Greenwood County might hit the $87.9 million revenue cap for the 2016 capital project sales tax early — a far cry from the multi-million dollar shortfall projected just two years ago.
When the penny sales tax passed in a 2016 referendum, voters went to the ballot and approved the tax with a maximum collections cap of $87,938,185 to fund 27 projects throughout the county. Confusion sparked in August 2019, when the late County Council Chairperson Steve Brown said officials expected their final collection rate to be up to $20 million below that projected total.
In fall 2020, County Manager Toby Chappell gave a breakdown of quarterly tax revenues and said that shortfall was down to a $10 million deficit. These projections were based on predicting no increase in collections for the following 20 quarters.
But that’s not what happened.
Some quarters saw the collection rate drop — especially in the summer of 2020 — but others have seen significant growth. Now County Treasurer Steffanie Dorn is predicting the tax will bring in more than originally projected — nearly $1.2 million over.
When initially estimating the tax’s collection, the treasurer at the time, Sharon Setzer, contacted the state Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office to predict annual tax income from a 1% increase. The office’s estimates in September 2015 are what were used to estimate the $87 million cap in the 2016 referendum voters approved.
Dorn was working for the City of Greenwood when the 2016 shortfall predictions were made. CPST Manager Josh Skinner was hired about six months into the tax’s lifespan to handle execution of the projects.
Skinner keeps a master spreadsheet, started before his hire, where county officials keep a record of each CPST check given to them from the department of revenue. They apply those funds to each project, rolling any leftover funds forward to the next set of projects.
“When we first started, the way we made our projections was we just took the average of our quarterly collections, and sort of add that to each project,” Skinner said. “Of course, that’s what got us in trouble in the beginning, because those averages were $1.9, $1.8 million — they were pretty low.”
These estimates didn’t project growth, and came up dramatically short.
“After COVID, the collections just blew up,” Skinner said, “and then Steffanie started adding projected growth.”
“I’m looking at what we’ve collected every quarter since its inception, and what the growth has been from quarter to quarter,” Dorn said. “I’m very conservative — which, you want your chief financial officers to be conservative, especially in the government sector — but I take where we’ve been and apply that to where we’re going to go.”
Even then, Dorn said she backs off a bit from raw projected growth, and typically presents a more cautious interpretation of these figures. Since 2016, the economy has experienced extremely volatile conditions, which make some quarters worse indicators of future performance than others.
“When I look at this thing, what’s so interesting to me is how in June of ‘20 we had this massive drop, COVID related. Then the next quarter we had this massive increase,” Dorn said. “No, obviously, I wouldn’t take that and apply it to future quarters.”
In her years crunching numbers for Greenwood County and city government, she’s been through several recessions. She knows Greenwood typically lags behind the rest of the country when it comes to economic impact, and takes that into consideration when making her predictions.
If the county hits the $87 million mark noted in the original referendum, Dorn said the state will notify retailers to stop collecting the tax. The county isn’t supposed to collect more than that cap, though Dorn acknowledged there’s usually a delay from when a tax starts or stops and when retailers make the needed adjustments.
But even if the county collects every intended cent, how do officials ensure it will be enough to afford the 27 approved projects?
“When we do the design and the planning, we’re always asking for cost estimates,” Skinner said. “A lot of times the bids will come in high, and we have to either value-engineer — find ways to cut the cost — or find additional money to pay for the overage before we sign the contract.”
Upgrading the J.C. Fox Boozer complex in Ninety Six had a $1 million budget, but the single bid to renovate the athletic facility came in at $1,278,000. That included building a central restroom and concession stand, but Skinner said the county decided to take that building out of the bid and bid it separately.
Officials were able to get the two bids down to $765,000 for the sports complex and $221,000 for the separate building; just less than $1 million. The county used money from its own budget and ARPA relief funds to help pay for additional side projects they requested from the contractors. They chose lower cost materials: Cut back on concrete, using asphalt instead on walkways.
The widening of S.C. Highway 246 was a big example of finding additional funding. The CPST’s budgeted $12 million was never intended to pay for the entire widening of a four-mile stretch of the highway. The county needed to leverage those millions to get additional state or federal funding, and earlier this month they were awarded a $38 million grant from the State Transportation Infrastructure Bank to help with the project.
The county’s boat ramp going in at the Highway 72/221 bridge received $600,000 from the state Department of Natural Resources, supplementing CPST funds to help the project come to fruition. But it also took $200,000 from a state water recreation fund, among other state dollars.
