COLUMBIA — A federal judge has dealt a defeat to environmental advocates who had sued a Florida businessman and his South Coast Mitigation Group over plans to convert rare freshwater wetlands into salt marsh in order to sell them to developers as mitigation bank credits.
The S.C. Coastal Conservation League, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, objected to the commercial proposal for 700 acres, located west of U.S. 17 before the Talmadge Bridge and adjacent to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.
“We’re obviously disappointed in the ruling, but we’re considering all of our options as we move forward,” said Chris DeScherer, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, on Wednesday.
The S.C. Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had argued against Florida businessman Murphy McLean’s commercial mitigation bank plans on
numerous points.
Nearly 500 acres of “increasingly rare” freshwater impoundments will be “irretrievably lost,” warned the Fish and Wildlife Service, which said approving the project sets a bad precedent, “given the finite and diminishing amount of freshwater impoundments in the Savannah River system and along the South Carolina coast.”
At the core of the dispute is whether the commercial plan would transform the area from freshwater to salt marsh, or whether it constituted a “restoration.” South Coast claimed the latter, which is a requirement under the proposal.
Environmental experts saw it in a starkly different light.
“This is a money-making operation masquerading as an environmental restoration project,” DeScherer had said last year.
But that question was moot, said U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, because water samplings had shown that saltwater had already invaded the impounded area. In effect, Gergel wrote, the harm the environmental advocates and government officials had sought to prevent had already occurred.
In an interview in March of last year, McLean said: “We own it and control it, and we can flood it on any given day with saltwater.”
Because Friday’s dismissal centered on the timing of events at the Jasper County property, rather than the merits of the argument, it’s unlikely to color the dynamics of future mitigation bank approvals.
South Bank’s proposal, which has been underway for almost five years, is to remove 2,300-feet of dike to release the tide waters. It then calls for placing 5,000 cubic yards of fill material onto the site. The commercial plan is to sell credits to coastal developers, which must buy them to make up for environmental degradation from port-related work, roadways, natural gas lines, or other construction.
SELC’s lawsuit had also targeted the Environmental Protection Agency and the Charleston District Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps had approved the proposal as “restoration” work, authorizing it through a Clean Water Act “Nationwide Permit” intended for projects that benefit the environment.
But other state and federal officials, along with SELC, warned that altering the land could release pollutants, harm crucial bird habitat, affect the nearby national refuge, and destroy precious freshwater wetlands to create more common salt marsh.
The land, held over from South Carolina’s rice era, had been freshwater for at least 200 years.