Developers and their attorneys and consultants were in Columbia on Wednesday making their case against the state's coastal management law. The occasion was a hearing on a resolution introduced by Loftis and Rep. Bill Witherspoon of Horry County, who sit on the House Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs Committee.
Those business interests described the law protecting our environmentally sensitive coastal region as illegal, bureaucratic and hard to understand, The (Columbia) State reports.
And they have the ears of key legislators. They're in the hallways at committee meetings making their case to lawmakers, while we're sitting at home assuming 30 years of protections offered by the Coastal Zone Management Act are secure. Most importantly, they have the money to go to court. And in recent years, they've been winning some key victories, largely because the legislature has failed to act on new laws to protect critical isolated freshwater wetlands left vulnerable by a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
If you think the development we've experienced in the Lowcountry in the past few years has been rampant, overwhelming and costly, see what happens when the brakes come off filling and building in wetlands.
South Carolina has some of the highest concentrations of wetlands in the Southeast. The state has an estimated 300,000 acres of isolated freshwater wetlands. About 200,000 of those acres are in the eight-county coastal plain, with 16,000 in Beaufort County.
As hard as developers and their representatives say it has been to deal with the state Department of Health and Environmental Control and its policies and regulations, we're still reeling from the impacts of rapid growth.
We've spent millions and millions of dollars and thousands of hours grappling with how to control and manage stormwater runoff created when we build and fill in this low-lying area. Bluffton officials are looking at doubling the town's stormwater utility fee to $98 to help the town deal with stormwater and drainage problems.
When legislators heed only private interests with no regard for the greater public good, we all pay an enormous price -- in money and in lost quality of life.
Loftis took us to task last week for raising concerns about the resolution and what opening up the Coastal Zone Management Plan for review might mean to freshwater wetlands protections in particular. He states that the intention is to ask DHEC to promulgate certain "policies" as regulations. "This would put the management of coastal resources on a much firmer legal and moral footing," he writes.
We did not object to the review so much as the possible negative outcomes for protecting our natural resources. We asked that the effort not result in weakened protections. We also objected to the fast track the resolution was on without a full public airing on whether such a review was warranted. That was corrected when it was sent back to committee.
It's doubtful that the resolution will go anywhere this legislative session, which ends the first week of June.
The resolution also asks that DHEC look at streamlining the process, a phrase that environmental advocates see as code for weakening the rules.
Developers complain about the time-consuming permitting process, even as the legislature fails to finance DHEC to the level needed to keep up with the demand for services, particularly in the rapidly growing coastal region. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Lawmakers' performance on the issue of wetlands protection since the 2001 Supreme Court ruling is worrisome at best. If the past is prologue, we're very much concerned about the outcome of this review and "promulgation" process.
Repeated attempts to pass wetlands protection rules following the Supreme Court ruling have failed even after a stakeholder group that included environmental and real estate interests came up with a compromise. That failed legislation included a provision that local wetlands ordinances could not be stricter than state law, a provision strongly objected to by Hilton Head Island officials, who have had a strict local wetlands ordinance on the books since 1995.
Elizabeth Hagood, former chairwoman of DHEC's board, told the Packet in 2006 that laws and regulations carefully crafted over many years to balance growth with economic opportunity were being gutted by an ill-informed legislature doing the bidding of special-interest lobbyists.
Loftis assures us there will be ample opportunity for public input. That's good. Let's just hope that public input does not tip heavily toward developer interests in the halls of the General Assembly.
So we issue a call to arms. It's time for the rest of us to get the collective ear of lawmakers, to let them know we don't want weakened protections. We can't afford it, and we don't want it. Beaufort County lawmakers need to lead the charge in the Statehouse to guard against any attack on the Coastal Zone Management Plan and the protections it affords us.
Don't let developers, their attorneys and special-interest lobbyists have the only say.
To see more of The Island Packet, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.islandpacket.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Island Packet, Hilton Head Island, S.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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