly, from an ecological standpoint, it's very sad," said Virginia Dale, an environmental research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Joslin said a 1995 report by The Nature Conservancy characterized the floodplain area "of very high biological significance."

Many groups would have paid much more than $54 an acre to preserve the land in its current condition, Joslin said.

Developers had portrayed the strip of land as critical to a proposed residential development on 1,200 acres nearby. The floodplain parcel gives the development river access.

Oak Ridge city officials said the housing project is needed to expand the infrastructure westward and help the local economy.

The Roane County deed shows the 182-acre parcel was sold Feb. 6 for $9,828 to Oak Ridge Land Co. LLC. Representatives of the company were not available for comment.

"The land was sold at fair-market value," said Steven Wyatt, a spokesman in the Energy Department's Oak Ridge office. "That's determined by the appraised value of the land."

He declined to elaborate further.

Rick Parrish, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said it's hard to understand how the property can be perceived as valuable to a development and valuable for preservation and still be sold at such a low rate.

"It just seems puzzling," Parrish said. "It just doesn't make sense."