But like other fast-growing areas across the country, Effingham had to learn that large-scale expansion often comes at a price. In the county’s case, it was the long-term integrity of the vast underground water supply that serves it as well as other major areas in the South.
“The prevalent mentality that natural resources have no end has come to an abrupt halt here,” said John A. Henry, chief executive of Effingham’s Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Authority. Because overuse of its wells could draw in saltwater, the county can no longer rely solely on the wells for business and residential use, he explained, and it has been buying water from Savannah for the last five years.
As a result, cities in the county have had to spend millions of dollars and expect to spend millions more to try to keep up with growth. Residents’ water bills have risen significantly, and yet, the growth continues.
As recently as the early 1980s, Effingham County was still dotted with farms and corner gas stations. But in the last two decades it has grown rapidly, becoming home to subdivisions and to businesses like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The county’s population was 37,535 in 2000, a 46.1 percent increase from the 25,687 population in 1990, according to census figures. By 2006, it was 48,954, up another 30.4 percent.
Effingham’s development has been most noticeable in the city of Rincon, 20 miles north and slightly west of Savannah along State Highway 21, where new building permits for single-family houses rose to 268 last year from 65 in 1996. The city’s population in 2006, according to census data, reached 6,922, an increase of more than 58 percent from 2000, when it was 4,376.
The water problem became widely known about a decade ago, after years of investigation by scientists at the United States Geological Survey. They said that intense industrial and residential development had caused a cone of depression in the Upper Floridan aquifer, straining the key underground water source past its limits.
The problem in Effingham County, said Timothy Baumgartner, an engineer with EMC Engineering Services Inc., which works for Rincon, was that continued high use there of underground water could intensify saltwater intrusion in wells throughout the area served by the aquifer.
The strain on the underground supply has already caused some saltwater to be suctioned into low-lying coastline areas near Hilton Head, S.C., about 40 miles east of Rincon. Federal officials said that unless action was taken, future generations would draw saltwater instead of freshwater.
“Maybe not in one year or two,” said Steve Liotta, an Effingham County engineer, “but in 5, 10 or 15 years, wells in cities served by the Upper Floridan aquifer would increasingly become contaminated with saltwater.”
Last year, in response to the federal government’s findings, Georgia ordered sections of Effingham and all of neighboring Chatham County to lower daily groundwater use to five million gallons below 2004 levels. Rincon and other areas in the county were forced to pipe in water, from surface sources like rivers and streams, that is treated in Savannah and then sent out. In addition, no new wells could be drilled.
So far, Rincon has spent nearly $10 million to build a water treatment plant, and it is about to spend $3.5 million more to upgrade the facility. The goal is to reprocess water already used by households so that it can be reused for nondrinking purposes like watering lawns and irrigation, said David Schofield, Rincon’s acting city manager.
Stacie and Preston Taylor, who moved to a starter home in a development in Rincon four years ago and then two years later to a larger colonial in another development, were initially able to draw their drinking water from a community well. Now they must tap into municipal supplies, and that, Mrs. Taylor said, is taking a hefty bite of their household budget.
Mrs. Taylor, a mortgage banker, and her husband, a sales representative, used to pay $30 a month for their water; their monthly bill for water that now comes from Savannah is $300, and sometimes more. “It can be very hard on a family’s budget,” she said.
But the high quality of the local public schools and the “family-type, small-town feeling” in Rincon, despite its growth, offset other negatives. The Taylors have a 2 ½-year-old daughter, Kaylee, and are expecting another child in December.
Sandy Martin and her husband, Stan Milam, retirees who used to own a home near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and now live in Springfield, another city in Effingham, said that the county had changed since they first moved there six years ago. Not only water problems but increased traffic have resulted from new development, Ms. Martin said.
The couple, who live in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch on 28 acres that they bought in 2001 for less than $250,000, still draw from their own well and do not have to pay for municipal water. But their friends and neighbors pay for water, Ms. Martin said, “and they can get grumpy about that, especially when it comes time to fill their pools.”
“People complain about paying for water,” she said, “but lots of things that used to be free, like TV reception, now cost money.”
Residential real estate in Effingham remains a bargain compared with Savannah, according to LaTrelle Pevey, the owner of ERA Adams-Pevey Realty in Rincon. In today’s market, a new 1,400-square-foot subdivision house with three bedrooms, two baths and a fenced yard on one-fourth to one-half an acre in southern Effingham would cost $130,000 to $175,000. In Savannah, the same house would cost $160,000 to $195,000, Ms. Pevey said.
What prompted the decades-long land rush in the 480-square-mile Effingham County? According to V. Elaine Seabolt, the president and owner of Seabolt Brokers/Harry Norman Realtors in Savannah, the county owes its growth to two groups.
Young families, seeking to escape the higher cost of housing in Savannah, began migrating in the early 1990s in search of small starter homes selling for $125,000 and up, Ms. Seabolt said. Empty nesters, many priced out of retirement havens like Hilton Head, also gravitated to Effingham, where the climate is warm most of the year, the cost of living reasonable and the threat of hurricane damage far less than in Florida.
“The bottom line is that dirt is a lot cheaper right outside of Savannah,” Ms. Seabolt said, “and certainly less expensive than in Hilton Head.”
The Floridan aquifer system, according to the Geological Survey, is one of the most productive in the world, underpinning about 100,000 square miles in southern Alabama, Southeastern Georgia, Southern South Carolina and all of Florida. It provides water for cities including Savannah and Brunswick in Georgia; and Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Orlando, and St. Petersburg in Florida.
Effingham’s water problems are not unusual. In Naples and Tampa in Florida, in Southern California and in Scottsdale, Ariz., aquifers have similarly been stressed by intense development, Mr. Baumgartner of EMC Engineering said. But those cities, he said, do not have the saltwater problem.
Ken Lee, Rincon’s mayor, said that the city, which was “now trying to play catch-up to solve the problems,” had no plans to cut back on either residential or commercial growth because of the water problems.
But not everyone agrees that the explosive development of the last two decades should continue, according to Levi Scott, Rincon’s assistant mayor, who grew up in the city during the 1950s and 1960s.
“You hear a lot of griping at council meetings,” he said. “Some people think the city has already paid too high a price for all this growth.” So far, there is no organized opposition to growth.
Mr. Liotta, the county engineer, said the focus should be on how best to conserve water for future generations. “One way to do that,” he said, referring to the county’s new policies, “is that the more water someone uses, the more they will pay.”