NEWBERRY COUNTY — Two 15-acre sites within the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park will be made pad ready in hopes of enticing new industry to locate in Newberry County, thanks to a partnership that includes local and state entities.
Pad ready means the trees will be cleared and stumps removed plus it will be graded level where finishing grading and concrete placement can take place, County Councilman Leslie Hipp explained.
Hipp said the idea to make the park pad ready came about when representatives of a potential industry from Germany came to view the property. According to Hipp, the representatives were interested in the county — the demographics and the workforce — until they arrived at the Commerce Park.
“We actually went out to the park and they saw that we just had a huge wooded area with no pad ready site, open graded pad ready site. In some cultures, maybe Asian and European, woods and wooded properties are often protected under the government and require much more licensing, a lot more regulatory control,” Hipp said. “To them, when they saw the wooded area, they saw a huge impediment to their industry.”
During that visit, the county was accompanied by members of the S.C. Department of Commerce and the Central South Carolina Alliance. The group realized some of the property would have to be opened up to make it more attractive to potential industry.
“In that process we determined we needed to go through the entire property clearing trees and making it more open,” Hipp said.
The county is currently working on thinning the trees at the park. The county will net roughly $150,000 through the sale of the timber.
Other economic development entities recommended that the county have pad ready areas it could also market. The cost to have two 15-acre sites available for immediate construction at the commerce park would be $1.25 million, which includes licensing, engineering, land clearing, grading and all over the associated licensing and regulations with that process.
To get funding for this project the county approached Newberry Electric Cooperative, the state Department of Commerce and Santee Cooper (via South Carolina Power Team) for assistance. With their financial assistance, the county’s commitment is $115,000 or 10 cents on the dollar.
“We could not do this without any of our partners. By raising this money with the county, Department of Commerce and Newberry Electric Cooperative, we are now eligible for a 1 to 1 grant from the South Carolina Power Team,” said Rick Farmer, director of economic development.
For a time, the process to make the Commerce Park pad ready had slowed. However, Farmer said it was thanks to Hipp that things started moving again.
“Mr. Hipp was actually instrumental in this,” Farmer said. “This project was actually stuck in neutral for months and months and months, and the Department of Commerce, for reasons we understand, did not have the money. So they just kept pushing us off. Mr. Hipp suggested we go down there and actually meet with the secretary of commerce and he led that effort. We went down there and that broke the log jam. We owe a great deal of that to Mr. Hipp for getting us over that last hurtle.”
Now that this process has started, Farmer said he has reached out to existing projects to let them know what they are doing. He added that the beauty of the Mid-Carolina Commerce Park is that it is 20 minutes from the first Columbia exit, and having this site directly on the interstate better draws people from other counties, which enables Newberry County to better compete with other industrial counties.
“We are trying to be able to have products any potential industry would need, whether 10 acres or 1,000 acres. This way, Newberry County will not be rejected from any potential new industry because we do not have a product that meats their needs,” Hipp said. “With the addition of having the Commerce Park, pad ready sites, the Spec Building and the Mega Site, we can build a sustainable foundation for economic growth.”