“And of course, we’re spending almost all of it,” Skinner said. “The low bid on that was $1.8 million, so without those extra funds there’s no way we could have built what we’re building now.”
County officials try to set aside a 5 to 10% contingency based on the project’s cost, so they can afford change orders if complications arise. Materials and construction costs are changing constantly, along with inflation, and it’s hard to account for how far today’s dollars might stretch in a year.
In 2016, the allocated $65,000 for Wisteria Park in Troy was budgeted to upgrade the whole park. Today, Skinner said that would probably pay just to renovate the parking lot.
Balancing income and spending is a tall task, rife with complications. But county officials are confident they have the right people for the job.
“We have the best staff there is; Steffanie Dorn is a genius,” County Council Chairperson Chuck Motes said. “She tracks the income of the capital sales tax and reports it to us, and she’s been accurate. Josh is a remarkable manager, too.”
Savings Skinner negotiates help cover costs on other projects, Moates said. While the economic climate is difficult to navigate, and getting more challenging daily, he said the county works to do as much as it can with the funds available.
The county is gearing up to ask its residents to approve another capital project sales tax when this one expires, and Moates said he’s confident it will be an easy sell.
“All I’m going to have to do is say to voters, ‘Look around you,’” he said. “There’s been so much enrichment of our lives and community, with these parks and the sports complex, the utilities work, all the projects.”
Originally Published by Index-Journal on: Sep 24, 2022
By DAMIAN DOMINGUEZ ddominguez@indexjournal.com
Article Link: https://www.indexjournal.com/news/from-shortfall-to-windfall-county-officials-balance-cpst-income-with-rising-costs/article_92ffb4e0-1a11-5335-85d2-cb395aaf467b.html
Katherine Hall renovations need more funds; town eyes tax credits
/in Index-JournalWARE SHOALS — Katherine Hall was unique among mill buildings.
It served as the heart of Ware Shoals for years, and was home to a theater that served as the town’s gathering place.
Although nearly $3.4 million in Capital Project Sales Tax funds are on their way to help the town renovate the 15,637-square-foot building, it might take more than that to bring the 109-year-old building to its former glory.
On Thursday, Ware Shoals Town Council met to hear preservation consultant Kyle Campbell’s plan to bring in extra funds that will supplement the CPST millions. Campbell helped the town prepare the 2015 conditions report on Katherine Hall, and is working to get the town registered as a national historic district.
“Since we did the conditions report, some of the things that were going to be addressed in the intervening seven years have not been,” Campbell said. “Specifically the porch leaks — those have gotten significantly worse, pushing water into the building.”
Because of the water damage over time and increased labor and material costs, he expects the cost of renovating Katherine Hall has outgrown the $3,397,273 coming in from the penny sales tax.
A solution? Tax credits.
Campbell proposed applying for state historic tax credits, a state textile credit and a federal historic tax credit, which together could cover 70% of qualifying rehabilitation expenses to fix the now-collapsed porch roof and the subsequent damage to the porch itself.
In total, those credits would amount to about $2.3 million — the town has little use for tax credits, however. The plan, instead, is to sell the tax credits using a tax credit syndicator — a business that helps people sell tax credits, often to corporations.
“What those syndication forms do is large corporations like Exxon, they will buy those credits to put against their tax liability,” he said. “They buy it at, say, 80 cents on the dollar. So they’re saving themselves 20% on their taxes by buying tax credits generated by a project like, say, Katherine Hall.”
Even if the credits are sold at 70 cents on the dollar, Campbell said it would generate more than $1.6 million to be applied to the project. He said he worked with Josh Skinner, the county’s CPST coordinator, to ensure that selling tax credits wasn’t in conflict with the legal apparatus of the penny sales tax, and said they appeared to be in the clear.
Because the town isn’t a nonprofit, council will have to set up a development corporation to own the building for a five-year period. In the meantime, Campbell said the town should move to nominate the building for the national historic register, develop renovation plans that meet the secretary of the interior’s standards and submit those plans to the relevant state agencies.
While CPST funds don’t come in until 2024, Campbell urged council to take action sooner rather than later when it comes to fixing the porch. Water is continuing to pour into the building, damaging flooring joists and damaging plaster and tile in the basement level. Funds spent to fix the porch now can be reimbursed from those CPST dollars later, he said.
“We’ve had seven years of letting it deteriorate, if we could cut out these last two years it would be really beneficial to this whole project,” Campbell said.
