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CaroLinks abandons plan to barge cargo up Cooper River
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
CaroLinks, the Charleston-based startup logistics company, is abandoning a controversial plan to barge cargo up the Cooper River to a facility on Lake Marion, stating that it simply can’t afford to navigate the shoals of an extended permitting process.
In a statement released in December, the company said it had been informed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other authorities that the process for obtaining the kind of commercial barrage permit the company would have to seek would be “extremely lengthy” and “costly.”
The process would entail “countless open hearings” among the constituencies that would be affected by the cargo movements and would require a detailed scientific analysis of the potential impact of regularly scheduled barge service on the river, the company said.
The decision came almost six months to the day after CaroLinks abandoned plans to buy the former Macalloy site in North Charleston, an industrially zoned property adjacent to Shipyard Creek, which was to serve as the staging area for both barge and rail operations by the company.
The company has since said it will concentrate its efforts on developing 800 acres that it is negotiating to buy into an intermodal facility near Santee. However, that plan is also rumored to be confronting some difficulties stemming from companies wanting to buy portions of an 800-acre parcel rather than lease land for distribution centers and warehouses from the company.
The company said ground for the Midlands project will be broken in February.
Lucy Duncan-Scheman, co-founder and president of CaroLinks, said in the statement that while “waterborne logistics makes sense on paper, the reality of
CaroLinks footing the bill for such a long and arduous process on its own is not economically compelling.”
Duncan-Scheman also said such an undertaking “would be more appropriate to be organized as a private-public sector partnership, where all stakeholders can transparently address their commercial, transportation and environmental needs.”
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