NEWBERRY COUNTY — Economic development simplified is the practice of growing the economy and for Rick Farmer, that means facilitating job creation and capital investment.
But not just any jobs and not just any capital investment.
“Of course, we want to create jobs for general community improvement, but not just any jobs. We want to create jobs that are above the local community average, which in our case is somewhere around $16.50 an hour,” said Farmer, director of Economic Development in Newberry County.
“We make the process easier for the private sector to create jobs, and we facilitate that typically from start to finish,” he added. “A lot of this stuff is organic, but a lot of it we have to get out and fight for. That is what this office is in charge of.”
While many might think that bringing industry into a community is as simple as putting up a for sale sign and waiting, it is not.
According to Farmer, readiness is key in the modern competitive world of economic development.
“You have to be ready for development when it comes. You cannot say, ‘Well, we will get a site.’ You have to have a site. And now we have seen things evolve to where it is not enough to just have a site. It has to be a shovel ready site,” he said. “That has never been more true, and that is the reason we are clearing and grading those two sites down at the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park. We want to to be in a position where a company can come here and start working, and if it is shovel ready, and you have a pad ready site on it, they can come and start pouring the footings for their foundation.”
Before the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park was purchased by the county, they had the Bush River Industrial Park and the Newberry County Industrial Park. The Bush River site is essentially full and has one 50-acre site available.
“The Newberry County Industrial Park is a great industrial park. It is a high profile site, it is right on the interstate. We have effectively filled that industrial park. The last parcels were sold about two years ago. The county has done an awesome job filling that park,” Farmer said.
So how does the decision come about for a county to purchase land for an industrial park, or even a mega site?
For Farmer to make the recommendation, he has to see opportunity.
“It would need to be in a good location, and that does not just mean visibility, but visibility is important. You can see the spec building from the interstate. The infrastructure and the proximity to infrastructure is one of the most critical things,” he said.
What made the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park possible was the fact that the county did work on the infrastructure, which included the water and sewer.
Farmer would not recommend buying a property based on his own observations. He would also hire professionals to look at the property and they would then tell him what parts of the property could be developed and what could not.
“I am sure they did that (with the Mid-Carolina Park), I am sure they did their due diligence and of course now it is a certified site, so we know it is good for development,” Farmer said.
While visibility and access to infrastructure are both important factors of a potential site, it also has to have some size.
Farmer said it does not make sense to create a 25-acre industrial park. The ideal size is 500 acres. The Mid-Carolina Commerce Park has 424 available acres.
After a property has been purchased, next comes making the site ready for development.
The 1990s were the heyday of economic development because it was before the North American Free Trade Agreement really kicked in and a lot of companies realized they could locate in other countries.
“The 1990s were when I was in Sumter,” he said. “We were creating 700 new jobs per year, basically two jobs per day,” Farmer said. “Comparing today’s economic development to that is kind of an apple and oranges conversation. Globalization makes competition much more fierce, plus there are a lot more local communities who do economic development today than they did 20 to 25 years ago.
“Now not only do we have a global competitive environment, but the local, domestic competitive environment is a lot more intense that it used to be,” he said. “A lot more people are fighting for a small number of overall projects.”
Farmer says it is a much bigger playing field compared to the 1990s where you competed with other communities just in the southeast.
“It is hard to win economic development projects with so many people competing for them. Also we are in a new normal in our economy. We have been since we recovered from the recession. Things are not happening as fast as they did before 2006, and there are more communities that are active and involved,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean they give up.
“We continue to try. It’s just not as easy to win economic development as some people think it is,” he said. “For instance, comparing us to the success Greenville has had, apples and oranges comparison again. We can really only compare us to relatively rural counties, with relatively small populations.”
During the 1990s Farmer said you could essentially make a promise to a company. For example, if you have a 25 acre site that is nothing but pine trees, water and sewer is two miles away, you could make a promise to a company that if they locate here, water and sewer would be extended that extra two miles.
“Nowadays that competitive environment is such that virtually everybody has that water and sewer in play, now it is not enough to make that promise, you have got to be truly ready for development,” Farmer said. “Of course we certainly are, we have all the necessary infrastructure currently in place at the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park. It is ready for development today.”
Having the infrastructure in place is just one of the components of making a site shovel ready. For instance, not only is the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park in the process of becoming pad-ready, but there is also a spec(ulative) building on the property.
“A spec building cuts a start up time off of a company, saves them roughly a year. You buy a completely undeveloped site, it’s got water and sewer and all that, but it is just trees. They got to come in and get the permits, knock down those trees, grade that property, remove the top soil (because you cannot build on organic matter), then they have to bring in field soil that has no organic matter, they have got to compact that and plus they have to have time for the studies, like a geotechnical borings,” Farmer said.
Farmer added that if a company purchases the spec building it will cut off about a year of their start up time, which increases they likelihood that Newberry County will win an economic development project. However, it does take time.
“The spec building drives most of my traffic, about 60 percent of the prospects who come looking at Newberry County come looking because of the spec building,” he said. “The idea behind building the spec building was the fact we did not have a good industrial building here in this community that was ready.”
With infrastructure in place, and the property holding a spec building and in the process of pad-ready, the job now becomes marketing. Something Farmer is sure to let potential projects know is that the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park is so close to the interstate.
“It is very common for a prospect to insist that it needs to be five or 10 minutes off the interstate, here it is literally one minute, and that is what makes it attractive,” Farmer said.
The Mid-Carolina Commerce Park is approximately 30 miles from Columbia and 60 from Greenville. Farmer said because of that Newberry County can get projects larger than a community with a population of roughly 40,000 can normally get, because they can tap into the Columbia, Lexington, Irmo labor sources.
