Posted by
Jack Cruger on Saturday, July 05, 2008 10:55:18 AM
Carolina Station:
As I left the Horry County Council meeting on July 1, 2008, my friend Joe said “Jack we have lived in the last great generation”.
The decision made at that meeting, approving the Carolina Station project, will cause the next generation not to be so great by leaving them with major County budget shortfalls for the next 30 to 40 years or more.
Carolina Station is a planned unit development (PUD) on 6259 acres in the Loris area off Highway #905. This is a mega development of 13,800 homes, housing 41,000 people, 3 or 4 schools, commercial business and buildings. Carolina Station will be a major size city within Horry County, being develop by International Paper Realty (IPR), and will resemble the new Market Common in Myrtle Beach.
The Horry County Council approved the project even after hearing valid pleas of water availability not being addressed and with the school board pleading for an extension so they could present the Council with a reasonable impact study showing the financial load the new schools would put on the Horry County Budget and ultimately on the Horry County Taxpayers. Since this project is not going to start anytime soon it would seem reasonable that a sixty day extension would not impact the start.
Anybody who lives around the area and uses South Carolina roads know that the roads are barely adequate to support current traffic load and by adding the approximately 27,000 cars plus service and support vehicles along with construction equipment traffic, will add a whole new meaning to the word gridlock.
Now to be fair the Carolina Station project will take many, many years (like 20 to 30 years) to complete, so hopefully added road lanes and roads would be added, however, being County and State roads we all know how good they are in keeping up with road expansion and improvements?
There is no question in my mind, Carolina Station will be beautiful place to live and work.
The Taxpayer’s question should be, is the developer, IPR, paying their fair share of the expansion costs to accommodate the added load or will the Taxpayers of Horry County shoulder the majority of the burden by adding more taxes?
That is precisely why Horry Country P.R.I.D.E.Com (Promoting Responsible investment in Infrastructure, Development, & Environment) decided to get involved. PRIDE is an On-Line group of citizens who are concerned that taxpayers currently pay more than a fair share of taxes, especially concerning Mega projects such as the Carolina Station. Usually in project developments of this size the developers tend to error projections showing net revenue to the county on the plus side. They also set aside land at inflated values instead of cold hard cash. The fact is that they have to do both.
Special interest groups such as realtor associations, builder and developer groups all have the attitude the more money they can get the tax-payers to pay the bigger their profit.
The developers, Realtors and the County Council got the upper hand at that July 1st meeting but they certainly now know there is a watchdog group, of concerned taxpayers, who by utilizing the power of their vote will soon be able say we at least helped the next generation get a jump on being great too.