While that warm breeze blowing over Savannah from the west Wednesday morning was actually pushing a front into the area, it could just as well have been the collective sigh of relief coming from Atlanta as the partnership agreement for the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project was signed.
“After years of regulatory purgatory, we can finally start moving dirt,” said Gov. Nathan Deal, who hosted the signing between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Georgia Ports Authority.
“It’s been a long, long time coming.”
Almost from the project’s inception, the writing was on the wall — getting an extra five or six feet of depth in the Savannah River channel would be no easy task.
Jack Kingston knew it as early as 1997. One of the deepening’s staunchest champions, the U.S. congressman from Savannah was meeting already with the Sierra Club and other stakeholders to talk about concerns and drum up support.
But even Kingston, who sponsored the provision authorizing the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project in the federal Water Resources Development Act of 1999, didn’t expect it to take the better part of two decades just to get the actual work started.
“For 17 years we have lived and breathed the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project,” Kingston said this week. “In that time, not a week has gone by without calls, meetings or legislative action to promote this vital project.
“In the end, the jobs, opportunities and economic prosperity generated by this project will speak for themselves for years and make it worth every step along the way.”
Kingston praised the early work of Sens. Paul Coverdell and Max Cleland and former Gov. Zell Miller in helping get the project off the ground.
“They were with us from the very beginning,” he said.
Still, Kingston continues to shake his head over the amount of time it has taken from the earliest Environmental Impact Statement in 1998 to today, when the first shovelful of river mud has yet to be brought up.
Even as he called Wednesday’s signing “a momentous achievement for our state, our region and our country,” Kingston said the project’s scenario of delays and red tape cannot be repeated.
“While this is a day for celebration, we must remain mindful of the unacceptable amount of time it took to get here,” he said.
“The 15 years and 50 million dollars on studies that it has taken to get to this point are stark reminders of the federal bureaucracy’s hindrance of economic growth and advancement,” Kingston said.
“If America is to remain competitive in the global economy, we must rededicate ourselves to reforming the process by which projects like this one are approved because the rest of the world will not wait for us to catch up.”
Studies, studies and more studies
From the beginning, the project came under fire from environmental groups concerned that it would allow saltwater to creep further up the river and harm the ecosystem of the 27,000-acre Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, which adjoins the port.
Those concerns in part prompted language in the original legislation that based final approval on completion of a study analyzing the impact on the environment of dredging the river channel to various depths between 42 feet and 48 feet.
That study, along with a mitigation plan to ease environmental consequences, had to be approved by the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the secretaries of Interior and Commerce before construction could begin.
The bill also gave resource management agencies such as the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Natural Resources a “kill switch” to stop the project for environmental reasons.
Meanwhile, the ports’ Stakeholder Evaluation Group was formed to help determine the types of scientific studies needed to adequately address all the environmental concerns about the project. The group, organized and run by the ports, included some 50 representatives from environmental organizations, state and federal natural resource management agencies, local industries and others.
Stymied early on by procedural issues and infighting, the stakeholders’ group later settled in to deal not only with dissolved oxygen issues, salt water intrusion and the quality of drinking water, but the impact on several species of fish in the river.
The first lawsuit, filed in 2000 and dismissed the following year, was directed at the Corps of Engineers by a coalition of environmental groups who argued the Corps had acted too hastily in its preliminary approval of the project. It would not be the last.
By 2001, more than two dozen separate scientific studies had been started — looking at everything from how endangered short-nosed sturgeon use the river and how tidal freshwater wetlands regenerate to how deepening the channel could impact the aquifer.
A series of five elaborate computer mathematical models were being developed to demonstrate how each added foot of depth would change the saltwater and oxygen content of the harbor.
Meanwhile, the Port of Savannah, defying a national trend, had grown to 1 million containers moved in fiscal 2001.
In 2006, stressing the need to complete the deepening project before an expanded Panama Canal opened, then Georgia ports executive director Doug Marchand said studies on the deepening were basically complete, adding that he hoped the Corps’ record of decision would come by July 2007, allowing construction to begin in 2008 and wrap up by 2012.
