GEORGETOWN — An audit completed in April by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control found that Georgetown County’s stormwater management program “needs improvements” in its implementation.
The audit found deficiencies in the areas of inspection and recordkeeping for the county’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4). DHEC defines an MS4 as “a system of conveyances that include, but are not limited to, catch basins, curbs, gutters, ditches, man-made channels, pipes, tunnels, and/or storm drains that discharge into Waters of the State.”
The audit found no documentation of the 2014 Murrells Inlet Watershed Plan ever being implemented. The plan, submitted to DHEC in June 2015 by the Waccamaw Regional Council of Governments, sought to reduce fecal bacteria in areas of the inlet where shellfish are harvested.
“Receiving an audit report that shows this level of deficiency on the part of Georgetown County is extremely troubling to the citizens of the Waccamaw Neck,” Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel Cynthia Ranck Person of Keep It Green Advocacy said in a June 13 news release. “It’s just another example of Georgetown County’s lack of regard for applicable state and federal law.”
Keep It Green is currently involved in multiple lawsuits against Georgetown County over site plan approvals for developments on the Waccamaw Neck that it contends never should have been approved for violating the county’s comprehensive plan.
Georgetown County Public Services Director Ray Funnye said the watershed plan was “reasonable” and contained points the county should consider, but he said the county was “not under any obligation to take that report as our marching orders.”
“Our responsibility, clearly, is to make sure that we meet the requirements of the MS4 permit,” Funnye said.
Funnye said the DHEC audit will serve as a guide to ensure the county is meeting requirements for this area going forward.
“Certainly, we work toward perfection, but we are not perfect people,” Funnye said. “And I think the audit allowed us an opportunity to recognize some deficiencies that we had and we quickly made some adjustments to correct them.”
Funnye said those adjustments have been made in the fields of staffing, reporting and due diligence on site inspections.
Auditors also found several deficiencies in construction inspections carried out at Waccamaw Oral Surgery and the Sunnyside Village development, both in Murrells Inlet. Those included necessary repair or maintenance, permit requirements missing from inspection reports and inspection reports missing entirely.
According to the audit, Georgetown County issued a construction permit for Murrells Inlet development Sunnyside Village in October 2021. But an MS4 inspection was not conducted until the following January, skipping over three monthly inspections.
A May 19 response letter from Funnye to DHEC Stormwater Compliance Manager Matthew Krotchick accepted some of the findings of the audit, but did dispute some deficiencies found regarding the county’s inspection of Sunnyside Village.
One reporting deficiency DHEC named was that a 2021 annual report was not received until the audit was performed in October 2022, six months past deadline. Funnye’s response letter stated that DHEC “has not released any official statements to move the due date” for such reports to April 1.
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