Council member Patty Walters said she was concerned the penny sales tax funds wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket to get the building fixed. Campbell disagreed, saying he’d worked on projects on similarly sized buildings; the total funds with the estimated tax credit earnings will give the town about $5 million to work with.
Digging up discussion from last year, council member George Leagans asked if the town didn’t have enough money to restore the building, where would they find money to tear it down? Other members of council were confused, and emphasized that removing the current building is not an option.
In 2021, Leagans suggested the town’s best path forward would be to tear Katherine Hall down, with fellow council member Kent Boles saying the building should have been torn down decades ago.
The town submitted its application in 2016 for the Capital Project Sales Tax seeking funds to restore the building, not demolish it. The $3.4 million coming from the penny tax is only applicable to the planned restoration.
Council was eager Thursday to move forward with Campbell’s plan, disagreeing only on when to do it. Council member and mayor-elect Bryan Ross said he wanted to hold off on a vote to move forward with this plan until the town has a project manager contracted for the restoration project. Council member Micheal Powell wanted to show that council was on board with this plan, though, and council voted 4-3 to proceed with the plan.
First steps will be to hire a project manager, then work with this person to form the development corporation that will eventually take ownership of Katherine Hall for five years.
Greenwood County hopes to open boat ramp Dec. 1
/in Index-JournalSummer has come and gone, with temperatures plunging over the weekend.
That didn’t stop some Greenwood County residents from trying to use the Capital Project Sales Tax-funded boat ramp, which is adjacent to Break on the Lake and isn’t quite finished.
“We’ll call that the soft opening,” County Manager Toby Chappell quipped at Tuesday’s Greenwood County Council meeting.
CPST coordinator Josh Skinner assured council that contractors have better blocked the site from public access while work continues. He is working with the state Department of Natural Resources and said they are eyeing Dec. 1 to open the boat ramp.
To that end, council voted 6-0 to approve a lighting contract with Duke Energy for the ramp, which costs $12,387.52 up front and $324.42 monthly. Council member Theo Lane, who works for Duke Energy, abstained from the vote.
Council member Dayne Pruitt recalled assurances in January that work would wrap up by August and asked if the county could hold the contractor accountable for not finishing on time.
The short answer: Yes.
Skinner said the contract included a penalty of $200 per day for failing to finish on time, although some work delays don’t count toward that tally. Chappell estimated the final penalties at about $11,000.
Ninety Six to re-bid town park upgrades
/in Index-JournalArticle Body
A $100,000-speed bump is delaying renovations at the Ninety Six Town Park.
The 2016 Capital Project Sales Tax referendum allocated $440,727.23 to renovate the Ninety Six Town Park, but once the project was put out to bid the lowest bidder’s offer was still over budget.
The project was put out to bid June 29, seeking contractors who could do necessary site work on the grounds, renovate the gazebo and build a new restroom facility to replace the existing one, along with an add-on alternative for electrical hookups along the park’s perimeter.
Only two companies bid on the project: Greenway Construction and Wiley Easton Construction. Greenway’s bid was nearly $200,000 cheaper than the competitor, at $483,000, but after the county used part of the allocated CPST funds for planning from Davis and Floyd, only about $380,000 remain to pay for the renovation.
“We did meet with Greenway Construction since they were the lowest bidder,” Ninety Six Mayor Mike Rowe said. “We knew we were going to have to trim some things.”
After about three weeks, Greenway came back with a plan to only rebuild the bathrooms, renovate the gazebo and work on a single walking trail for about $350,000.
“That didn’t include the playground equipment, and that’s the main part of the park. Children play there every day,” Rowe said.
Josh Skinner, Greenwood County’s CPST coordinator, has run into this issue with a few projects now. Sometimes when a multi-faceted project is bid out and comes back over budget, breaking the project down into separate bids can help reduce the cost and allow for more companies to competitively bid.
Rowe said Davis and Floyd will help the town split the bid — bidding out the playground, bathrooms and gazebo separately. On Monday, Ninety Six Town Council voted to reject the Greenway bid so they can move forward with re-bidding the project.
While he said he knows materials and construction costs have risen considerably in the past year, he still hopes they can afford to have electrical outlets put in throughout the park. That would help offer electricity to vendors who set up during the S.C. Festival of Stars.
“We need to try to get the most we possibly can out of the money we have,” Rowe said.
Greenwood County seeks new tool in determining lake ownership lines
/in Index-JournalWhat Greenwood County Council saw as another tool in the toolbox, a crowd gathered at Tuesday’s meeting saw as a needless step that they worried would keep lakeside residents from owning the land under them.
