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Friend, When Hurricane Helene rampaged up the Atlantic coast last month, it was no surprise for the residents of Sapelo Island that their community lost power in its wake. “We had a six-day power outage,” Reginald Hall, a native of the island who left for several years before returning in 1994, texted after power was restored. “Getting back in the swing on the grid.” While waiting last month for one of the three, 30-minute (each way) ferry rides that carry people to the island each day (there is no bridge to and from the mainland), Hall pointed out the single power line feeding the island as a weak link. “We lose power whenever there’s a big rain,” said Hall, 59, who lives in the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island, where he, like generations of the Gullah Geechee community before him, was raised. “We’ve paid taxes for years, but never got any of the infrastructure we were due.” Hogg Hummock, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the last intact Gullah Geechee community in the Sea Islands of Georgia. After surviving for centuries on the island without adequate government services, the descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans who were settled and resettled here are now facing a dire threat to their way of life, and it is not from nature but is manmade. A new development code for McIntosh County, passed without meaningful input from the island’s residents, has raised the maximum square footage allowed for residential construction. New development under the code, on a larger scale and, most likely, aimed toward high-dollar investors who want to create luxury hideaways on the oceanfront property, would raise property values, taxes and eventually erase the culture of the island’s remaining inhabitants by displacing them. The new code also passed against the community feedback received during the few opportunities for input. Those opportunities saw overwhelming opposition to the loosening of restrictions on development. A few developer voices were the exception. Southern Poverty Law Center attorneys, along with co-counsel from the Atlanta-based law firm of Bondurant, Mixson and Elmore, are representing Hogg Hummock residents in their legal fight to strike down the ordinance.
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