A letter written today by Nancy Cave of The Sun News states that Mike Wooten the S.C. Department of Transportation commissioner for the 7th Congressional District, should know better than to lie and mislead Horry County taxpayers by try to shift blame for the County’s RIDE II projects from the Department of Transportation to the Coastal Conservation League.
The original federal permit for the Carolina Bays Parkway project were issued were issued in March, 2000 by the US Army Corps of Engineers with the parks the Parkway’s southern boundry being located at US 17 near Holmestown Road. In March, 2010 the SCDOT requested a modification to the permit from the corps in 2000 in order to be able to change the Parkway’s southern boundry from from US 17 to SC 707 and to also add a ramp to the SC 544/Carolina Bays Parkway interchange. These changed required that both the SCDOT and Corps to undertake additional environmental reviews and studies pursuant to federal law.
Modifications of highway projects and additional analyses are required for these changes to be made; and they take time and cannot be blamed, as Mr. Wooten does in his op-ed, on conservation organizations that had nothing to do with these changes
