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Proceedings: April 5 Envision 2025

Horry County Comprehensive Plan

        -- George Edwards

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of the Envision 2025 Horry County Comprehensive Plan.

Steering Committee Membership Changes on the Horry County Web Site

A new organization that is not one of those named in the ordinance forming the steering committee was added to the list of members on the Horry County Web site: Shoreline Engineering. Eric Rabon was named as its representative.

The three such organizations previously on the county Web site no longer appear there:

D.R. Horton, Doctor's care and Black Water Development. The representative for D.R. Horton, Mitchell Flannery, was instead listed as an appointment from county council District 2 and the representative for Doctor's Care, was instead listed as an appointment from county council District 5. As of this writing, David Duvall and Black Water Development are no longer listed as steering committee members.

George Edwards was newly named as appointed by county council district 8.

I intend to publish the officially approved Land Use Element minutes with other enlightening information when such become available and my time permits.

Click www.horrycounty.org and then click Envision 2025 to determine any possible future changes in the official membership.

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Top Level April 5 Envision 2025 Unofficial "Minutes"

Pin-on badges for those with acknowledged steering committee voting rights were at the check-in table and placards were placed on the meeting table where those members were to sit. Steering committee voting attendees were David Utterback, Julie Harbin, Ibrahim Aborshey Ashly, George Edwards, Fred Richardson, Felix Pitts, Chris Carrillo, Holly Kauffman, Peggy Graham, Pam Creech, Mitchell Flannery, Liz Gilland, Eric Rabon.

Fred Richardson, the steering committee chairman, opened by saying that his role was not to be the keeper of credentials, he left that up to staff and administration. There was to be no discussion today on steering committee credentials. Any such should be addressed outside these meetings.

He further said that the committee decision to not segment the comprehensive plan into separate urban and rural sections was a second item questioned between meetings. He said this was decided at the last meeting by a close vote. But it did pass, so both areas would be decided in an integrated overall comprehensive plan.

He said that anything can be readdressed.

After getting the chair's permission to speak, George Edwards said that he questioned the validity of his own appointment after reading the ordinance which formed the steering committee as well as having other credential concerns. [After becoming aware of the issue, I considered resigning, but decided not to while others with equally, or more, questionable credentials remained on the committee.] He said that none of this was to question the qualifications or integrity of individuals. He said that county council had attempted to set up a balance of perspectives on the committee with the objective of getting a such a balance in the committee recommendations. Click here to read the original ordinance attachment that set up the requirements for steering committee membership.

There was some further discussion on the disestablishing separate sections for urban and rural goals, policies and strategies, but I don't believe any further action was taken.

Ravin Gore, senior planner,  announced that their were three steering committee meetings left to complete the Land Use Element of the comprehensive plan (April 19, May 3 and May 17).

Julie Harbin noted that the Land Use Element, yet to be completed, was the most important element of the plan.

John Danford, senior planner, spoke to a PowerPoint  presentation of the historical, current and future projected bases for the land use element as prepared by staff. This had been e-mailed a few days before to steering committee members. Click here to read text extracted from the preliminary draft sent with that e-mail.

Peggy Graham questioned the statement that 27 to 29 of the soil types in Horry County were not suitable for residential or commercial construction. Danford cited the source of the information. I believe it was from the USDA.

Danford presented data said that 84.33 % of the land in Horry County showed little or no human activity.

Edwards said that the reported increase from 9,507 to 23,256 new housing units that Horry County rezonings allowed in 2006 struck him as insane. Danford noted that that was only what was possible due to the rezonings. Holly Kauffman referred to the 2006 growth as a "blip" although it far exceeded previous years. (On rechecking the presentation, I see that the annual increases in the preceding 4 years were 6,291, 6,034, 6,952 and 9,507 [in 2005]).

Danford explained that the "residential" category separated from specific residential types referred to known residential that was not in the database as to specifics.

Roy Anderson, principal planner, presented a preliminary Future Land Use Map and descriptions of various future land use designations. He noted that any such map was not intended to control growth but to serve as a guide.

Holly Kauffman said that roads create growth, specifically mentioning Highway 9. Anderson said that the map was only a start and completely amendable. He said that no consideration had been given to the proposed route 73 or the proposed southern evacuation route.

Mitchell Flannery said that areas around current urban/suburban areas should be shown as transitional growth areas. He said that you can not stop growth.

George Edwards quoted the e-mail sent to the steering committee indicating a future land use map should consider suitable locations for land use and growth including infrastructure. He said that school adequacies should be included in such infrastructure consideration.

He observed that, although named as steering committee members, no Horry County school representative had attended the Land Use element meetings. Nevertheless, he had found  school system representatives quite ready to share their extensive data. But they needed to be asked.

Pam Creech said we should be careful as to preservation of natural resources.

Fred Richardson noted that roads are a critical issue.

Julie Harbin returned to stressing the need for determining the adequacy of public infrastructure in various areas. She questioned how we could reasonably proceed with any future land use mapping without that knowledge.

A senior planner from North Myrtle Beach in the audience (possibly a non-voting ex-officio member appointee) stressed his belief that the steering committee guidelines should be as specific as possible. Members of the audience said they felt that the guidelines should use stronger words than such as "encourage."

Edwards expanded on the desirability strong guidelines to give county council and concerned citizens as much backing as possible in attempting to control the negative impacts of growth. He said that county council should be encouraged by the guidelines  to continue getting  contributions -- financial and in-kind -- from developers in exchange for approving rezoning requests.

He buttressed Richardson's concerns on roads by saying developers should continue to be asked to construct turn lanes as well as widen roads or build parallel ones. He noted that U.S. 17, U.S. 17 bypass, U.S. 701 and S.C. 707 were over capacity -- in 2005.

Anderson said that paper was not so much the answer as the will of county officials.

As the meeting was moving towards adjournment, Edwards noted Richardson's statement early in the meeting that "anything can be readdressed" and suggested the committee strongly consider readdressing its early deletion of the "community benefits agreements." This  was the first paragraph of staff's initial draft strategies for urban growth areas: "Promote community involvement and stakeholder participation through the use of community benefits agreements" [contracts].

Edwards said that the earlier committee discussion was led by the statement that neighboring areas would never agree to any development, but the agreement recently reached between the Southwood residential community and Wicked Stick golf course showed that this was not true.

Holly Kauffman said that such an agreement could be handled with an existing mechanism, a planned development district. She noted neighborhood involvement in an agreement on a northern Myrtle Beach development.

She confirmed that this agreement was made in conjunction with a Planned Development District. Edwards said that this was not the same thing as a "community benefits agreements." A community benefits agreement is a mechanism whereby a developer and affected neighbors enter into an enforceable contract as to what both parties agree is mutually acceptable. He noted that a simple oral statement by a developer in such matters is not enforceable and cited an instance in the just previous county council meeting where this problem was made quite evident.

In adjourning, the steering committee agreed to begin the April 19th. meeting two hours earlier than scheduled -- at 1 p.m., as it had the two earlier meetings -- to give it more time to properly complete its charter.

Steering Committee Membership Criteria: Ordinance 14-05 Attachment Copy

The following has been obtained by scanning a hard copy of the steering committee attachment to ordinance 14-05 "to establish a steering committee for the purpose of guiding the 2005 Horry County Comprehensive Plan update" with a copy of the then county council members signatures to enact the ordinance on February 1, 2005. The scanned copy was converted to text by optical character recognition software and edited to conform to the original where OCR errors were detected.

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