$600 million roads program could be ‘jeopardized’ by proposed hospital project

If your daily commute takes you near Conway, along Highway 701, Highway 501 or Highway 378, you know traffic can get gnarly, and often is. You crawl to a stop and inch forward, red light by red light.

So, to cut back on the congestion, county planners have proposed widening parts of Highways 501 and 701 and plan to built a cut-through road between Highways 378 and 701. Each of those projects, included in the county’s $600 million RIDE 3 infrastructure program, could be easing traffic woes a few years from now.

But a proposed hospital project in Carolina Forest — not located near any of those busy roads — has thrown a wrench in the county’s plans. That project, a 50-bed hospital along International Drive proposed by Conway Medical Center, has rankled neighbors and raised concerns among Horry County officials that placing a hospital there could inadvertently “jeopardize” the RIDE 3 road improvement program.

If that sounds confusing, well, it’s complicated.

Proposed near a state nature preserve and another site Horry County hopes to preserve as part of RIDE 3, CMC’s hospital has raised concerns among county and state officials that a hospital is incompatible with the vast, neighboring wetlands on International Drive that require occasional and controlled forest fires for ecological maintenance. How those concerns regarding wetlands and wildfires affect Horry County’s multi-million, multi-year infrastructure program is the subject of an ongoing discussion between county planners, state environmentalists and CMC officials.

“That is the largest issue that staff has, is that it would jeopardize (RIDE 3),” County Planning Director David Schwerd said earlier this month. “Not only are we talking about saving birds and wetlands, we’re talking about the fact that if we can’t have that wetlands mitigation bank, you won’t be able to drive down Highway 501 because we won’t be able to widen it, we won’t be able to build the Conway Perimeter Bypass and we won’t be able to build the Highway 31 extension.”

At its meeting Tuesday, the Horry County Council agreed to delay debating or voting on a needed rezoning for CMC’s hospital until its Feb. 2 meeting.

Wetlands, fires and roads ... oh my!

Let’s back up a step.

According to federal rules tied to the Clean Water Act, developers who impact wetlands — often by filling them in with dirt and building on top of them —have to make up for it by preserving wetlands elsewhere. To do so, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers run a system in which a developer can either set up their own wetlands preserve, called a mitigation bank, or purchase credits from someone else’s preserve. If a panel of federal and state overseers approves a mitigation bank, the system requires the bank operator to preserve and restore wetlands over a period of several years, in exchange for an amount of so-called “mitigation credits” each year.

Now, back to Horry County.

After Horry County voters approved the RIDE 3 road-projects-via-sales-tax ballot measure in 2016, county officials crunched the numbers and figured out it would be cheaper for the county to establish its own wetlands mitigation bank, rather than attempt to purchase credits elsewhere. Jason Thompson, the county’s RIDE 3 program manager, said the county estimates that it will likely need between 1,500 and 2,000 credits to cover the wetlands impacts from the RIDE 3 road projects, including the widening of Highways 501 and 701 and other projects.

Wetland mitigation credits are bought and sold on the open market, so the price of a single credit can fluctuate, usually between $8,000 and $12,000 per credit, according to David Wilson, a mitigation specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers in Charleston. That means Horry County would have had to shell out $12 to $24 million to make up for the wetlands it will impact under the RIDE 3 program.

Instead, Horry County spent $11 million on a 3,700 acre tract of land along International Drive in 2018 as a first step towards setting up its own wetlands mitigation bank.

Mitigation banks, and any credits awarded through them, have to be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers and a council known as the Interagency Review Team, made up of a number of federal and state environmental departments including the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. According to its prospectus for the International Drive mitigation bank, Horry County said the land it bought contains 3,265 acres of wetlands and will work to restore 2,233 acres and preserve the rest over six years in exchange for mitigation credits. Thompson said the county hopes to get between 2,000 and 4,000 credits once the project is complete.

This is where things get tricky.

The wetlands Horry County is working to restore are wet pine savanna wetlands, an environment that the Army Corp of Engineers says should be burned by fire to help restore it to a natural state. The Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve across the road is similar, and also uses controlled burns to maintain the habitat. Since CMC’s hospital first came before county officials, DNR officials have maintained that the nearby fires could harm the workers or patients at the hospital. In addition, CMC has asked DNR to move a gate it uses to block off International Drive during prescribed burns, a point that’s still under discussion.

DNR officials have stressed since October that the prescribed burns in the area are necessary and are themselves tricky to manage.

