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George's Information and Comments Growth Impact Action Committee ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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Carolina Station 7/19/08 Update: Carolina Station Current (7/19/08) Situation and Suggestions
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January 28 Planning Commission Meeting -- George Edwards
Action on the Carolina Station development agreement and rezoning request was deferred again at the January 3 Planning Commission meeting, as recommended by Janet Carter, Planning Director, and agreed by International Paper Realty representatives in attendance. The only planning commission members urging passage at the meeting were Holly Kauffman, District 1, and Rob Wilfong, District 2 appointee of Brent Schulz, DDC Engineering partner.
In the initial preliminary development agreement, IPR was going to make land available for three schools within Carolina Station that the school system could buy at fair market value. Joe Burch of the Horry County school system told me just prior to the meeting that what I had heard that IPR was now going to actually dedicate land for two schools within the development (and is said in The Sun News article linked to below) was not settled. During the meeting, Wooten said that, although the board of education seemed pleased with that offer, it had not acted on anything.
There were many items upon which agreement had not yet been met and the only documentation received since the original preliminary development agreement was an e-mail that is reproduced below (see Note) as has been furnished in response to my request to Janet Carter.
As mentioned in the news article linked to below, Wooten said that it was unfair to require IPR to contribute public facilities that Carolina Station would require as neighboring developments, that had not offered any of the many things that IPR was offering, had been approved without requiring them to contribute all the public facilities they would require.
Comment: Wooten has a point. It is precisely because of this that a proportionate share ordinance of some kind should be passed that applies to all new developments and, because that will not likely be done before approval of the development agreement, the final Carolina Station development agreement should include a provision specifically stating that IPR agrees to abide by future proportionate share ordinances.
Click here for the excellent news story on the meeting by Mike Cherney of The Sun News.
Click Growth Management Tools and scroll down to view my prior PowerPoint presentations to County Council committees on proportionate share ordinances. Click Proportionate Shares to see the more specific quantifications that have since evolved for determining fair proportionate shares.
Note: The following is a copy of the e-mail referred to in the meeting that IPR representatives referred to as a document that augmented the initial Carolina Station preliminary development agreement
Carter, Janet
From: Mike Wooten [jmw@ddcinc.com]Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 4:30 PM To: Carter, Janet Cc: Gosnell, Steve; 'Sabina T. Finnegan'; Claude Epps; 'Jeff King'; Roland Meyer; 'Josh A. Decker'; 'Dan Lambert'; Brent Schulz; 'Dale Gaff' Subject: FW: Carolina Station Message Page 1 of 2 1/4/2008
Janet:
Thank you for setting up the meeting this morning to discuss the Carolina Station project. I believe the meeting was very beneficial.
In accordance with Steve's request, I have developed a summary of the elements of infrastructure which will be provided by our Client , International Paper Realty (IPR) . Please keep in mind that these are the "basics" and, as such, the what, when, where and how elements must be defined. The summary is as follows:
1) IPR will provide the property for three County maintained parks and will fund the construction activities for said parks, limited to a maximum of $ 4,750,000. DDC will provide the County with a summary listing of the facilities which, we believe, can be developed within this budget amount. IPR will not only fund the parks, but will equip and construct the parks as well, based on a mutually agreed upon time frame.
2) IPR will donate one (1) site for EMS/County Police , which will be approximately four (4) acres in size, and will fund construction activities for this site up to a maximum of $1 million toward construction and equipping the station.
3) IPR will donate one (1) site for a solid waste convenience/recycling center. This site will be approximately four (4) acres in size. IPR will, as part of the construction activities associated with other elements of the project, clear and grub this site.
4) IPR will donate two (2) twenty acre elementary school sites within the limits of the project . The High School site has been removed from Carolina Station. A site adjacent to Carolina station can be set aside for a high school site. This site is for purchase and will be located on IPR property located near the project, but not within the limits of the proposed project.
5) IPR will complete all of the recommendations contained in the Carter Burgess report Memorandum, dated August, 2007 with revisions dated November 20, 2007 which are depicted on Table 2 of the memorandum which are contiguous , adjacent and touches the project. Table 2 can be correlated back the original report, which depicts the intersection improvements in greater detail.
