A Texas developer has been given permission to go ahead and re-bury bodies from a 170-year-old cemetery that developers had planned to relocate into a 50-foot buffer zone mandated by a 2002 rezoning.
"With the rain coming this weekend, we wanted to go ahead and get those bodies properly covered," Commissioner Bill Hullander said. "They can either cover them back up or go ahead and move them."
Earlier this week, as workers were in the process of removing the bodies from their graves and had already uncovered them, the company was ordered to stop work until a decision was made about the cemetery.
The property is located at Snow Hill Road and Mountain View Road in Ooltewah, near exit 11 off I-75.
In 2002, as part of a rezoning agreement, the county put restrictions on the use of that land, mandating that a 50-foot buffer would remain next to Mill Run subdivision. A site plan showed that the cemetery could not be moved, but that was not made one of the rezoning conditions.
The developer went to Chancery Court last summer and got permission to move the old Wells Cemetery, which has one tombstone dating to 1838.
Commissioner Hullander said today's action was an emergency measure designed to ensure that uncovered bodies were properly protected, and that the full commission will deal with the larger issues raised by the incident at their meeting next week.
"The developer told us that they did three title searches on that property, and didn't find anything about the buffer zone we had required be maintained," he said.
"Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the things we were trying to do never got recorded . . . That's another thing we're going to change."