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Jafza reveals early plans for Orangeburg
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Baseball fields, public parks, nature trails and lush vegetation might not be the first things one typically thinks of when imagining a vast warehouse and distribution-based commerce park.
But those are among the highlights of the preliminary master plan created by Jafza International for the 1,300 acres it owns in Orangeburg County.
“We’re going for a campus feel and employing a strategy we hope benefits the public as much as it benefits our company and our clients,” said Chuck Heath, the company’s senior vice president and managing director.
The details of the plan—details Heath said likely will be revised at least a dozen times before ground is actually broken for the project in 12 to 18 months—were contained in a simple black binder he carried with him.
“This is what we envision, based on a preliminary evaluation by our traffic and environmental consultants,” he said.
Heath and other representatives of Jafza International converged on South Carolina late last month to start hammering out several aspects of the project. In addition to continuing conversations with public officials over incentives and infrastructure, the company also is actively talking with engineering firms and consultants that will assist in taking the project to the next step.
“I don’t know if we’ll ultimately find one local firm or utilize a number of them, but the one thing we didn’t want to do at the outset was bring in a big international firm that has projects going all over the world,” Heath said. “We want a very local focus to make sure that this project is done right not only from our perspective but also from that of South Carolina.”
Staying in the family
For the first phase of the environmental analysis of the site, Jafza International kept the work somewhat in the family, hiring Applied Technology and Management of Charleston, a company that’s partially owned by the government of Dubai through Island Global Yachts in which it holds a large equity stake.
ATM was the lead consultant selected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work on the Environmental Impact Statement for the S.C. State Ports Authority’s planned terminal at the former Charleston Navy base, it has also done environmental work for projects at and around the Port of Savannah.
At the Jafza site, ATM looked at wetlands on the property and, together with Jafza officials, determined that the best approach would be to leave the wetlands as they are and install wooden bridges and walkways to incorporate natural areas into walking trails and recreation areas.
“The recreational components of the plan will all be outside the secured perimeter of the main warehouse, distribution center and manufacturing component of the facility, but some of these trails will also be inside the main development for use by employees,” Heath said. “Again it goes back to creating a campus feel for the property.”
Toward that end, the preliminary plan calls for an office complex to ring a large lake that former property owner Jim Roquemore built on the site.
A significant swath of the recreational space will be placed west of Interstate 95, between the industrial uses of the site and the residential communities in Santee.
Asked if ATM would have the inside track on future consulting work related to the Orangeburg project, Heath said they’d be considered along with many other firms.
“Sometimes it’s a good thing to hire family; sometimes it’s not. It all depends on the needs and parameters of the task at hand,” he said.
Emphasis on buffer
One of the goals of the preliminary master plan is to buffer existing communities as much as possible from what they might see as disruptive industrial activities, Heath said.
“Going into this project, we’re adopting the attitude that we can’t do anything wrong, and that it’s in the buildup stage when you have the most opportunity to do the right thing,” he said. “Once something is built out, it’s very hard to go back and say, ‘If only we’d thought of (that amenity).’
“Mistakes or oversights you make in the planning stage only come back to haunt you as nagging headaches later on. One thing that’s very important to us is that this buffer be native vegetation and trees, rather than those ugly, sound-buffering walls you see along I-95 in places.”
The company also is looking at strategies that will keep truck traffic entering and leaving the site far from S.C. Highway 6, the major artery that leads right into the Santee residential community, Heath said.
“I don’t want trucks going through Santee on (Highway) 6, period, whether during the construction phase or when our park is fully operational,” Heath said. “It doesn’t do us any good to have traffic adversely impact the existing communities or even the commerce parks that are going up near our site.”
Heath also revealed that the company is rethinking the need for a cloverleaf interchange at the intersection of I-95 and U.S. Highway 301.
“We definitely need that interchange reworked, but what we’re finding is that a cloverleaf might not be the best or most cost-effective way to go,” he said.
The preliminary master plan now includes four possible options: The cloverleaf, a partial cloverleaf, a diamond, or a four-legged, all-directional interchange.
Jafza is also considering additional land purchases adjacent to the land it already owns in Orangeburg.
Heath described the effort as a matter of symmetry. “I simply want to smooth the edges of the property out a little bit.”
Judging from the company’s diagram of its existing holdings, those additional purchases could increase its acreage by as much as a third.
Company seeks locals
As the project moves forward, Jafza officials will divide their time between Charleston, Columbia and Santee to establish the framework through which qualified companies will be able to participate in the project, Heath said.
Later this month, the company plans to establish a Web site through which local companies can learn how to tender a proposal to work on specific areas of the project. The Web site also will offer a timeline for when Jafza intends to start working on specific elements.
“The responses from local companies, as you can imagine, has been tremendous,” Heath said. “But we want to have an acquisition framework in place that not only is fair to all concerned, but that also ensures that we ensure diversity in our contracting.”
At this point, Heath is not sure if he’ll have a single individual overseeing the whole project or if he’ll create a local team to handle the many diverse economic development elements of the project, he said.
“One thing we need to do is get a feel for what’s available in the local market,” he said. “One thing I can say definitively, however, is that we definitely prefer to hire locally.”
Heath’s greatest fear at this point is “over-expectation,” he said.
“The fact is, we’re in this for the long haul, and this is going to be a 20-year build out,” he said. “Even Orangeburg’s own recent commerce park project took nine months to get through the regulatory process and get going.
“As it stands right now, we have a very preliminary plan and over the next three to four months we’ll get into the detail design phase. Then we’ll have to complete our traffic studies and the like, and it’s only when all those things are done that we’ll take this to the Orangeburg County planning board.
The other problem with a project like this is final financial models can’t be completed until the exact costs are known, he said.
Among the issues that need to be resolved is how the rail component of the plan will work, including such operational questions as whether the Norfolk Southern trains will operate on CSX tracks.
“It’s an extensive process,” Heath said.
Marketing has begun
But that doesn’t mean the marketing of the project hasn’t already begun. While they’re here, one thing Jafza officials are looking at is developing strategies to raise the company’s marketing profile in South Carolina.
The company is meeting with local public relations firms about handling the local campaign and is looking at buying some billboard advertisements along I-95, Heath said.
“The main message we want to communicate is that Jafza International wants to do business here and wants to have as minimal a negative impact as possible while having a tremendous positive impact on this community and region,” he said.
In Dubai, the company has already been promoting the Orangeburg County site in many in-house publications, Heath said.
“And we’re featuring South Carolina this month in the company newsletter,” he said. “We see Orangeburg not only as a gateway into the Southeast or the United States as a whole, but as the gateway into all of North America.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.
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