As we discussed, these are based on an understanding that IPR will be able to develop a funding mechanism which will reimburse IPR for out-of-pocket expenses associated with the park/EMS station construction.
James M. Wooten, PE DDC Engineers, Inc. 1298 Professional Drive Myrtle Beach, SC 29577 jmw@ddcinc.com www.ddcinc.com p (843) 692-3200 f (843) 692-3210
Click here to view the initial preliminary development agreement.
Click here to return to table-menu for this page.
Known Carolina Station Status Up to the January 2008 Planning Commission Meeting
--George Edwards
The current draft of the Carolina Station development agreement will be acted upon by the Horry County Planning Commission tomorrow, Thursday night starting at 5:30 p.m., immediately after general public input for which at least an hour previous registration is required. There is no public input set up for the public to specifically discuss the agreement.. With the holidays and other obligations, I have not yet set aside the time to give a report on the previous planning commission meeting at which action on the development agreement was deferred.
A copy of the preliminary development agreement and my published
comments to date regarding it, Carolina Station and two pictorials of
the then proposed development are published elsewhere on this Web site.
Extremely briefly, it will involve commercial and residential development
including in excess of 13,000 homes -- representing, at two people per home,
more than ten percent of the currently estimated total Horry County
population.
At the previous planning commission meeting, I said that the agreement
should either require the Carolina Station development to contribute its
proportionate share of the public facilities it requires or explicitly state
that the development would comply with any future proportionate share
ordinance or provision that county council passes in the 30 years that the
development agreement covers.* Among other things, other citizens expressed
concern that, regardless of road interconnectivity within Carolina Station,
the increased traffic load on S.C. 9, without more external road
construction external to the development, would surely result in traffic
backups similar to those currently experienced on U.S. 501 due to Carolina
Forest. A proportionate share fee reflecting the added exterior road load
that will be caused by Carolina Station could at least offset some of the
taxes from those that would have to otherwise be paid by the general
population.
Earlier today, I asked county staff for an electronic copy of the
current draft of the Carolina Station development, that the deputy planning
director promised she would e-mail me if she found out where it was. At this
point, I have been unable to locate a hard copy of the draft although I had
been told that one exists -- and potentially in Microsoft Word on county
computers, suitable for e-mailing and publication on the GIAC Web site.
As it is, I have no information on what the current draft says except
that Kay Loftus, District 4 board of education representative, tells me
that the school system has been able to negotiate the development's
donating land for two schools rather than just setting aside space for the
school system to buy the land at fair market value as in the preliminary
development agreement. The development will at least require 3 new school
facilities. In my opinion, Carolina Station should pay its proportionate
share of the construction of all the additional school facilities its K-12
students will require, not just dedicate land for some of it. This is what
is right and what the county should be requiring, not negotiating --- for
any new development.
*Edwards prepared comments (essentially eliminated the first paragraph because the information in it had been covered in lengthy presentations early in the meeting): I am pleased with many things offered in my reading of the preliminary Carolina Station agreement including most of it to be zoned for three-quarter acre single family residence lots, freezing that zoning for the thirty years of the agreement, promised internal road interconnectivity, lower density zoning from the outside into and within the traditional neighborhood core and forty foot deep buffers surrounding the development as well as the twenty individual development “pods.”
This could all not be offered without the concurrence of International Paper and the guidance of Mike Wooten with DDC engineering.
I fully appreciate Mike Wooten’s complaint about the unfairness of saddling Carolina Station with proportionate share requirements of the public facilities the development will require without equally requiring the same for other developments. It may not be feasible to complete the planning and adoption of such proportionate share ordinances within a reasonable time for reaching a Carolina Station development agreement. If that is true, the agreement should specify that Carolina Station will fully comply with proportionate share ordinances adopted in the future.
The published preliminary development agreement shows that land will be dedicated for public facilities on-site except for schools and land will be set aside for purchase by the school system to build school facilities. But the developer does not agree to construct or pay for any of these public facilities including schools.
