The September settlement of a long-running federal court case appeared to finally lay to rest the question of whether thousands of acres along the Congaree River would ever be ripe for development.

Now, the group that proposed creation of a massive “city within a city” on the site wants Richland County to pay for a huge swath of the property.

The settlement appeared to finally lay to rest the question of whether thousands of acres along the Congaree River would ever be ripe for development. Courtesy photo

In an amended lawsuit filed last month in the Richland County Court of Common Pleas, Columbia Venture LLC accuses the county of wrongly using a questionable floodplain determination to place 70 percent of its property into the floodplain zone. Columbia Venture seeks unspecified compensation for the regulatory taking, court costs and attorney’s fees.

The county has not yet answered the complaint but has filed several motions related to it, including a motion to dismiss, according to county spokeswoman Stephany Snowden.

The county declined to respond to the specifics of the complaint, citing a policy against commenting on continuing litigation. Attorneys for Columbia Venture were not available for comment.

The move comes after Columbia Venture settled a suit against the Federal Emergency Management Agency in which Columbia Venture sought to remove restrictions on developing its land. Under the September settlement, FEMA agreed to pay Columbia Venture $75,000 and allow it to file a formal request that FEMA’s flood map be revised. For its part, Columbia Venture agreed to withdraw all pending Freedom of Information Act requests it filed related to the case.

The issue in the new case hinges on Richland County’s acceptance of FEMA’s 2001 flood maps, which severely restricted development of the land. In order to mitigate its losses on the land, Columbia Ventures sold a portion of its land in late 2007 and sought the annexation of its remaining 3,113 acres into the City of Cayce. There, the initial Green Diamond proposal morphed into a vastly scaled-down proposal that environmentalists did not oppose but which has since withered away anyway, in part because of the housing market.

Columbia Venture argues that a preliminary FEMA analysis in 1999 that found the 4,474-acre tract located between Bluff Road and the river was not in a floodway thanks, in part, to the presence of the Interstate-77 embankment and agricultural dikes that ran through the property. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey showed the same thing, the amended complaint said.

After a period of spirited public debate, however, a flood map drawn by FEMA in 2001 discounted the existence of the levee and dikes and said they’d do little to protect the property from flooding. The federal government said the new data was the result of a different set of scientific and technical data being collected about the property.

Columbia Venture says the agency violated its own public comment rules and employed a flawed methodology that purposely restricted the land’s development. More pointedly, Columbia Venture argued that in issuing its revised determination, FEMA bowed to pressure from Richland County and others and changed its position “for reasons that are not articulated in the public record,” its complaint states. Further, it says, the standards the county applied to block the project were “completely arbitrary and irrational.”

Cayce’s annexation trumps Richland County’s ban, making development still theoretically possible. However, if FEMA’s upcoming studies of the site affirm its 2001 findings, any hope of developing the land would once again fall flat.