Council discussed an update to its boundary line agreement policy on Lake Greenwood. The county owns the lake, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has designated a line marking the contour of the lake at 440 feet above sea level, which the county must maintain ownership of.
That can create some ambiguity when owners of property adjacent to the lake go to determine the boundaries of what they own and what the county owns. The boundary line agreement process exists to clarify those borders.
Prior to Tuesday, property owners seeking a BLA would have a survey done of their property to determine the 440 contour. The county would then, after a review process, either transfer county property to the owner to adjust their property lines, or keep the boundaries where they already were.
The policy change discussed Tuesday added a new option — to offer an easement that would allow the county to keep the property in question, but give the resident all rights of access and use of that land.
“If it ever comes to a point where we haven’t maintained our boundary, or that FERC sees that we’ve given away part of our project boundary or we’ve lost our project boundary, they can require us to buy it back or they could also penalize us,” said Rett Templeton, county engineer. “Doing the easements will help protect the county. It doesn’t take away any rights from adjacent property owners to the lake.”
Council member Theo Lane described the addition of easements as just another option the county can take in circumstances where they might run the risk of giving away property too close to FERC’s designated line. Council member Mark Allison saw the situation differently.
“When I came on council 12 years ago, this was a major issue on Lake Greenwood,” he said. “At that time, if you wanted that access to that property, that ownership of that property, you had to purchase that property.”
It created “total chaos” on the lake, but after years of research, he said council learned Greenwood County didn’t really know where that 440 contour line was. The line was drawn in 1929, and since then surveying technology has come a long way.
“We were trying to establish a true line of ownership. I think the easement does not do that,” he said.
Dozens of people came to the meeting to hear this matter discussed, and council took a few questions from the crowd without a public hearing. One resident asked why this was needed, and Templeton explained the county’s need to make sure it doesn’t give away property designated by the FERC contour. Another expressed worry that this was a tool to keep county ownership of property that could be right under existing homes.
In the end, council voted 4-3 to approve the policy change, with Allison, Edith Childs and Dayne Pruitt dissenting.
Council also approved moving forward with two contracts for multi-million dollar capital project sales tax-funded builds.
They unanimously approved a $10 million design-build contract for the Wilbanks Recreation Complex renovations. J.D Goodrum will handle the design and building, which will include an ADA-compliant playground, pickleball courts, two artificial turf fields and a natural field, a restroom and snack bar facility and baseball field renovations. It will also see upgrades to Legion field, the farmers market building and demolition of the former animal shelter building.
The other contract council approved is the about $50 million total contract with CONSOR Engineers to widen part of S.C. Highway 246. The state Department of Transportation will handle much of this arrangement, with $11.9 million coming from Capital Project Sales Tax funds and $38 million from a state Transportation Infrastructure Bank grant.
Construction is expected to start in 2027.
In other business, council:
Considered and approved three rezoning requests. The first was by Velux to rezone parcels of land on and adjacent to their Old Brickyard Road campus so they can expand. The second was by a developer seeking to bring eight three-story apartment buildings to a complex on East Northside Drive. The third was to allow a resident to build a house and barn on property he owns on Old Woodlawn Road.
Reappointed three members of the Greenwood County Public Library Board: Barbara Wright, Ojetter Williams and Margaret Anderson. Council also reappointed Susan Hellman to the Country Acres special tax district commission and Stephen Wilson to the Newport special tax commission.
Recognized its employees of the third quarter.
Approved spending funds from the Lost Lure Special Tax District fund, which dissolved last year. The more than $3,000 in that fund will go to local nonprofits.
From shortfall to windfall: County officials balance CPST income with rising costs
/in Index-JournalGreenwood County might hit the $87.9 million revenue cap for the 2016 capital project sales tax early — a far cry from the multi-million dollar shortfall projected just two years ago.
When the penny sales tax passed in a 2016 referendum, voters went to the ballot and approved the tax with a maximum collections cap of $87,938,185 to fund 27 projects throughout the county. Confusion sparked in August 2019, when the late County Council Chairperson Steve Brown said officials expected their final collection rate to be up to $20 million below that projected total.
In fall 2020, County Manager Toby Chappell gave a breakdown of quarterly tax revenues and said that shortfall was down to a $10 million deficit. These projections were based on predicting no increase in collections for the following 20 quarters.
But that’s not what happened.
