Published: Tuesday, June 4, 2024
By RUSS BYNUM Associated Press
SAVANNAH (Ga.) — A Georgia conservation group filed notice Monday of its intention to sue two U.S. Government agencies, claiming they failed to properly evaluate the environmental impact of the $7.6-billion electric vehicle and batteries plant Hyundai is building near Savannah.
The Ogeechee Riverkeeper claims that the Army Corps of Engineers issued a permit for filling or dredging wetlands at the plant using outdated data, which failed to take into account the final scale of the project. The agency also erred in assuming that the project’s impact on groundwater would be negligible.
Environmental groups also claim that the U.S. Treasury Department distributed millions of dollars worth of infrastructure funding to the project, without performing the required environmental reviews.
Donald D.J. Stack, a lawyer representing the conservation group.
Hyundai Motor Group began construction in 2022 of its first U.S. facility dedicated to the production of electric vehicles and batteries. The South Korean automaker said that it hopes to start production in Bryan County, west of Savannah, before the end this year.
Hyundai will eventually have 8,000 employees producing 300,000 electric vehicles per year on the Georgia site. This is the biggest economic development project that the state has ever undertaken. The plant site covers more than 1,170 hectares (2,900 acres).
Emails seeking comments Monday evening from Hyundai’s spokesperson and those of the two federal agencies mentioned in the letter by the environmental group were not immediately answered.
The group says it will file a lawsuit after 60 days, if the construction of the Hyundai factory is not halted until the Army Corps and Treasury Department have updated their environmental reviews.
In a press release, Damon Mullis said that if we discover that applicants for permits withhold information from a permit application, and if the permitting agency does not do its due diligence, then we will hold them accountable and use the law.
In the group’s letter, it is stated that the Army Corps granted a permit for the project in 2022 using a lot of information from a application submitted in 2019 by a local authority before there was an agreement with Hyundai to build the car in Georgia. The letter says that the project has grown by more than 500 acres 202 hectares in this period.
In a letter, the riverkeeper group also said that the Army Corps had “severely underestimated” the impacts on the water supply in the area. The agency says it granted the permit without knowing how much water would be used by the plant, assuming that Bryan County could handle a “negligible impact”.
Georgia’s environmental regulators, however, are currently considering permits for four wells located in a nearby county. This would allow Hyundai to withdraw an aggregate of 6.5 million gallons per day. The water would be sourced from the groundwater, which is the main source of drinking-water in the area.
The riverkeeper group claims that the Treasury Department has violated the National Environmental Policy Act, by not performing an environmental review prior to disbursing estimated $240 millions to pay for improvements to the water and wastewater infrastructure at the Hyundai plant. The funding was derived from the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package Congress approved in 2020.