With steel mill plan stalled, county moves ahead with port redevelopment – Coastal Observer

With steel mill plan stalled, county moves ahead with port redevelopment – Coastal Observer

A decade from now the 46 acre former state port on the Sampit River will be unrecognizable, said Johnny Weaver, who was dockmaster for the weekend’s Georgetown Wooden Boat Show. “The historical district here, it’s not going to change that much. That’s going to shift a lot of focus to over there,” Weaver, president of the S.C. Maritime Museum, said. It needs to tie together, said Lee Gastley, the managing principal at SeamonWhiteside in Mount Pleasant, the lead consultant for Georgetown County’s port redevelopment project. “How do we take the character that’s Georgetown and potentially transfer that over there, recognizing that would be a new development. But you don’t want to lose sight of Georgetown and have it look like a totally different place over there,” Gastley said. “It needs to tie together.” The county acquired the property from the state in June 2023. The port was commissioned in 1732. The port was a key economic engine for the area, handling 1.8 million tons of cargo in 2000. The steel mill accounted for most of the cargo handled in Georgetown at its peak in 2003. The last cargo ship docked at the port in 2016.  Gastley, who serves as the project manager, said the analysis to determine what that reality may look like in Georgetown has not been done yet. “Realistic has to do with what the market thinks they can make money on,” he said. “I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what developers are in the business to do, is to make money.” The first step to figuring out that reality is through public engagement and feedback before developing a master plan. That process begins tonight at 6 p.m. with a community kickoff meeting at Howard Auditorium. “There’s nothing written down yet,” Gastley said. Gastley and Jason Munday, vice president at Seamon Whiteside, were ahead of the curve for tonight’s meeting with a tent among exhibitors at the boat show. They had a poster board with images of different land uses and amenities such as hotels, offices and retail locations. Other images displayed a marina, amphitheater and farmer’s market.  Onlookers were invited to place stickers on the three they would like to see at the port property. Gastley estimated less than half were from Georgetown County. “But they come here a lot and they have an interest in Georgetown,” he said. It’s a blank slate, Munday said. “You can’t make everyone happy, right? But you can design by consensus,” he said. “That’s what this does. It kind of guides us. It gives us direction.” Yellow dots covered the photo of the marina. Only one was placed on the image of a corporate campus. Open space and parks may have an important role to play, Gastley said. “If you’re going to have a live-work environment, play is an important part of that,” he said. “You don’t want to overbuild offices. You don’t want to under-provide housing, so just kind of analyzing that to come up with a reasonable mix of uses that are marketable.” Olivia and Austin Osburn of Georgetown were strolling down Front Street with their 1-year-old daughter, Briella. The young family said they weren’t aware of the redevelopment plan, but that didn’t mean they don’t have a vision for the area. “We have a lot of restaurants already,” Austin said. Olivia would prefer the 46 acres to be preserved as a historical landmark. She said her grandfather and great-grandfather worked at the adjacent steel mill and paper mill that both closed in 2024. “That’s what I would want to see,” she said. “I remember the sights, the smells. Everything,” said Skyler Covington of Florence, who said he grew up coming to Georgetown. “Anybody can make a restaurant. Anybody can make a hotel. Anybody can do this other stuff, but having something that honors the heritage of the town is what I’d like to see.” Both mill sites were under contract for redevelopment with River Development Equities. The New Jersey-based firm announced to residents last month that the deal for the steel mill fell through. It had planned a mixed-use development on the sites integrated into the city street grid along with green space and walking trails. Those change in plans didn’t affect the port redevelopment directly, Munday said. The steel mill is in the city. The port property and the paper mill are outside the city limits. “We were kind of working our own. I think politically, there were, you know, maybe…” he said. “It would be easier if we had an entity that we could collaborate with, that they were working toward a plan and we saw what that was,” Gastley said. “Our plan, at least, recognized what they were doing.” Weaver and others would like to see the Harborwalk extended around the port property. That’s something city and county officials say they are working on. Gastley said that would make sense. “The properties are so close. They do need, at some level, to connect,” he said. “They need to interact,” Munday agreed. Covington said he does not want to see heavy industrial or a large mixed-use development introduced on the property. “We want it to be really cool, but not another, you know, Charleston. It needs to be unique,” he said. Clay Livingston of Pawleys Island, who was part of the boat show’s boat building competition, said he would like to see a steel mill with people working there. “That’s what the town was built on,” he said. The redevelopment of the port property wants to address the loss of hundreds jobs in the city, Gastley said, but it will take time. “It’s going to take a much larger effort to ultimately recapture those jobs in some shape, form or fashion,” he said. “But it’s a start.” Weaver, who is the president of the board at the S.C. Maritime Museum and a founding member of the Harbor Historical Association, hopes to see the city’s maritime history preserved. It would be a shame if it wasn’t, he said. The museum would like to have space at the port property for its sailing and boat-building programs. “That needs to be continued over at the port property,” Weaver said. The firms will collaborate to create a few conceptual master plans that will be presented in mid-January for public feedback, he said. After refinements, the “final” conceptual master plan with the real estate component is due by mid-April.  That will just be the end of that first phase of design, Gastley said. Anything to do with zoning requirements and the implementation of the plan he said would be another scope of work to address. “At least the county would then have something that they could take and say, ‘OK, we’ve got a vision now for what it is,’ ” Gastley said. “We care about what we do. We don’t live here, but we address the problem as if we lived here.”