Some quarters saw the collection rate drop — especially in the summer of 2020 — but others have seen significant growth. Now County Treasurer Steffanie Dorn is predicting the tax will bring in more than originally projected — nearly $1.2 million over.
When initially estimating the tax’s collection, the treasurer at the time, Sharon Setzer, contacted the state Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office to predict annual tax income from a 1% increase. The office’s estimates in September 2015 are what were used to estimate the $87 million cap in the 2016 referendum voters approved.
Dorn was working for the City of Greenwood when the 2016 shortfall predictions were made. CPST Manager Josh Skinner was hired about six months into the tax’s lifespan to handle execution of the projects.
Skinner keeps a master spreadsheet, started before his hire, where county officials keep a record of each CPST check given to them from the department of revenue. They apply those funds to each project, rolling any leftover funds forward to the next set of projects.
“When we first started, the way we made our projections was we just took the average of our quarterly collections, and sort of add that to each project,” Skinner said. “Of course, that’s what got us in trouble in the beginning, because those averages were $1.9, $1.8 million — they were pretty low.”
These estimates didn’t project growth, and came up dramatically short.
“After COVID, the collections just blew up,” Skinner said, “and then Steffanie started adding projected growth.”
“I’m looking at what we’ve collected every quarter since its inception, and what the growth has been from quarter to quarter,” Dorn said. “I’m very conservative — which, you want your chief financial officers to be conservative, especially in the government sector — but I take where we’ve been and apply that to where we’re going to go.”
Even then, Dorn said she backs off a bit from raw projected growth, and typically presents a more cautious interpretation of these figures. Since 2016, the economy has experienced extremely volatile conditions, which make some quarters worse indicators of future performance than others.
“When I look at this thing, what’s so interesting to me is how in June of ‘20 we had this massive drop, COVID related. Then the next quarter we had this massive increase,” Dorn said. “No, obviously, I wouldn’t take that and apply it to future quarters.”
In her years crunching numbers for Greenwood County and city government, she’s been through several recessions. She knows Greenwood typically lags behind the rest of the country when it comes to economic impact, and takes that into consideration when making her predictions.
If the county hits the $87 million mark noted in the original referendum, Dorn said the state will notify retailers to stop collecting the tax. The county isn’t supposed to collect more than that cap, though Dorn acknowledged there’s usually a delay from when a tax starts or stops and when retailers make the needed adjustments.
But even if the county collects every intended cent, how do officials ensure it will be enough to afford the 27 approved projects?
“When we do the design and the planning, we’re always asking for cost estimates,” Skinner said. “A lot of times the bids will come in high, and we have to either value-engineer — find ways to cut the cost — or find additional money to pay for the overage before we sign the contract.”
Upgrading the J.C. Fox Boozer complex in Ninety Six had a $1 million budget, but the single bid to renovate the athletic facility came in at $1,278,000. That included building a central restroom and concession stand, but Skinner said the county decided to take that building out of the bid and bid it separately.
Officials were able to get the two bids down to $765,000 for the sports complex and $221,000 for the separate building; just less than $1 million. The county used money from its own budget and ARPA relief funds to help pay for additional side projects they requested from the contractors. They chose lower cost materials: Cut back on concrete, using asphalt instead on walkways.
The widening of S.C. Highway 246 was a big example of finding additional funding. The CPST’s budgeted $12 million was never intended to pay for the entire widening of a four-mile stretch of the highway. The county needed to leverage those millions to get additional state or federal funding, and earlier this month they were awarded a $38 million grant from the State Transportation Infrastructure Bank to help with the project.
The county’s boat ramp going in at the Highway 72/221 bridge received $600,000 from the state Department of Natural Resources, supplementing CPST funds to help the project come to fruition. But it also took $200,000 from a state water recreation fund, among other state dollars.
“And of course, we’re spending almost all of it,” Skinner said. “The low bid on that was $1.8 million, so without those extra funds there’s no way we could have built what we’re building now.”
County officials try to set aside a 5 to 10% contingency based on the project’s cost, so they can afford change orders if complications arise. Materials and construction costs are changing constantly, along with inflation, and it’s hard to account for how far today’s dollars might stretch in a year.
In 2016, the allocated $65,000 for Wisteria Park in Troy was budgeted to upgrade the whole park. Today, Skinner said that would probably pay just to renovate the parking lot.
Balancing income and spending is a tall task, rife with complications. But county officials are confident they have the right people for the job.
“We have the best staff there is; Steffanie Dorn is a genius,” County Council Chairperson Chuck Motes said. “She tracks the income of the capital sales tax and reports it to us, and she’s been accurate. Josh is a remarkable manager, too.”
