Charleston resident Stephen Gates would like more time to review documents the State Ports Authority submitted with its latest application this week for a cruise ship terminal at Union Pier.

Gates, whose Historic District home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, said the Army Corps should extend the comment period and schedule a public hearing for the project.

Sean McBride, a spokesman for the Army Corps, said the agency has already given residents more time to review the proposal.

“Public notices are typically only issued for 15 days, but due to the nature of this permit application, we proactively issued it for 30 days,” McBride said, adding that any extension requests would be taken on a case-by-case basis.

“We have granted them in the past, typically to resource agencies that are understaffed and feel like they have valuable input,” he said.

The SPA is staying out of the comment period fray.

“The ports authority defers to the Corps’ judgment on the time for any public notice period for its permitting process,” SPA spokeswoman Erin Dhand said.

Blan Holman, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is suing the SPA in an attempt to stop the terminal’s construction, said his group will ask for more review time. Holman said he’s seen the 40,000 pages of materials, and they are “a complete mess.”

The documents “appear to consist of a disorganized dump of random information and legal pleadings that the Corps and the public will have trouble navigating,” Holman said, adding there is no index or organization of the paperwork.

He said the SPA is using the documents “to shut down citizen inquiries.”

Permit primer

The SPA wants to build a new terminal to replace the 42-year-old facility that handles passengers mostly for Carnival Cruise Lines and its 2,056-passenger Fantasy ship.

The SPA has asked for permission to install five additional clusters of pilings beneath an old Union Pier warehouse north of the existing terminal that will be renovated as a new facility. Environmentalists and neighborhood groups say the new terminal will create more pollution, noise, traffic and other quality-of-life concerns. They want cruise lines to follow municipal laws that protect the city’s environment and historic assets. And they want an environmental impact study to be completed before any construction takes place.

Cruise ship supporters say the industry is an important part of the tourism economy and a source of jobs

The SPA previously tried to get a federal permit for the terminal, but that application was tossed out by a federal judge in 2013 because it did not consider the terminal’s impact on the city’s Historic District.

A separate lawsuit over a permit issued by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is pending, with final briefings submitted to the state’s Court of Appeals but no hearing date scheduled.

Dhand said terminal opponents have had plenty of time to review the documentation.

“The vast majority of those documents are the discovery documents from the DHEC permit litigation, which means that, at least for the cruise opponents, all of those documents have been available for review for well over a year, and for some documents over two years,” Dhand said.

“While the administrative record supporting the permit review is voluminous, I think it is important to note that the project under review is the same project that the Corps previously reviewed and that DHEC permitted in 2012,” she said.

McBride said the 40,000 pages aren’t readily available for public review. To actually see them, someone would have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. What is publicly available is a 15-page notice that “provides a summation of a few pages of what we felt like the public would need to know for them to make a comment,” McBride said.

The notice includes technical drawings and an outline of the pilings installation process, but it does not say what impact the terminal will have on quality of life in the Historic District. The Army Corps says it will consult with national and state historic preservation offices — and other groups that wish to be heard, if they respond within the 30-day period — “to gather additional information about the project site and the surrounding area to inform an effects determination.”

Port haters?

The new cruise terminal has been a contentious issue ever since the SPA first proposed it five years ago.

Holman said the SPA has branded residents who don’t like the cruise ships as enemies, even though many of them support the port’s cargo operations.

Jim Newsome, the authority’s CEO, said in an email that is part of the 40,000 pages of documents that opponents can’t have it both ways.

“I would say that these people do not hate cruise and love the port, they hate the very idea of us being a port,” Newsome said in an email seeking advice on the issue from a public relations expert. “It’s like saying you love dogs but you do not ever plan to feed them because they might (relieve themselves) on the rug.”

Newsome has said he’s tried to accommodate Historic District residents with a self-imposed limit of 104 cruise ship visits annually and no ship larger than 3,500-passenger capacity. He says the Charleston market isn’t big enough to handle anything more than that.

Newsome also has bristled at environmentalists’ suggestion that the cruise terminal be moved farther north to the Columbus Street Terminal — “We need every acre of space on this terminal for freight,” he said in April — and proposals that electric shore power devices be installed to reduce emissions while ships are in port.

Limited outdoor air testing at Union Pier shows no pollution above federal guidelines, even when a cruise ship is in port.

Gates, the Charleston resident with a historic home just blocks from the terminal, said he is undeterred in his opposition. But he adds that residents and the SPA should be on a level playing field when it comes to voicing their opinions.

“Public citizens should not be disadvantaged by this inundation of material,” he said.

Reach David Wren at 937-5550 or on Twitter at @David_Wren_