I am very pleased to hear that county staff and the developer are negotiating for the developer to pay for or actually build the on-site public facilities except for schools. The appraised value of any that they do build should offset all or a portion of the proportionate share for such public facilities that the development requires.
Unfortunately, Mike Wooten has strongly indicated that the development can not and International Paper will not agree that the development will pay for the construction of the public schools that Carolina Station will require. If it will not and the development can not pay for them, the rest of the county really can not afford the development and should not agree to do so.
That portion of Carolina Station’s proportionate share of the public school facilities the development will require must be agreed to be contributed by the developer or its sub-developers in the initial development agreement or implicitly agreed to in explicitly accepting future proportionate share ordinances and, if those schools do not meet all the development’s needs, it must in either case agree to contribute its proportionate share of the off-site school space the development requires.
Almost half again of the fiscal needs and therefore the taxes that must be collected from Horry County residents are the school systems’. The county should not negotiate separately from the school system or at least not approve a plan unless the school system also agrees.
The bottom line is: The Carolina Station development agreement should not be approved unless it includes provisions for contributing its proportionate share of the public facilities that the development will require or that it will comply with future ordinances that require it as well as other developments to contribute their proportionate share of the public facilities they require.
Personal Commentary on the Initial Preliminary Development Agreement -- George Edwards
Let me rapidly convey my general impression of the current Carolina Station development agreement. It concerns a huge tract of land south of S.C. 9 and the Long Bay Golf Club that is to be developed in phases over 30 years. Most of it is to be made up of roughly one-third acre residential lots (SF-14.5) surrounding a core traditional neighborhood district (TND) that I assume resembles, at least in part, the residential-above-businesses-walking-distance-development currently being constructed on the old air force base. It will also include property to be developed in one of the recently renamed Highway Commercial districts, RE3, which, as I recall, differs from RE4 by not allowing hog farms or camper rental lots among other things.
It will include internal roads, park and lake amenities with better road interconnectivity than usual. It will set aside space for three schools (subsequently shown as only two schools on a 11/29/07 p.m. County Council workshop presentation slide) which the school district at taxpayer's expense can purchase at market value if it exercises its options soon enough and will dedicate space for police, fire and public safety facilities to be constructed at county taxpayer's expense. Horry County Council is to assert that the agreement is in full accord with its comprehensive plan.
In the interest of getting what I consider to be the gist of it out as soon as possible, I recite this without referring to my notes on my top-of-the-head review of the development agreement. We can all check the details, and perhaps correct my faulty memory, by reviewing the scanned-in optical character recognition software version of a preliminary development agreement e-mailed from Ted Van Weeren reproduced in a separate section below and referring to the county zoning district requirements published on the Horry County Web site, www.horrycounty.org.
Mr. Van Weeren volunteered to scan and e-mail me the Carolina Station preliminary development agreement when I phoned him about The Sun News essay he wrote emphasizing the need for planning the public facilities that Carolina Station would require.
In my mind, this preliminary Carolina Station development agreement is completely inadequate from the point of view of the county. And I don't know whether any adequately planned agreement for Carolina Station is feasible and agreeable between the parties in what either consider is an acceptable time frame. The only possibility I see for an agreement adequately protecting the county is an explicit stipulation that it will be subject to an adequate public facilities ordinance* with proportionate share provisions, as I have outlined elsewhere, that are not in place by the time a joint agreement is signed. I don't know whether International Paper would buy such, and I don't believe, failing that, that the county should sign anything less until such time as such ordinance(s) are in place.
The following are copied from PowerPoint "slides" on Carolina Station given in the November 29 Horry County Council workshop.
Summary of project
Project Summary Table
For the Community
Click here to view a pictorial of the proposed Carolina Station development copied from a Power Point "slide" given in the November 29 Horry County Council workshop. (Caveat: to avoid having to reload this entire Web site to return, you must first click menu items uncovered by a pictorial before clicking a desired menu item on the new page.) Click here for a pictorial from another presentation. Among other things, more road names are clearly shown.
Click here to return to table-menu for this page.
