Debby left Charleston’s future Lowcountry Lowline underwater | News

Knee-deep water pooled under Interstate 26 along the spine of Charleston’s peninsula on Aug. 6 as Tropical Storm Debby blew through, leaving stretches of the future Lowcountry Lowline submerged.

The long-anticipated linear park is expected to extend 1.7 miles from Mount Pleasant Street to Marion Square following an old railroad bed that cuts under the highway, and eventually connect to other pedestrian and bike networks across the city.

But a city official and project planner said the pathway isn’t just a mobility project, its also an opportunity to mitigate flooding along the corridor and the neighborhoods that surround it.

“This is why there’s so much opportunity and value in the Lowline,” said Logan McVey, chief policy officer to Mayor William Cogswell. “Because it also gives us this ability to put infrastructure in to move water away from these places.”

The fact that parts of the site were underwater after the recent storm’s dousing “puts an exclamation point behind the necessity for this project,” he said. “Not a concern, not a delay, but an exclamation point.”

McVey was part of a contingent of city officials who recently traveled to Atlanta seeking inspiration from a nonprofit behind more than 300 miles of interconnected trails across Georgia, and advice on how the Holy City might proceed here.

“This project has been on the shelf for so long that people aren’t sure it’s ever going to happen,” McVey said. “We want to find a way to get it done quickly.”

But to move quickly, the city may have to decline a $7 million federal grant awarded in 2022 for the project’s planning and prep work.

The city hoped to use federal dollars to remove toxic and contaminated soil from the site. But after awarding the grant, the US Department of Transportation told the city it couldn’t use the money to “turn dirt” and could only use it for planning purposes, adding 3 to 5 years to the timeframe.

“With federal dollars come federal strings, and those federal strings can be cumbersome,” McVey said. “We think that we can beat that timeline to build a path ourselves.”

Much of the planning has already been done by the nonprofit Friends of the Lowcountry Lowline, which in 2020 developed a conceptual master plan that broke the project into phases with a total price tag of $35 million. Some of those deadlines have already passed, yet no construction on the public portion has begun.

According to McVey, the federal grant money has not been touched. If the city doesn’t use the grant, it will have to look for other revenue streams to pay for the project. Currently, the city has about $1.3 million set aside for the project, he added.

The city purchased most of the railroad right-of-way from Norfolk Southern Corp in 2017. The partnership with the Friends nonprofit helped make the $4.6 million purchase possible.

The last half-mile of the planned path — from about Line Street to Marion Square — is privately owned. The city has commitments from several developers and plans approved that will incorporate the Lowline into these private projects.

One such owner-developer is Evening Post Industries Inc., the former parent company of The Post and Courier, which plans to raze the newspaper’s former building and build a mix of retail, office and residential spaces on a 3.7-acre city block bounded by King, Columbus and Line streets and the future park.

An acre of the site, which is now called Courier Square, has been designated as public space to integrate into the Lowline, and the developers committed $2 million to help jump-start the city’s park project.

Plans like the Courier Square development are what have made the Atlanta Beltline so successful, McVey said. Not only is it a park, where residents can get out of their cars to traverse downtown, but he hopes it will be a destination for shopping and dining, as well.

Private developers also have to meet the city’s stormwater requirements, which includes flood mitigation.

On the public portion of the trail, the city plans to add pipes underneath the permeable and elevated pathway that will connect to the city’s existing stormwater system to direct excess water away from surrounding neighborhoods. Below the I-26 interchange, where Newmarket Creek flows out to the Charleston Harbor, plans call for a “stormwater park” to collect runoff from the interstate and retain the water that currently overflows existing wetlands and floods a dirt path, skate park, and nearby intersection at King and Huger streets.

“We wanted to figure out ways where the Lowline could help with the flooding problems that we have,” said Scott Parker, a landscape architect whose company, Design Works, helped develop the master plan years ago. Parker is on the board of the Friends of the Lowline and attended the trip to Atlanta with city officials.

“When you deal with stormwater, you want to detain it so it doesn’t cause flooding, and you want to treat it for water quality,” Parker said. “Nature does that with wetlands. And so we’re actually proposing to create a large wetland there, collect the water from the elevated highway, bring it here, let the wetland clean it, and then have the water go out into Charleston Harbor through Newmarket Creek.”

In Atlanta, McVey, Parker and others met with representatives from the PATH Foundation, the nonprofit that helped build the Atlanta Beltline, which encircles the Georgia capital and also runs along old rail lines.

While there is still no timeline for when construction will begin, the city invited the foundation to visit Charleston this fall to advise on how best to start.

Parker said the nonprofit was “very encouraged” by the July 24 meeting in Atlanta and the administration’s push to see the park come to life.

The Friends and the city seem to favor a phased approach and are eager to hear strategies for tackling the project from the Georgia path builders.

“Whatever phase one is, when it’s built, it needs to be enough that it really captures the imagination of the larger community,” Parker said. “So that when people actually go there, they’re excited. They want to go back.”

And that they will want to see the next phase built, he added.