Camden County must pay the outstanding money owed to Union Carbide Corp. for the land on which county commissioners had wanted to build a now defunct spaceport project, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The ruling is the latest blow to the county which has spent more than $12 million dollars in legal costs fighting its citizens who were against the spaceport as a waste of taxpayer money and managed to stop it via a citizens’ referendum. The county then spent millions more trying to overturn the referendum in the state Supreme Court.
The Eleventh Circuit Court ruled on Friday on a related matter concerning the contract for land on which to build a future spaceport. The county had entered a property contract with the Dow Chemical Co. subsidiary for land.
The commissioners had paid a total of $2.6 million to Union Carbide for an exclusive option on the disused industrial property as it worked for years — unsuccessfully — to secure federal regulatory approval for rocket launches and a deal with a rocket company. The total purchase price agreed was $4.8 million.
The court, in an unsigned opinion, found meritless Camden County’s claims that the citizens’ referendum in 2022 that stopped the spaceport project should also nullify the contract for the 4,000-acre land deal.
“The referendum does not expressly provide that it will operate retroactively to make the earlier payments to Union Carbide illegal,” read the five-page opinion from the judges. “Because a valid contract existed when those payments were made, the county’s claim for unjust enrichment or money had and received fails.”
The ruling likely ends Camden County’s efforts to recoup its costs from the failed project that had been percolating for more than a decade without yielding new employment or local jobs.
Spaceport Camden was proposed in 2014 and was controversial from the start. Residents and visitors to Cumberland and Little Cumberland raised safety issues based on their position under the flight path of rockets. Residents on the mainland scrutinized the project’s cost and viability.
As costs to consultants soared, residents pushed to hold a local referendum to stop the county commissioners from spending more money.
Throughout the process, the Camden County government fought its citizens at every step. The county first sought to invalidate the citizens’ petition, claiming duplicate signatures amounted to fraud. When that didn’t work it sued the county-employed Probate Court Judge Robert Sweatt who approved the petition. After the March 8, 2022, referendum, in which about 72% of voters rejected the spaceport purchase, Camden tried to prevent the Georgia Secretary of State from certifying the results.
In a unanimous decision in 2023 the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the referendum as constitutionally authorized, a development that quashed the spaceport but not Camden’s plans to recoup some of its money.
Camden County then sued Union Carbide on the grounds that it was refusing to honor the option agreement while pocketing the county’s cash. Union Carbide countered that the county’s position would violate the so-called contracts clause of the Georgia Constitution, which prohibits laws from invalidating commercial contracts.
Earlier this summer, the Eleventh Circuit panel of three judges had signaled skepticism during oral arguments of the county’s arguments that the successful referendum should retroactively invalidate a previous contract.
“Laws are repealed all the time, and they’re repealed for purposes of going- forwardness,” said U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher. “That doesn’t mean what they did in the past is either good or bad. It just means that going forward, there’s a new law.”
In their opinion, the judges found “no clear indication in the text of the citizen referendum that it is to be applied retroactively.”