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Carolina Station Finale

            -- George Edwards

During public input at the July 22 Horry County Council meeting, Richard Leavitt and I, as taxpayers, repeated the school district’s previous meeting plea for county council to reconsider approval of the Carolina Station development and its development agreement. We did so to allow the school system to renegotiate in an attempt to have International Paper agree to put Carolina Station in a Residential Improvement District. One primary reason for doing this was so that the Carolina Station property owners would be required to pay the increased taxes necessary to cover Carolina Station's proportionate share of the public school facilities the development required.

No motions for reconsideration were made; therefore Carolina Station development approval and its development agreement approval stand. None of its sub-developments will require an appearance before county council, so any financial agreements can only be negotiated by Planning.  The Horry County planning commission, up to now, has said that negotiating finances is not their job, but the job of county council.  

Carolina Station's proportionate share of its public school facility costs will be a bare bones minimum approximating $105M in today's dollars. This is derived from school system estimates for the costs of two equipped elementary schools to be fully occupied by Carolina Station students, one equipped middle school 75% occupied by Carolina Station students and one high school 50% occupied by Carolina Station students plus the cost of a 20 year bond to cover this occupancy. The school system, of course, can not build partial schools so the full cost of the equipped school facilities required to be built to serve Carolina Station would approximate $125M in today's dollars. This does not consider the required bond costs. It is important to note that neither estimate considers inflation in construction and material costs. As it is now, most of these costs have to be paid by other taxpayers in the county rather than by the Carolina Station property owners.

The county council majority has chosen to completely ignore this situation, as well as other complaints about the development agreement.

Councilmen Ryan, Schwartzkopf, Worley, Barnard and council chairman Gilland had voted against approving the Carolina Station development agreement at its third reading on July 1. Only one more vote would have made the necessary six to defeat the approval, because only eleven could vote. Councilman Schulz, as a partner in DDC Engineering Inc., the firm representing the Carolina Station developing landowner, International Paper, had to recuse himself.

Two other councilmen who voted for the approval, Foxworth and Allen, had voted for impact fees earlier and so had seemed to believe that developers or developments should pay for the public facilities they require. Either could have moved to reconsider at the July 22 meeting as they had been on the prevailing side. But both would have had to vote for the reconsideration for it to pass, because Barnard was absent due to a trip that he had planned better than ten months before. County council meetings are generally scheduled on the first and third Tuesday of the month rather than the fourth Tuesday, July 22 in this case.

 Neither Allen nor Foxworth moved to reconsider. For years, Foxworth had claimed to be an outspoken supporter of developments paying impact fees or otherwise paying for the public facilities that the developments require. Several people were surprised that he had not cast the one vote necessary to deny approval of the Carolina Station development agreement at third reading. Allen has been on the council for a much lesser time, but he had voted for impact fees.

The reason that Allan gave for his vote for the Carolina Station development agreement approval was that otherwise International Paper could follow through on its statement that it would not agree to put Carolina Station into a special tax district in the development agreement. With its then pulling out of any agreement,  instead of having a well planned overall development, the county would be faced with many smaller less well-planned developments.

Foxworth had given several reasons for his vote, the foremost one being that International Paper had been negotiating for two years, had jumped through all the hoops and deserved approval. He would only vote for something that applied to everyone. I spoke to him before the meeting mainly saying that we had to start sometime requiring developments to pay for the public facilities they required and now was the ideal time.

At the start of my public input, I set aside my few prepared comments to speak off the cuff, first about International Paper possibly walking away,  I said that it would profit more from its proposed overall development plan than selling its land in individual parcels. I also pointed out that the Residential Improvement District act allowed development buyers to pay special taxes for some of the facilities that developers normally provide, noted that the act was proposed by a real estate developer in the general assembly and was generally favored by developers.. I said that International Paper would have the opportunity to negotiate when school bonds would be needed and so could have the taxes phased until International Paper was essentially out of the picture. I said that other developments were not in residential improvement special tax districts now but we had to start sometime. And I pointed out that the taxes due to the costs of public schools so outweighed any other tax costs that those other tax costs were down in the mud.

I then returned to my prepared remarks noting that the Residential Improvement District Act is the only S.C. legislation that inarguably provides for developments or developers to pay for any portion of the public school facilities a new development requires. And I pointed out that impact fees, that International Paper agreed to be bound with, clearly can not cover public school facilities under the S.C. Impact Fee statute.

I re-emphasized that the Residential Improvement District act became law only last month so it was not available for consideration in earlier negotiations with International Paper. And concluded by saying: “As an Horry County taxpayer, I’m asking you to reconsider your approval of the Carolina Station development and its development agreement last meeting and then defer those approvals until further negotiation with International Paper to allow provisions in the Carolina Station development agreement to put Carolina Station’s  buyers into a Residential Improvement District Act special tax district.”

County council did not respond to our pleas and took no action.