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Mount Pleasant to annex East Cooper Airport
By MATTHEW FRENCH
Staff Writer
If all goes according to plan, the town of Mount Pleasant will soon add the East Cooper Airport to its already expansive-and-growing holdings. The airport, located on Highway 17 North past Highway 41, is a 20-year-old facility that serves about 100 planes, most of them smaller and propeller-driven.
The airport is the property of the Charleston County Aviation Authority and under the governmental jurisdiction of Charleston County. In late February, the Mount Pleasant Town Council directed Mayor Harry Hallman to look into the possibility of annexing the property.
“Instead of asking ‘Why does Mount Pleasant want to annex the airport?’ I ask, ‘Why not?’” says Mac Burdette, Mount Pleasant’s town administrator. “We’re a town of 60,000 people and we’re soon going to be a town of 80,000 people. It makes perfect sense for us to annex a piece of property that is completely surrounded by Mount Pleasant.”
Mount Pleasant has of late been promoting itself as a business-friendly destination. Highway 17 has sprung up as a thoroughfare of industry and retail, as has Coleman Boulevard. Town officials say the presence of an airport, even one as small as East Cooper, could help sell Mount Pleasant to other businesses, helping to shed any image of being a small town by demonstrating that Mount Pleasant is large enough to have its own airport.
“Some people still consider us to be a small village with a few fishing boats,” Burdette says. “We’re large and growing. We’re one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing town in the state.
Burdette points to past successes in attracting business to the East Cooper area as evidence of the area’s growth and potential for future growth.
“We have had a degree of success, bringing companies like Hubner (GmbH Manufacturing Corp.) and Benefit
Focus.com to Mount Pleasant,” Burdette says. “And we have a municipal airport, of sorts. That’s not to say that we’re planning to expand the airport or bring something else in there. The airport is and will continue to be controlled by the Charleston County Aviation Authority.”
The aviation authority is also in favor of the deal and is working out the final details, says David Jennings, the authority’s chairman and an attorney with Rosen, Rosen and Hagood.
“The ball is actually astride the net,” Jennings says. “The lawyers are now working out the finalities. At its meeting in February, the aviation authority gave me the authority to execute a petition once the lawyers have worked out the details.”
Burdette says that the airport is completely surrounded by the town, so the politicians see annexing the property as a normal course of action.
“We’re also trying to negotiate to annex other parcels of land that are surrounded by the town,” he says. “It’s like completing the puzzle.”
The monetary benefit to the town will be negligible, if there even is one, Burdette admits.
“The tax revenue generated from annexing the sale would be next to nothing,” he says. “We might get a couple of planes that aren’t registered in Mount Pleasant or a concession owner would have to buy a business license from us. But we’re not doing this for the money.”
As a governmental body, the aviation authority doesn’t have to pay property taxes, so the 300 acres the airport occupies would not contribute to the town coffers.
Mount Pleasant, once a relatively small town east of the Cooper, has quickly grown to be one of the largest towns in the state. By 2010, Mount Pleasant will trail only Charleston, Columbia and North Charleston in the number of residents it boasts. As such, it has been expanding farther north and east as the population keeps growing.
“When the airport was built, it was built in the middle of nowhere,” Jennings says. “There was nothing out there. Now you have Park West on one side and Dunes West and soon, Carolina Park. It’s safe to say we’re no longer in the middle of nowhere. In fact, we’re practically right in the middle of town.”
The aviation authority will benefit significantly from the deal. At the moment, Mount Pleasant Waterworks doesn’t service the airport buildings and the facility is serviced by the Awendaw Fire Department.
“We could try to help the aviation authority get water and sewer out there,” Burdette says. “And we could provide security with fire and police. If there were a conflagration out there, we would have to wait until the Awendaw Fire Department responded and asked us for our assistance.”
Jennings agrees, and says the aviation authority would welcome the town’s help in getting Mount Pleasant Waterworks out to the facility.
“We would like to have municipal services, but we don’t have the funds right now to extend (water infrastructure) from Highway 17 to the airport buildings,” he says. “We would certainly welcome it if Mount Pleasant came in with the waterworks to do that.”
The aviation authority is now waiting for a mutually acknowledged development agreement before petitioning the town for annexation.
“We want to make sure that we won’t have any future problems operating the airport,” he says. “For example, we have T-hangars out there because the airport services almost entirely single engine general aviation aircraft. If we wanted to build another set of T-hangars, we don’t want to have to battle any airport animosity there might be in the community.
“That’s not likely to happen,” he adds. “But you never know.”
Burdette says this is not the first time the town has pursued annexing the property.
“We did look into doing this years ago, but the aviation authority didn’t petition in,” he says. “Mount Pleasant has a reputation of being anti-growth and it may be that they thought if they came into town, we would impose rules and regulations.”
As to how long the discussions will take, Jennings says he hopes and expects it will not be long.
“The question is how long will the lawyers take,” he says. “I don’t think it will take long, I hope not more than a couple of months. As a lawyer on the client’s side, I’d like to think this could happen in a couple of weeks. There isn’t a lot to hammer out here and both sides are in favor of the proposal.”
Matthew French is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.
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