Savings Skinner negotiates help cover costs on other projects, Moates said. While the economic climate is difficult to navigate, and getting more challenging daily, he said the county works to do as much as it can with the funds available.
The county is gearing up to ask its residents to approve another capital project sales tax when this one expires, and Moates said he’s confident it will be an easy sell.
“All I’m going to have to do is say to voters, ‘Look around you,’” he said. “There’s been so much enrichment of our lives and community, with these parks and the sports complex, the utilities work, all the projects.”
E.A. Sween is ready to move in; Greenwood County hands over keys
/in Index-JournalGreenwood County’s newest corporate neighbor is ready to move in.
County officials handed over the keys Wednesday morning for the North Greenwood Industrial Park spec building to the E.A. Sween Co. The Minnesota-based manufacturer of prepackaged sandwiches will be spending $37.9 million to fill the shell building with its newest manufacturing facility, and hiring about 300 people over the next three years.
And it wouldn’t have happened without the county’s gamble, putting a speculative building at 5730 Highway 25 N., Hodges.
“Economic development is a long-play, and this park has been eight years in the making,” county Economic Development Director James Bateman said. “If we can get a company here, we can sell them on Greenwood — but we have to have the product available. We have to have a building for them to come see.”
County Councilman Theo Lane was an early advocate for the spec building when he ran for office in 2016, pushing for the building while also serving as advocacy chairman for that year’s Capital Project Sales Tax campaign.
“People thought I was crazy, but here I am standing here today,” Lane said. “People said I couldn’t get elected supporting a tax.”
But $4 million of those CPST funds went into constructing the North Greenwood Industrial Park, and the first building there was finished in November 2020. Once the county had the 100,000-square-foot speculative building, they had to find a company to fill it.
E.A. Sween was that perfect, blue-chip tenant, Bateman said. When company officials came to tour the building, President and CEO Tom Sween paid a follow-up visit two weeks later; Bateman said that was a good sign.
Earl August Sween founded E.A. Sween in 1955 as a sandwich company franchise in Minnesota, but cut ties with it’s franchisee in 1980. Today it makes the Deli Express brand of prepackaged sandwiches sold in convenience stores.
The Greenwood facility is expected to produce about 75 million sandwiches a year once at full capacity, doubling the company’s production. Tom Sween said this third-generation, family-owned business is ready to consider Greenwood a second home.
“We plan to keep this tradition alive and well, supporting Greenwood county,” he said, standing in front of the spec building’s doors. “This will be remembered as one of the biggest days of our company’s history.”
Alongside constructing the shell building for the company, Greenwood offered incentives including a 30-year agreement to lock the property’s millage at 6% of its assessed value and special source revenue tax credits for a decade.
“Greenwood County is a shining example of doing what it takes to attract and recruit a business,” County Council Chairman Chuck Moates said.
The money the county receives from selling the building to E.A. Sween will get rolled into building a spec building for the next prospective tenant. Bateman said the plan is to continue expanding the park, attracting further industry to the Highway 25 North corridor.
$38M coming from state for Greenwood’s Highway 246 expansion
/in Index-JournalGreenwood County is getting $38 million from the state to fund the expansion of S.C. Highway 246 South, according to a news release.
On Thursday, members of the State Transportation Infrastructure Bank voted unanimously to award the $38 million grant for the county’s widening project. The planned widening is part of the 2016 Capital Project Sales Tax, which designated $12 million of CPST funds for the estimated $50 million expansion.
These state funds were always an essential part of getting this project done, said county Public Works Director Rob Russian. To date, the county has received and designated about $6 million for pre-construction costs, including design.
“Having this state funding come through from the state infrastructure bank was always essential to the project,” Russian said. “It’s a tremendous relief getting this money. This has been a project we’ve been working on since I started in this position.”
The project involves widening four miles of Highway 246 South from Highway 221 in Coronaca to Highway 702. This stretch of highway includes industries such as Teijin, Ascend Performance Materials, Lonza, Fujifilm and Velux. Russian said the current two-lane highway serves as bare minimum road infrastructure for these existing industries. If Greenwood wants to attract more business to this stretch of highway, he said expanding it is key.
“I can’t thank the voters of Greenwood County enough for the role they played in today’s announcement,” Josh Skinner, CPST coordinator said. “As a result of their foresight we were able to leverage the $12 million allotment from the CPST funds into $50 million to accomplish this important project.”