“You can’t just burn whenever you want,” said Lorianne Riggin, DNR’s director of environmental programs, noting that wind, weather and forest conditions all have to line up in order to conduct a burn. “We have to be able to burn when we’re able to burn, when it’s appropriate to burn. We can’t have additional restrictions on top of the restrictions that are already in place.”

Could hospital affect Horry County’s road program?

At a Planning Commission meeting Jan. 7, county officials said that if CMC’s proposed hospital prevented the county from conducting its prescribed burns next door, and thereby its wetland mitigation credits, the RIDE 3 program could be put on pause.

“The concern from county staff is that...if a hospital was to locate on this site, that it could endanger our ability to have the wetlands mitigation bank approved,” Schwerd, the county Planning Director, said. “Worst case scenario, we lose the bank itself and we have to compete in a private market (for mitigation credits) where they do not currently exist.”

For it’s part, CMC said it’s proposed hospital would not disrupt the RIDE 3 program.

“We do not believe the project will impact the RIDE 3 roads program,” Conway Medical Center CFO Brian Argo said in a statement following the Planning Commission meeting. “We continue to work with SCDNR and the county to address and mitigate concerns.”

After more than an hour of discussion and debate, the county Planning Commission voted 7-2 to send CMC’s proposal onto the County Council with a favorable recommendation. It’s not clear yet if County Council will vote to approve the proposal, but one member is already raising concerns.

“My biggest concern is over the mitigation bank,” said Council member Johnny Vaught. “If (they) were to balk on granting us that mitigation credit, it could really screw up our RIDE 3 program.”

Concerns from neighbors and the Department of Natural Resources

This conflict comes after months of back and forth between CMC, DNR and the county.

In late October, DNR sent a letter to county planners saying that the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, adjacent to the site where CMC wanted to build, required periodic controlled burns, and that the agency needs to close off access to International Drive when those burns occur. In the letter, DNR Director Robert Boyles wrote that access to the hospital could be affected by the need to close that road, and that hospital operations could be disrupted by smoke in the area. He said the location “has unavoidable risks for the operation of a medical facility.”

In response, CMC officials proposed moving the hospital to a different part of the site, further away from the nature preserve, and said the hospital would install a ventilation system able to keep the building smoke-free, similar to ones used in the parts of California where wildfires are frequent.

Since then, CMC officials met with DNR officials in an effort to find harmony between the controlled burns at the nature preserve and the hospital, CMC President and CEO Bret Barr said at the Planning Commission meeting. In a second letter sent ahead of last week’s meeting, Boyles said DNR will let county planners and County Council have the final say on the project, but noted again that smoke from controlled burns will be present in the area and added that DNR is likely to take stewardship over the county’s wetlands mitigation bank in the future, meaning an even higher likelihood of smoke.

“Bottom line...smoke will be present,” Boyles wrote.

In response, CMC has proposed situating the hospital in a third location on the site, Barr said at the Planning Commission meeting. In that mock-up, the hospital would be situated in the Southeastern corner of the lot, meaning large buffers between the hospital and both the nature preserve and the county’s mitigation bank. According to those plans, CMC is asking DNR to move a gate it uses to close off International Drive 330 feet to allow access to the hospital when the road closes for prescribed burns.

But the new designs have drawn the ire of nearby Carolina Forest residents who live in The Farm neighborhood. Residents there circulated a 144-signature petition opposed to the project and two homeowners who live near the proposed site spoke against it at the Jan. 7 Planning Commission meeting. Richard McAndrew, whose backyard abuts the proposed hospital site, said building a hospital there would bring noise and light pollution to his part of The Farm and traffic would be made worse than it already is. He and another resident of The Farm, Dan Flaherty, asked that CMC build their hospital elsewhere.

That appears unlikely to happen, as negotiations between CMC, DNR and Horry County are ongoing in good faith, and are set to continue next week. County Council is set to take up the issue in coming weeks, too.

Others, at the Carolina Forest Civic Association, have also raised concerns. At the group’s monthly meeting Wednesday, some residents worried that the project could derail the RIDE 3 program. Thompson, the project’s manager, assured them that the county could find workarounds in the event of a worst-case scenario.

“We feel comfortable that we will have wetland credits,” he said.

At the Planning Commission’s Jan. 7 meeting, Robert Wilfong, whose firm Development Resource Group is building the hospital, sounded an optimistic tone and urged the county to move forward on the project.

“We’re talking about a hospital. We’re talking about helping people,” Wilfong said. “Let’s push this forward. I think it’s a good thing. We will in some way or fashion get something worked out with DNR, I think that’s what we all want.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 1:00 PM.