Group says it intends to sue US agencies for failing to assess Georgia plant’s environmental impact

SAVANNAH, Ga. — A Georgia conservation group on Monday announced its intention to sue two U.S. government agencies for failing to properly assess the environmental impacts of the $7.6 billion electric car and battery factory Hyundai is building outside Savannah.

The Ogeechee Riverkeeper accuses the Army Corps of Engineers of issuing a permit to fill or dredge wetlands on the plant site using outdated data that did not take into account the ultimate scope of the project. And it says the agency wrongly assumed the project would have a negligible impact on the region’s groundwater supply.

The environmental group also says the U.S. Treasury Department distributed millions of dollars in infrastructure funding that benefited the project without conducting required environmental reviews.

“All activities related to this project must immediately cease until these critical steps are properly completed,” said a letter to the organizations’ leaders by Donald DJ Stack, an attorney representing the conservation group.

Hyundai Motor Group broke ground in 2022 on its first U.S. factory dedicated to building electric vehicles and the batteries that power them. The South Korean automaker has said it hopes to begin production in Bryan County, west of Savannah, before the end of this year.

Ultimately, Hyundai plans to have 8,000 workers produce 300,000 electric vehicles per year at the Georgia site, making it the largest economic development project the state has ever tackled. The factory site extends over more than 2,900 acres (1,170 hectares).

Spokespeople for Hyundai and the two federal agencies mentioned in the environmental group’s letter did not immediately respond to email messages seeking comment Monday evening.

The letter says the group plans to file suit after 60 days if construction of the Hyundai plant is not halted while the Army Corps and the Treasury Department conduct updated environmental reviews.

“If we learn that permit applicants are withholding important information in an application and the permitting agency has not conducted due diligence, we will engage them and use the law to hold them accountable,” said Damon Mullis, executive director of the river rangers group . said in a statement.

The group’s letter said the Army Corps granted the permit for the project in 2022 based largely on information from a 2019 application filed by a local agency before there was a deal with Hyundai to build in Georgia. It says the project has grown by more than 202 hectares during that period.

The river rangers group’s letter also states that the Army Corps “seriously underestimated” the impact on the area’s water supply. It says the agency issued a permit without information about how much water the plant would use, incorrectly assuming that Bryan County’s local water system would have a “negligible” impact.

However, environmental regulators in Georgia are now considering permit applications for four wells in a neighboring county, which would allow the Hyundai plant to extract a total of 6.5 million liters of water per day. They are said to come from the groundwater aquifer, the most important source of drinking water in the region.

The Riverkeeper group says the Treasury Department violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to conduct an environmental study before distributing an estimated $240 million to help pay for water and wastewater infrastructure improvements serving the Hyundai plant . It said the funding came from a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that Congress passed in 2021.