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Berkeley County: The Lowcountry’s boom town
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
In the history of South Carolina, only twice has a county nabbed $1 billion in corporate investment in a single year.
Both times it was Berkeley County.
In 1995, Nucor Steel moved in and BP Global expanded its plastic materials operation.
In 2007, the county announced a major coup in securing a Google data processing center, and just a few months later DuPont announced it would expand its current site near Cypress Gardens on the Cooper River to include a Kevlar manufacturing facility.
“This business is a team sport,” said John Scarborough, who during this interview in mid-
April was the county’s economic development director. He resigned shortly thereafter under political pressure.
“Nobody does it by themselves. It takes a County Council with some vision and trust in what I do to let me make deals and back me up on them,” he said. “It takes an administration in the county that is willing to go to council and say, ‘Here’s what we need; this may be a bit unusual, but can we get it done?’”
Google and DuPont marked the county’s largest corporate investments, the two alone pushing the county over the billion-dollar mark, but there have been others coming in as well.
The county has pulled in such names as Belimed Inc., Associated Container Sales, Pegasus Steel and Nationwide Express. An additional 921 jobs were added to the rolls in 2007 with a combined $41 million in salaries.
Homes spring up
Historically, Berkeley County’s role has been one of an industrial bedrock in the Lowcountry region. But the county’s residential base is growing alongside its commercial boom. New subdivisions are springing up in once-rural areas, tugging along the expansion of the retail sector. Hospitals are angling for real estate alongside projected population centers.
Last year, for instance, Trident Health System purchased 20 acres near the Cane Bay High School in the epicenter of three planned neighborhoods in Berkeley County, Cane Bay, Parks of Berkeley and Carnes Crossroads.
In mid-September, Roper St. Francis Healthcare purchased 66 acres just a few miles away.
With plans to build a similar office complex near the intersection of U.S. Highway 17A and U.S. Highway 176, Roper St. Francis is the first business to solidify a proposal to move into the neighborhood now under development by The Daniel Island Co.
“It’s a lot of jockeying for position,” Mark Robinson, Trident Health System’s chief operating officer, said recently. “It’s a lot of understanding … what people are doing and where they’re living. That’s why you see Roper buying that land, and you see Trident doing the same thing.”
Between 1990 and 2006, Berkeley County’s population grew 18%, presenting new challenges to county staff. Where industries could once pick their plots of land on a whim, the county needed a plan to build commercial and industry alongside mass-scale neighborhoods, Scarborough said.
“For years we did not solicit residential growth,” he said. “Our philosophy was we’ll take the industry and let folks live elsewhere if they want.”
Constructing neighborhoods
That was before MeadWestvaco began selling off huge chunks of land it had once set aside for timber. Developers seized on the opportunity. Across Berkeley County, dozens of neighborhoods are under construction. A new school is about to open up.
The growth is putting the county’s infrastructure in a pinch, prompting the Berkeley County Chamber of Commerce to push for a 1 cent sales tax increase to pay for new transportation projects. Residents in Charleston and Dorchester counties already pay this tax.
“Does the chamber want to add taxes to the residents or the business community? Absolutely not. However, do we want to make the roads safer for the people of Berkeley County? Absolutely. We have to get people to and from work and our children to school safely,” said Elaine Morgan, CEO of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce.
Businesses looking to locate in the county will want to know that the infrastructure can support them, she said.
Thomas Powell, vice president and general manager for DuPont Advanced Fiber Systems, said during the late December announcement, in which he said Berkeley County had been selected for the expansion, that a variety of factors went into the decision. Though the county offered a fee-in-lieu of taxes deal, incentives were not a major swaying factor, he said.
“What attracted us to Berkeley County is we have a long experience here. We’ve been operating here for over 30 years,” he said.
He also praised the quality and flexibility of the work force.
“They’ve been extremely dependable,” he said. “We’ve also had a great relationship with the local and state government.”
Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at mparker@scbiznews.com.
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