County Council Planning Workshop 11/29/07 p.m. Selections, Related Actions and Personal Opinions 12/3-4/07 Update: Correction shown in blue text below. Janet Carter said that she was misquoted in the newspaper; she would "not recommend to county council the [Carolina Station] development be rejected unless the developer and the county can figure out how to pay for all the schools, parks, roads and other municipal services the development would require." I completely agree with what she was quoted as saying in the newspaper. County council publicly grieves about poor planning in the past. The county should take the time to do Carolina Station right or not do it at all -- at least until the county has its act together enough to get the same concessions as an adequate public facility ordinance* with proportionate share provisions from International Paper. I believe we would be better off letting the land be developed a piece at a time until such time as an adequate public facility ordinance* with proportionate share provisions to apply to all new developments gets in place. Mike Wooten, DDC Engineering representative for International Paper -- owner of the Carolina Station land, was already grousing that it was unfair that they should be asked to do things that others were not required to do.
Alternatively, the development agreement should specifically specify that the development will be subject to an anticipated adequate public facility ordinance* with proportionate share provisions when that ordinance is put in place.
Horry County planning director Janet Carter said she sees the only way for an adequate public facility ordinance* to be implemented is to have a capital improvement plan in place, with the, to me, implied funding by taxing everyone in the county. She says that she doesn't believe it can hold back development in an area without adequate public facilities for more than a year. She appears to share the local attitude that any moratorium for any reason is verboten. Carter said that a capital improvement plan is necessary before enacting a public facilities ordinance. A capital improvement plan is called for in the S.C. impact fee statute, but the representative of the widely reputed Tischler organization said at this workshop that another jurisdiction, Somerville, they had consulted for won S.C. supreme court approval under the current impact fee statute by using, as I understood it, their current level of service rather than requiring a capital improvement plan. From this, one wonders whether the lengthy time that preparation of a full-blown capital improvement plan is required for an adequate public facilities ordinance*. An adequate public facilities ordinance* is called out in the comprehensive plan that the preliminary Carolina Station development agreement says that county council (if it were to sign it) agrees complies with that comprehensive plan. DDC Engineering partner Mike Wooten (representing International Paper) said that he was amenable to the results of the Horry County Tischler software** being applied to Carolina Station. But he wanted to participate in its development. Carter did not believe the software would be adequately developed to apply it to Carolina Station. I wonder how far away it is from development insofar as other public facilities than schools are concerned. Regardless, it certainly does not yet include school facilities which it should to be adequate. To me, this is just that much more reason to defer Carolina Station approval until the software is adequate to determine its fair proportionate share of the public facility it requires, or specifically require in the development agreement that Carolina station comply with any such future ordinance requirement. Carolina Station is a near ideal model to focus on in working out the proportionate share developments should contribute county-wide.
Wooten was given free reign to comment copiously
throughout the meeting. I finally asked if I could be allowed two
questions. Gilland first asked if anyone of the half dozen council
people in attendance had any questions. Then, their having none, she
granted me permission to ask my questions.
I asked if I was right in understanding
that the (vaunted) public facilities other than schools by the developer
were no more than a dedication of land for such as fire and police
facilities to be built at public expense paid for by all
resident taxpayers. Steve Gosnell, head of
infrastructure and regulations, said that that was still under
negotiation. I said that the second of my questions was if I understood
properly that insofar as the three schools (according to a preliminary
agreement but the PowerPoint presentation at the work shop showed only
two) were concerned Carolina
Station was just setting aside land that the school district could buy
at fair market value at public expense paid for by all
resident taxpayers.
Wooten said something to the effect that I
was premature. I asked when we would know what the development agreement
was going to say.
Now, Gilland interrupted and said we should
discuss that privately in the halls. There were other matters to be
taken care of in the meeting. I felt, as I always feel, that developers
get all kinds of time but private citizen comments are at
best, put on the back burner.