Skinner said these state dollars were a surprise. He expected it would be nearly two years before Greenwood could secure this grant funding. The county had applied for these funds in 2020, but state officials tabled the request until the county knew more about how it would fund the project.
Since then, Skinner said Greenwood got help from the Upper Savannah Council of Governments, which put the Highway 246 project on its list of transportation priorities. Getting DOT to agree to manage the project likely helped the grant applications’ prospects too, Skinner said.
“It all came together and yesterday the evaluation committee met and said we met all the criteria,” he said.
County Council Chairperson Chuck Moates praised Russian, Skinner and County Engineer Rett Templeton for their work securing these funds. The county has signed an agreement with the state transportation department to manage the project, and design is expected to be underway by the end of the year. Construction could begin in 2025, with a 2027 completion date.
The state infrastructure bank’s grants are competitive, and Greenwood was up against projects such as Interstate work in York County and projects in Charleston that also got funded. Russian said the state infrastructure bank has begun to shift its thinking in awarding funds to help promote development throughout the state.
“It’s a win for rural counties all over the state, to start getting these infrastructure funds,” he said.
The work’s not done yet, Skinner said. There’s no certainty construction and material costs won’t rise by the time the Highway 246 project gets bid, so county officials will continue working to secure additional funds.
Ware Shoals scraps original sewer project plans
/in Index-JournalA more than $1.5 million sewer line project in Ware Shoals needs retooling after problems arose with the original design work.
When the 2016 Greenwood County Capital Project Sales Tax passed, one of 27 projects slated for funding was to replace certain sewer lines and refurbish a pump station near Carnell Bridge in Ware Shoals. Before work could start, the town had to find an engineering firm to look at the existing lines and figure out how best to upgrade that system.
John Lake, owner of L&L Environmental in Ware Shoals and a regular advisor to town officials, said they originally worked with Dunn & Associates out of Anderson for the design work. An engineer there worked up a plan for the project, which Lake said was submitted to the state and construction permits were approved.
As staff went through revisions, though, the project seemed to get out of hand, and there were issues with the plan that couldn’t seem to be resolved, Lake said. He paid North Carolina-based Frazier Engineering $5,000 for a report giving its opinion on the project plan designed by Dunn.
Frazier’s report said the plan seemed incomplete, and that it couldn’t be built or bid.
“We finally came to the conclusion this had come to an end,” Lake said. “There was no way to resolve the situation.”
The original plan had to be scrapped. Town Clerk Randee Beasley said the town spent $253,725 from 2018-21 on that initial design work.
In its place, Lake said the town had to go through the process of finding a new engineering firm. Of the firms that reached out, Frazier seemed the best qualified as it specializes in sewer system work.
Lake said Frazier implied the project could be out to bid sooner, with a plan that seems more environmentally sound and more cost-effective. Ware Shoals Town Council voted Aug. 16 to move forward with Frazier’s plan.
Although a preliminary engineering report has to be done, Lake said the new plan would avoid outright replacing in-ground pipes, and instead do a mix of repairing existing above-ground lines, re-sleeving underground lines and replacing only what needs to be replaced. He also said this new plan would avoid putting a new pump station near the banks of the Saluda River, which would have posed a potential environmental hazard in the event of future pump problems.
It’s also a race against a possible market bump. As the next round of federal infrastructure dollars makes its way into communities, there’s little certainty that construction and material costs will stay at current levels.
“We think this way we’ve proposed will be the best way to proceed,” Lake said.
None of the $1,569,339 of CPST funds allocated in October 2019 have been spent. All the engineering costs to Dunn and Frazier have been paid by the town of Ware Shoals, said Josh Skinner, CPST coordinator.
Lake is set to attend the next Greenwood County Council meeting to explain the situation to council, and with their blessing move forward with re-designing and bidding out the Carnell Bridge sewer project. Skinner said CPST funds will be used to pay for construction, and could be used to pay for the engineering services if the town asked.
Our View: On safety, cooperation, projects and planning
/in UncategorizedWe mentioned it before, but it’s certainly worth mentioning again, especially as high school football more officially gets underway following the various jamborees in the area. And that is, our school districts’ leadership does deserve kudos for rolling out some swift plans aimed at averting the type of violence as was witnessed last week at Greenwood High, host of the latest jamboree.
Also as previously noted, these are good steps and certainly warranted, but no one should get too comfortable and think to themselves, “There. Everything’s gonna be all right now.” Be ever vigilant.
