Charleston P&C: SC towns stepping into wetlands breach created by Supreme Court panders
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Rising Waters Lab
Mount Pleasant poised to approve local protective wetlands ordinance
Mount Pleasant is poised to become the latest municipality to approve local wetlands protections after a U.S. Supreme Court decision stripped many isolated wetlands of their protections.
Mount Pleasant is poised to become the latest municipality in South Carolina to pass a wetland protection ordinance.
Following a series of Town Council amendments April 6, the ordinance will move to final reading at the April 14 council meeting. If it passes, the town will join a growing list of municipalities across South Carolina that have adopted ordinances to protect wetlands after a U.S. Supreme Court decision rolled back protections.
The wetland protections are achieved by adding a chapter and amendments to the town’s existing land development regulations. The plans have been in the works since fall 2025.
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“I’ve lost track of how many pubic meetings this has been on the agenda, how much public input we have gotten,” Mayor Will Haynie said.
The many wetland types makes mapping them difficult, though experts estimated that up to 1.8 million acres of wetlands lost protection in South Carolina after Sackett v. EPA.
To help identify areas where isolated wetlands can be found, the Town of Mount Pleasant created a wetland mapping tool that combines data about soil type, topography and a national wetlands inventory from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mount Pleasant’s proposed ordinance only applies to non-jurisdictional wetlands, which are no longer protected under the Clean Water Act. The protections would apply to subdivisions and single-family homes that require a building permit. The new rules would require a buffer, averaging 10 feet, around wetlands not already protected at the federal level.
Since the SCOTUS decision, a growing number of South Carolina towns have adopted wetlands ordinances aimed at restoring legal protections to the wetlands within their jurisdictions, including Bluffton and Awendaw.
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Following the Sackett v. EPA decision, only wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to bodies of water are protected under the Clean Water Act. Previously, wetlands that were connected though groundwater to a navigable waterway, like a river or lake, also were protected.
The new ruling left isolated, freshwater wetlands across the state vulnerable to development because they were no longer regulated by the Army Corps of Engineers or the Environmental Protection Agency. Preliminary estimates indicated that anywhere from 200 to 700 acres of wetlands in Mount Pleasant lost protections following the decision, according to previous reporting from The Post and Courier.
Wetlands play an important role in protecting communities from floods and hurricanes, in addition to filtering out pollutants. A single acre of wetland can capture between 1 million and 1.5 million gallons of water, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Lydia Larsen can be reached at lla...@postandcourier.com
Lydia Larsen covers climate change, environmental news and sea level rise at The Post and Courier. A Wisconsin native, she studied genetics before trading the lab bench for journalism.