SAVANNAH -- State law requires Jekyll Island officials to count marsh that stands above water at high tide as land when calculating how much of the state park is open to development, Georgia's attorney general said Thursday.
Olens' opinion rejects the conclusion of a task force appointed by the Jekyll Island Authority that said in April that the island long ago overstepped its maximum footprint for development. The group said Jekyll officials for decades wrongly included hundreds of acres of marsh in the island's total acreage as if they were dry land.
At issue is a 1971 law that mandates that only 35 percent of Jekyll Island's total land area can be used for hotels, golf courses and other development. While the law doesn't say how large the island is or define "land," Sam Olens ruled, nowhere does it say marsh can or should be excluded from the island's total acreage. And there's plenty of marsh that stands above mean high tide, the marker specified by law for measuring the island's boundaries.
"Excluding 'marsh' from Jekyll's measurement would constitute an inappropriate alteration of the statutory language," Olens said in his opinion.
The question over Jekyll Island's size arose as the authority works on a new master plan to guide future conservation, maintenance and development. The last such plan was done 17 years ago. It put the island's size at 4,226 acres and also found that 32 percent of the land had been developed.