A level of cooperation among Greenwood city and county officials warrants a thumbs up. This week, the county fire service and city fire department signed what amounts to a mutual aid agreement. In short, one will help the other as needed without concern for city and county boundaries. This agreement, in case you missed it, pertains only to fire calls and not medical calls. But it’s a great step they have taken.
Also of note and worthy of yet another thumbs up is the county’s report that its penny sales tax collection that funds the list of capital improvement projects throughout Greenwood County remains on track to collect the full amount originally anticipated.
Thumbs up and congratulations to Carol Coleman. The Greenwood native has returned home after some coastal stints to head up the joint city-county planning department following the retirement of Phil Lindler.
Having visited and worked in other areas of the state and even world, Coleman will bring an interesting perspective to the job. She has witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly of planning elsewhere and here, but it is her love for where she grew up that will guide her decisions. She’s not so naïve as to think Greenwood’s city or county will ever be what it was — no, the A&P, JCPenney and Belk are not coming back to Main Street — or that they can or should aspire to be what they once were. But we believe she will help steer planning with the very best interests of the city and county not only in mind, but also in heart.
CPST collections on track; city, county firefighters deepen ties
/in UncategorizedGreenwood County Council had much to be grateful for at Tuesday’s meeting.
Councilman Dayne Pruitt, of Ninety Six, thanked Economic Development Director James Bateman for bringing industrial recruitment efforts closer to his hometown. Bateman asked council to approve a marketing right and option agreement between members of the Adams family, who own about 425 acres near Ninety Six. The agreement, Bateman said, would allow for marketing the property as a potential industrial site for incoming businesses. The agreement passed unanimously.
Council also approved a bid for timber sales to Walker and Walker Logging, which made a bid of $522,730 for about 215 acres worth of timber from the county. County Engineer Rett Templeton said the funds would go toward the Greenwood County Airport.
The Greenwood County Fire Service and Greenwood City Fire Department made official something that’s been in the works for a while — the two agencies asked council to accept an automatic aid agreement between them. County Fire Chief Steve Holmes said 75% of the county’s fire calls are within four districts close to the city. This agreement would have city firefighters automatically respond to county calls in those four districts, and the county will offer its aid to calls in the city.
The agreement only covers fire calls, not medical, Holmes said, though both agencies are more than willing to work with one another on any call when needed. The agreement passed unanimously.
Capital Project Sales Tax Coordinator Josh Skinner gave his quarterly update on CPST collections and project progress. The revenue check that came in July was for more than $3 million, and County Treasurer Steffanie Dorn’s estimates show the county likely collecting 100% of the expected revenue from the penny sales tax. It’s raked in $50.54 million so far.
Skinner said July’s check is going mostly toward the renovation of the former Civic Center site into the Wilbanks Sports Complex. Skinner gave updates on projects, saying workers had broken ground on the parks in Hodges and Troy, and at Magnolia Park. For the Grace Street Park expansion, demolition of the old water treatment plant is complete and staff has selected a designer and builder for phase two. Foundry Park’s bids came in about a month ago, but Skinner said staff is negotiating the price down as it’s currently over budget. The Ninety Six town park is also over budget, he said, and staff is seeking to tweak the project to bring the cost down to $350,000.
The boat ramp on Highway 72/221 has some of its concrete poured, but Skinner said they’re waiting on the restroom building to be delivered and installed before pouring the parking lot. Ware Shoals officials are negotiating changes to the sewer line project there, but Skinner said the Ninety Six water line project is wrapping up, as is the J.C. Fox Boozer Complex.
Next quarter’s revenue check will fund the Wilbanks project, along with the next step in the fire master plan: building a joint training facility.
In other business:
Council approved, 5-1, a boundary line agreement that gave 0.22 acres of county land to Travis Larson at 110 Dunn Lane.
Council approved second reading of an ordinance to remove two properties on Hospitality Boulevard from the multi-county business park. The city of Greenwood requested this since the properties have changed hands and are no longer receiving an incentive from being in the business park.
WCTel and Brightspeed Broadband requested council’s support in applying for grants from the state Office of Regulatory Staff, and council voted to support both companies.
Renovations at the county office building at Park Plaza are set to be finished up as work on the elections office ends. Next is work on the economic development offices, and Dorn asked council to transfer $184,462 from the general fund to complete the renovations.
Council had first reading on an ordinance that would set standards for the construction and maintenance of marine structures on Lake Greenwood. County Attorney Carson Penney said this would require dock builders to be licensed marine contractors.