Cruise challenges in Charleston

The process of getting a modern cruise terminal built in the historical city of Charleston, S.C., is not a speedy one.

In 2011 when Charleston Mayor Joseph Reilly Jr. announced his vision for redeveloping the city’s Union Pier into a more suitable and aesthetically pleasing area, one component was a 100,000-square-foot terminal to replace the current, smaller facility.

He had hoped to have it opened by now. Instead it has been bottled up by a series of legal and environmental challenges. 

The latest setback is a ruling against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Carolina State Ports Authority, which were seeking a permit to add pilings under a warehouse that was going to be renovated to become the new cruise hub.

Not so fast, said U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel, who ruled that the Corps’ depiction of the project as too incremental to merit an environmental review was not an accurate one.

Saying the project was only about five new clusters of pilings underneath the current warehouse was disingenuous, Gergel said.

“You haven’t done what the law requires you to do by reducing a 108,000 square-foot project to 41-square feet of pilings,” Gergel concluded. “You have an obligation to look at the entire project.”

For cruise passengers, that means continuing to use the current 18,000-square-foot cinderblock building erected in 1973, the year after Carnival Cruise Lines was founded.

Carnival was the line that inspired the need for an improved terminal; it brought the Carnival Fantasy to Charleston in 2010 for year-round cruising.

Reilly has warned that one alternative, if the new building gets sufficiently delayed, is simply to renovate the existing terminal. That would seem neither to serve Carnival, which wants a more functional terminal, nor Charleston’s residents, who would get public access to a much nicer and more landscaped waterfront under the Union Pier plan.

Behind all the environmental opposition is the question of whether cruise tourism is out of place in the city’s historical area. 

But as it stands, cruise passengers account for 4% of the city’s 4.5 million annual visitors. Charleston will have to wait a little longer now to see if that total will ever grow.