Not to be
But by 2008, South Carolina had jumped into the fray, with proponents of a Jasper County port warning that deepening of the Savannah Harbor would not proceed without a fight. That state’s Savannah River Maritime Commission and Coastal Conservation League eventually filed lawsuits to try to stop the project.
In late 2008, the Corps postponed the expected release of its draft Environmental Impact Statement, citing significant issues over engineering, environment and economics. It would be November of 2010 before the document was released and gave the OK for a 48-foot channel.
In January of 2011, South Carolina threw the project yet another curveball, announcing that staff of its Department of Health and Environmental Control proposed a denial to the corps’ Water Quality Certification application for the deepening.
Meanwhile, South Carolina’s Savannah River Maritime Commission withdrew its support of a joint resolution calling for the expansion of both the Savannah and Charleston harbors and called for deepening the river to no more than 45 feet. South Carolina state Sen. Hugh Leatherman said the state had hired an environmental consultant “to make sure SHEP doesn’t go through.”
South Carolina continued throwing roadblocks in the project’s path until, finally — in April 2012 — the Corps released its Record of Decision.
After nearly 15 years of study, $41 million and a stack of documents more than twice as high as the five feet it would add to the river channel, the Corps recommended dredging the channel from 42 to 47 feet, lopping off a foot in concession to environmental agencies’ concerns.
Still, it would take an additional two years — until May 2014 — before the latest Water Resources bill was passed and signed into law, authorizing the project’s current price tag.
Show me the money
The signing of the partnership agreement last week marked a new phase in the project’s timeline, one not without its own set of challenges.
The largest of those challenges by far is some $400 million that has yet to be funded.
In the 15 years since it was approved by Congress, a project that started out with a budget of $240 million has nearly tripled in projected costs to $706 million, including construction and environmental mitigation expenses.
As a part of this cost-sharing agreement, the Corps will be able to use the 40 percent share of state funds to begin construction while it awaits congressional appropriations for the remaining 60 percent.
The state has already set aside $266 million — its total share.
“Every budget I have submitted and signed into law has included money for the state share of the deepening,” Deal said. “My most recent budget included Georgia’s final commitment, allowing this project to move forward now.
“Georgia has been ranked the top state in the U.S. for business by three different scoring agencies, and this expansion project will play a crucial role in ensuring our state maintains that top distinction,” he said, adding thanks to Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Speaker David Ralston for their leadership in the General Assembly.
The federal government has not allocated construction funds, but proponents hope that will be remedied in the president’s fiscal 2016 budget, due to be released early next year.
The earliest actions in the deepening will focus on environmental mitigation and extending the shipping channel an additional 7 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the environmental mitigation actions include:
• installing a dissolved oxygen injection system for the harbor;
• building a fish bypass around the New Savannah Bluff Lock & Dam near Augusta;
• rerouting freshwater to protect valuable wetlands in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge;
• restoring brackish marsh on Onslow Island;
• creating a fresh water impoundment for the city of Savannah’s water treatment plant; and
• recovering the Civil War ironclad CSS Georgia from the bed of the Savannah River.
Col. Thomas Tickner, commander of the Corps’ Savannah District, said the Corps has already put two contracts out to bid — one for dredging the outer harbor and another for constructing and installing the dissolved oxygen injection system.
“We’ll have those bids in hand by the end of the month,” he said.
According to an extensive study by the Corps, a deeper shipping channel will allow larger and fewer ships to move the same amount of goods at a lower transportation cost. Unloading and reloading fewer ships would be faster, allowing goods to move in and out of the port more quickly. Fewer, larger ships also will lessen congestion in the harbor, according to the report.
Tickner said the deepening will allow larger ships to load more fully when they call on Savannah. For the super post-Panamax vessels, the extra five feet of depth will allow them to carry another 3,600 cargo containers in each transit, or 78 percent more.
“GPA’s Garden City port is the nation’s fourth busiest container port and the second busiest on the East Coast. It set a record of 3.1 million 20-foot equivalent units (standard measure for containers) in the most recent fiscal year,” he said.
“We’re ready to do this.”