Welcome to the Giant Dirt Mound Website!

The Sunset/Holman (aka "Normaltown") neighborhood of Athens, Georgia is now host to our very own dirt mound/landfill.  One morning early March nearby neighbors awoke to the sounds of dump trucks beeping and banging and dumping load after load of fill dirt onto three residential sites in the 300 block of Price Avenue (between Sunset Drive and Old West Broad Streets).  Between 100-200 loads of dirt were offloaded, about 2,000 cubic yards of dirt.  The dirt piles were up to 30 feet high.

Several nearby neighbors contacted the county, because we were sure that it could not be legal for this much dirt to be dumped in a residential neighborhood without any permits.  However, the county staff told us that the developer's activity fell into several loopholes in the county code, and that they did not plan to cite him.

This group of neighbors determined that the dirt came from the excavation for the new Special Collections library on the campus of University of Georgia.  We contacted the University Architects, who explained to us that they had no control over the dirt, since it had been sold by a private contractor to the developer.  (We later discovered that it had actually been given to the developer.)

The developer has now told us, the county, and the media that he plans to use all this soil on these three sites, which total less than an acre and a half.  There are several of us in the neighborhood who have expertise in development, including a land use lawyer, an architect, two civil engineers, and two soil scientists.  We do not believe this amount of soil could reasonably be used on the site without creating serious runoff problems for the neighbors. The homeowner next to the driveway to this site is already experience runoff problems, and her driveway has been turned to a muddy morass.  The dirt mound and the silt fencing built around it is also trespassing a significant distance (about 30 feet) onto an adjoining property.

The developer will not give us any definite time line as to when he might use this dirt on this site.  He recently said that it might take up to a year to receive financing to develop the site.  This means that the homes adjoining the site will essentially have a landfill in their back yards for an extended period of time.

The University's contractors have expressed a willingness to remove at least some of the soil from the site in the next few weeks.  However, the developer is unwilling to allow that to happen. We are moving forward as a neighborhood to determine what solutions there might be to this problem.

If you are interested in specific information about the legal violations, please read our letter to EPD on the "Resource Center" page (which also has other documents related to the dirt mound).  In sum, the dirt mound violates the local erosion & sedimentation regulations, the zoning regulations, and the state regulations of inert waste landfills.