Not in ‘Harmony’

Phone trees and social media lit up across West Ashley last week in response to a national builder asking permission to fill in 5 acres of wetlands near Church Creek.
Locals, with the recent memory of the flooding associated with Hurricane Joaquin still floating in their heads, voiced serious concern that taking away wetlands could cause wet problems in the future.
D. R. Horton has successful developments dotting the Charleston area from Wescott Plantation in Summerville to luxury homes in Isle of Palms.
The national builder has proposed a 166-acre subdivision named Harmony along Church Creek off of Glenn McConnell Parkway. A little more than half of the site is apparently developable, with extensive wetlands.
In December, D. R. Horton asked for permission from both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) to offset the use of 5 acres of wetlands — roughly equivalent to the size of four football fields – with the purchase of credits from a mitigation bank and other mitigation efforts on the site.
Janet Segal was shocked. Still wrangling with FEMA and her insurance company to cover the damage to her home in the nearby Dunwoody II neighborhood off Bees Ferry and adjacent to Shadowmoss, she worried that no one had learned any lessons from October’s historic flooding.
Filling-in wetlands, even if they were partially offset onsite and elsewhere, could bring floodwaters back into her home, as they were an unwelcomed guest in October when trillions of gallons of rain fell on South Carolina.
“I have been living, breathing, nothing but flood insurance ever since,” she said.
D.R. Horton had yet to respond to a request for comment by press time for this story. A local sales member with the company passed the request to a regional sales manager on Friday.
Barbara Backer was equally concerned. A longtime West Ashley resident, she lives nowhere near the potentially affected area, with her home located of Old Towne Road in Charles Towne Estates III.
“I can’t help but think this could create more flooding and an infrastructure nightmare,” said Backer, who has made a call to action to similarly concerned citizens.
Backer, buoyed by her recent success in confronting a church on a separate issue, said it was locals’ duty to “not just growl on Facebook, but to do something.”
The S.C. Coastal Conservation League weighed in recently, too, sending letters of their concerns about the project to both the Corps and DHEC, according to its staff attorney, Natalie Olson.
Olson said the project “checked off the first two boxes” for the League, in that the project was located within the city’s recently established Urban Growth Boundary, and that its density and use were within the appropriate zoning guidelines. Additionally, she said the plan generally has “good connectivity” to other nearby developments, key to emergency response crews and creating a sense of community.
However, Olson said the League had serious concerns that the developer’s plan actually met the federally-established guidelines of dealing with wetlands set out in the Clean Water Act — “avoid, minimize, and mitigate.”
Sometimes in the complicated matrix of designing a neighborhood in an environmentally challenging site, there should be some give and take concerning wetlands, she said.
Like, for instance, Olson said to make a site viable it may be unavoidable to build a road across a wetland. That could mean a pipe being laid in the ground to allow water to collect or move around.
Olson said her organization, one of the most powerful environmental watchdogs in the state, was concerned that the wetlands being impacted by D.R. Horton’s Harmony plan appeared to have simply placed “a few more lots” in the wetlands on a cul de sac.
“It’s frustrating that they just added those few extra house lots,” said Olson.
DHEC will continue to take public comment until Jan. 22; one month after Horton filed its request.
But, even though the official comment period for the public to weigh-in has closed with the federal Corps, its state communications director Glenn Jeffries has said that the federal agency will continue to take comments from the public.
Citizens wanting their voice to be heard on the matter, “need not worry” about the passed federal deadline for comment, said Jeffries.
“We will continue to accept written letters in the mail, or they can call, or email … they can actually even come by the office, or send smoke signals,” she said. “This is all part of our agency gathering of information, so that once we go back to the applicant we will have a full sheet of questions and concerns for it to address. It’s a back-and-forth process.”
Usually, applications to the Corps with no challenges have a four-month turnaround, said Jeffries. “I don’t know about this one.”