Plans move forward for Cherry Grove dredging project

A $16 million canal dredging project delayed for years by lawsuits and still debated among Cherry Grove residents, who will have to foot some of the bill, inched closer to a start line Monday night.

North Myrtle Beach City Council unanimously approved the first reading of an ordinance that spells out the logistics for issuing and paying bonds to finance the Cherry Grove dredging project. No one spoke against or in favor of the ordinance at the meeting.

“The ordinance that we passed tonight is basically the ground rules for the banks so that we can move forward with the financing or the bond issuance,” said Mayor Marilyn Hatley after the meeting. “In the ordinance we have to have what to expect with this project.”

The expectations give the banks a clearer picture of the project in helping the financial institutions decide whether or not to submit bids.

“We have to go through another second reading and then, of course, if we have lawsuits, which we haven’t received a lawsuit yet, but if we do receive a lawsuit then that would delay the bonds and delay the project,” Hatley said.

“It’s been a long process,” she added. “I would say that we have been talking and working on this project for almost 15 years, a very long time. This project was talked about and it was brought to us as a city council from the residents on the channels that … wanted the channels dredged.”

A “super majority” of the residents still want that, she said, but opposition has lingered among some property owners who continue to debate who should pay for the project.

In December, the city council approved a final reading of an ordinance defining the Cherry Grove Improvement District and the 700 property owners who will be required to pay a total special assessment as high as $23,596 over 10 years to help pay for the project. Property owners were given a deadline of 20 days to inform the city whether or not they planned to appeal the decision.

North Myrtle Beach spokesman Pat Dowling said that 30 property owners informed the city they planned to appeal before the deadline, but no appeal has yet to be filed with the appellate court.

Twenty-five properties were excluded in the district, leaving the city’s taxpayers on the hook for more than $2 million of the project’s $16 million price tag. The city also spent an estimated $3 million dollars in a nearly three-year lawsuit to determine who actually owned the canals, according to Dowling.

The South Carolina Supreme Court ultimately ruled the center of the canals belonged to the state, but Dowling said the city has had no luck in getting the state to pay for the project. Although, he said, the city continues to “pursue all avenues for funding assistance.”

The city’s current dredging permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will allow North Myrtle Beach to accomplish two planned dredges, but only if the initial dredge is not delayed by litigation, Dowling said in an email updating the project Feb. 5. “A delay may well require the city to expend additional resources to extend the existing permit or to obtain a new permit.”

He warned, “This diversion of resources might well leave a second dredge unfeasible within the City’s current cost predictions.”

City leaders learned a second dredge for maintenance would be needed some time after an initial dredge now slated to begin in November and conclude by April 2017. The follow-up dredging is not predicted to cost as much as the initial dredging.

The man-made canals were constructed more than half a century ago and the silt build-up has never been dredged. City planners have studied dredging possibilities for more than a decade.

The pipeline dredging project will cut down more than three feet in depth and across 24 feet wide making the water navigable once again to the Atlantic Ocean at mean low tide. The project will affect channels in and around Cherry Grove’s Ocean Boulevard strip and the center of finger channels along House Creek from 42nd Avenue North to about 62nd Avenue North.

The Sun News Staff Writer Audrey Hudson contributed to this report.

This story was originally published February 15, 2016 at 9:02 PM with the headline "Plans move forward for Cherry Grove dredging project."