The Board of Land Use Appeals filed their written decision on XXX 2016, and it didn’t contain too many surprises. In their final order, BLUA required that the two CZM permits “be consolidated” while affirming the St John CZM Committee decision to approve the permits. This appeared to be somewhat of a contradiction – BLUA said that CZM was correct in affirming, but should have required a single “Land and Water Permit” as opposed to two individual permits. With a single permit the complete impacts of the project could be assessed, whereas in individual permits there was no consideration of “cumulative effects”.

Both Save Coral Bay and the Moravian Conference felt that BLUA had erred by not considering the full scope of evidence, and continued to feel that the CZM committee had erred in not requiring comprehensive documentation of impacts. As a consequence, both parties, individually, filed lawsuits in Virgin Islands Superior Court.

These lawsuits – known as “Writs of Review” – are the first level judicial challenge to any permit decision. The BLUA hearing is what’s known as an “administrative” review and is conducted under different rules of procedure than the judicial proceedings.

The Writs of Review were filed in July 2016, and although they’ve been fully briefed and there have been multiple requests for trial and decision, the cases remain “OPEN” on the docket of the Virgin Islands Superior Court.