DHEC denial no death knell for bridge plan

A proposal for a second road bridge across Lake Marion is back in the hands of the state Department of Transportation.

As expected, the Department of Health and Environmental Control’s Division of Water Quality last week turned down a water quality permit that is essential to its construction.

The decision should not have come as a surprise, particularly to DOT, which applied for the permit, DHEC spokesman Thom Berry said in an interview Saturday.

Berry said the permit was denied because the agency is required by law to decide on permit requests within a year, and DHEC staff felt that DOT’s application was “incomplete,” even though there has been dialogue between the agencies during the year.

“They’ve been providing us additional information, and we’ve been requesting other information,” Berry said, adding that this is not at all unusual for such an application.

“We were coming to the end” of the one-year time frame and “some information we felt was needed to make the decision was not in the application,” Berry said.

He said DHEC sent DOT a letter in early January, “suggesting that, if they wished, they could withdraw the application, fill in the gaps and then resubmit it,” which would give DHEC another year to review it.

“Or they could leave the application as it was, where it was, but in our opinion it was incomplete, so we’d have to turn it down,” Berry added.

“The Transportation Department made the decision to go ahead with the application as it was, so this week we denied it because of the fact that the application was incomplete,” Berry said. “There was not enough supporting information.”

Upon receiving formal notification of DHEC’s decision, DOT has 15 days to ask for a hearing before the DHEC Board. Alternatively, DOT can resubmit the permit application.

“The ball is in their court as to what they choose to do,” Berry said.

“Our understanding is that DOT plans to resubmit the permit application,” Hope Derrick, press secretary to U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn, wrote in an e-mail to The T&D.

Berry said he could not recall specifics of what additional information DHEC staff felt was needed in order to make a decision on the permit application.

But in general, “we had not gotten what we felt was a complete environmental impact statement,” he said. The EIS “would be part and parcel of the whole process.”

There are different degrees of environmental impact statements, and “as to whether a full-blown EIS is going to be required, I just do not know.”

A full EIS would be costly and time-consuming.

The Southern Environmental Law Center said in a press release Friday that it understood DHEC had rejected the permit on the grounds that DOT had not:

* Demonstrated that the bridge is the least environmentally damaging option to improve economic conditions in the area.

* Conducted a thorough review of the environmental impacts of the project.

* Developed a plan to mitigate unavoidable environmental impacts.

* Properly evaluated potential impacts on water quality and public health.

“The denial of the permit by DHEC staff confirms our long-standing position that SCDOT conducted a shoddy environmental study to justify a project that has no legitimate transportation purpose,” said David Farren, senior attorney in the law center’s Carolinas office in Chapel Hill, N.C.

“We can, and should, do better to protect both the taxpayers and this unique environmental jewel,” Farren opined.

The law center is representing the S.C. Coastal Conservation League, the S.C. Wildlife Federation and Audubon South Carolina in a federal lawsuit filed in September that challenges an environmental impact statement prepared in 2003.

The lawsuit raises many of the same issues cited by DHEC in evaluating DOT’s certification request, the law center said in its press release.

That fact “confirms that the concerns raised in our lawsuit are legitimate,” said Blan Holman, the law center’s lead attorney for this lawsuit. “DOT’s effort to ramrod through permits for this project have been dealt a strong blow.”

In a statement provided to The T&D on Saturday, Clyburn said the permit application “is part of the process every road and bridge project must undergo before it receives approval.”

He said the proposal’s “future is being played out in all three branches of government. I represent the legislative branch and a lawsuit has been filed in the judicial branch.”

And “this permitting debate is taking place at an agency that answers to the executive branch,” the congressman said.

“We must wait for it to play out in all of these government jurisdictions before any declaration can be made on the Connector’s future.”