As it is, developers negotiate with Planning, frequently with no public notice, the results are presented in Planning commission meetings and later to the county council. In front of both bodies, the public is allowed to speak in public input, frequently without full information, before developers make their presentations, then developers are generally given the floor to answer questions and further make their case with no opportunity for anyone else to offer rebuttals. There should be provisions for an ombudsman representing Horry County everyday citizens to sit in on and have a voice in all negotiations on all developments, certainly all major developments like Carolina Station, and for Tischler Horry County software** development if developer representatives are given such access as Wooten requested in the meeting.
After the meeting I talked to Gosnell and
said that I had hoped to get a hard copy of the Carolina Station
development plan (so I could touch up areas that the OCR process in
scanning did not reproduce), but I gathered it was a waste of time if it
was still being negotiated (with the developer -- it is not in the
standard process to negotiate with private citizens who get the finished
product at the last minute if at all). He said that it was premature. I
did not understand if I was told how I was to find out when it was ready,
pointing out that we were supposed to be given public input on the
Carolina Station development plan at the December 6 planning commission
meeting next Thursday. He assured me we would get more than land
dedication.
Gosnell telephoned me today (the 4th.) to tell me that I
misunderstood what he had said in writing that school district officials had
been invited to sit down with them (county staff) but had not chosen too.
He corrected that by saying
they had initially. I had otherwise corrected the record here yesterday on the
3rd. after listening to the tape
of the last planning commission meeting for when the first Carolina Station public
hearing was held. On that tape it was clear that Joe Burch had
participated in early negotiations with Horry County staff on behalf of
the school system. On talking to Janet Carter, immediately after
listening to the tape, she said that Wooten had told her that negotiations had been going on separately
with the school district after the
earlier joint meetings.
When I got home, I called Kay Loftus, my
District 4 school board representative, telling her this and asking if
she would get something done about it, noting also that there was never
anyone from the school system in attendance on the comprehensive plan
although there was a seat for them there and that a principal planner
that came aboard several months ago said his calls to the school
district went unanswered. To hear Loftus, she totally agreed with the
idea of an Adequate Public Facility Ordinance* with proportionate share
provisions. I said great now it was a question of her doing something to
get the school system involved. She sounded agreeable but sounded
dubious if she alone could accomplish anything. We need to put pressure
on the entire school board.
This morning, school board chairman Will Garland responded to an earlier e-mail I had sent to him and Loftus. I responded with an e-mail repeating what I had told Loftus.
* Click
Growth Management Tools
to see discussions describing Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances
including earlier presentations and the most recent one presented by
county staff at the 11/29/07 Horry County council workshop and a
Proportionate Share ordinance. The latter is described separately, but
it could be a portion of an Adequate Public Facilities ordinance. If it
is not, an APFO could, and likely would, just end up causing a further
tax burden on the rest of the county residents who would not otherwise
require the additional public facilities required by new developments.
**The Horry County Tischler software uses detailed Horry County inputs to independently determine the capital and operating costs to county government for various developments and the offsetting fees and taxes to pay for those costs. Points were made about the Tischler analysis being a fiscal analysis as to government expenses not an economic analysis about jobs brought in. If economic benefits to retailers from the more consumer residents result, those retail operations should be the ones saddled with the additional taxes or fees not other current residents. But no one made such a point. When asked, the Tischler representative said the break-even point for a single family home to pay for itself in Horry County was more than one-half million dollars. And this analysis does not include school district expenses that far out-weigh those of the rest of the county. He also said that their analysis showed a Walmart shopping center to be a net loss as to taxes versus revenues. That came as a surprise to me because I thought commercial developments always paid for themselves. Click here to view the Horry County Tischler Software PowerPoint Presentation given at the 11/29/07 Horry County Council Workshop. -------------- A PowerPoint presentation was also given at the workshop pointing out the wisdom of allocating more funds for road maintenance now because a curve showing the costs of repair to roads inadequately maintained over time did not just increase linearly but after a few years, instead, curved rapidly and radically upwards. Click here to return to table-menu for this page.
Preliminary
Carolina Station Development Agreement This is a scanned copy of a preliminary (its particulars are still being negotiated) Carolina Station development agreement as interpreted by optical character recognition software: _______________________________________________ ----COPY E-MAILED FROM TED VAN WEEREN --
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