Aiken Chronicles Update:
Hearing on Ed Woltz Business License Appeal Postponed;
State of the City event: Future of Municipal Building, Hotel Aiken, the National Lab Office Building, and “There’s a Joke There Somewhere.”
The “ New Horizons” Meeting
By Don Moniak
January 24, 2023
Ed Woltz Business License Appeal Cancelled.
On Tuesday morning, the city issued a public notice stating:
“The meeting that was scheduled for Thursday, January 26, 2023, at 10 a.m. regarding appeal of a business license for Edward K. Woltz and Holly H. Woltz and S&C Properties LLC v. The City of Aiken, South Carolina and its Designated Business License Official has been cancelled. The meeting will be rescheduled at a date to be announced later. “
No reason for the cancellation was given. As reported in Ed Woltz’s Business License Citation. Aiken attorney Clark McCants III has represented Woltz on the case since December, 2021. While representing defendant Woltz against the plaintiff, Aiken City Solicitor Laura Jordan, McCants III also earned $1200 from the City for representing City Council and City Attorney Gary Smith in two lawsuits related to Project Pascalis.
McCants III also filed the answer on behalf of Smith in the Blake et al vs City of Aiken et al lawsuit. To add to his busy schedule McCants III is also one of two public defendants retained by the city, earning a $3000 a month flat fee for an unspecified number of hours.
Whether McCants III had other engagements is unknown.
State of the City , 2023
The City of Aiken’s 2023 State of the City public presentation is available for viewing on the city’s You Tube channel. For both city and county residents, the most important news was arguably Mayor Rick Osbon’s announcement that the preferred future of the city’s recently vacated, historic, New Deal era Municipal Building at 214 Park Avenue, SW is as a consolidated office for the county Solicitor’s Office.
The Solicitor, who is the local equivalent to a District Attorney, presently has offices scattered throughout the city. As reported in Why is the City of Aiken Toying with 113 Downtown Jobs, negotiations with the county were cut short when the city’s economic development department unilaterally decided to relocate the proposed Project Pascalis conference there. That option would have put the future of the downtown courthouse in doubt, placed 113 associated jobs at risk of leaving the downtown area, and possibly require a $40 million plus courthouse replacement on the outskirts of town.
Mayor Rick Osbon described the Solicitor Office option as a “win-win” situation:
“This evening I can tell you that I have had extensive discussions with the leadership of the Aiken County Government. City council has discussed the best use for the building moving forward and there appears to be a consensus that offering it for sale to the county to house the solicitor’s office is the best path forward. Having the solicitor’s office there would likely play a key role in keeping the county courthouse downtown as Chairman Bunker has suggested. We hope to have an agreement drafted between the city and county for both councils to review and consider in the near future.”
Hotel Aiken
The Hotel Aiken warranted extensive discussion—although the older Beckman Building next door on Laurens drew no mention. According to Mayor Osbon, the plan for the hotel is:
“To let the free market make the decision with lots of input and guidance from the public the experts any and all potential buyers and the city council. Within the next 45 to 60 days the plan is to craft a very broad request for proposals to purchase the hotel. There will be no preconceived ideas about what needs to be done with it, just a list of the parcels, a description of the buildings as they stand, and call for interested parties to make an offer to tell us their plan for it.”
“The RFP will encourage proposers to help our city with the important work of repurposing and complementing our Historic downtown assets. The requests will not suggest a future use for the property. Potential buyers may want it to be a hotel once again. that’d be great. Others may suggest condos or apartments and still others may suggest a great idea that has never occurred to any of us.”
“Here’s another important promise to you. Shortly after those proposals are. received and opened by City staff, those that meet some basic qualifications will be released to the public each each and every one of us will be able to evaluate what the plans are, what purchase price is offered, and what incentives a potential buyer might ask for all of it.”
“Keep in mind the plan the plan is for the private sector to pay for creating a profitable business at that site. In my opinion no proposal that asks the city to foot the bill for the actual Renovations or construction will seriously be considered. That said, if we all review the proposals together as a community and find one worth pursuing we’ll do just that if not we’ll reject them all and start again that’s my promise to you.”
The Lab.
The most discussed and hyped item of the evening was the proposal for a 45,000 square foot Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) office building in downtown Aiken on the current site of Warneke’s Cleaners and the former CC Johnson Drug Store. The city released a lengthy news release on the plan just after the presentation providing more details. SRNL has been managed by Battelle Savannah River Alliance since early 2021.
The facility is proposed to be funded with some or all of the $20 million in plutonium settlement funds set aside by the state legislature for “SRS/National Lab Offsite Infrastructure.” This money is separate from the $25 million in settlement funds for unspecified “Downtown and Northside Redevelopment” projects.
As described in footnote #2 in Pascalis Properties on Aiken City Council Closed Door Agenda, the original proposed setting for the SRNL “offsite campus” was USC-Aiken, but the first mention of locating it downtown was made at the last planned public AMDC meeting.
One notable moment of the lab discussion occurred at 53:30 of the presentation, when Dr. Vahid Majidi, Director of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) stated:
“I should emphasize that this Savannah River National Laboratory building is being designed for only computational administrative work we don’t have any chemicals hoods or hazardous material in this facility uh….”
After some applause and few laughs from the crowd, Dr. Majidi remarked:
“There is a joke there somewhere right?”
No joke was revealed. It is unknown whether the light humor was related to an incident in January, 2022. After a shipment of unidentified radioactive materials were found to be erroneously labeled as nonradioactive, all offsite shipments of hazardous and radioactive materials. were suspended until corrective actions could be taken.
The unidentified customer, who was expecting a shipment of radioactive materials, discovered the error upon receipt and inspection. The length of the suspension was not identified in the incident report, but the deadline for corrections was identified as Augusta, 2022.
This was not the first time that hazardous materials were inappropriately transported from SRNL to an offsite location.
For example, on April 24, 2018, an SRNL researcher “transported a 125 mL bottle of aluminum powder (estimated at 100 g of material) from the lab to the Aiken County Technical Laboratory in his personal vehicle. The “highly flammable/reactive” material should have been transported in a placarded government vehicle in accordance with federal hazardous material transportation regulations. The “Lesson Learned Statement” was “Mentoring and proper onboarding should be done for new
hires so that they are aware that their actions can have consequences concerning hazards and risks.”
Annual New Horizons Retreat
Today City Council also announced a “New Horizons” public meeting, during which the key agenda items will include Plutonium Settlement funding prioritization of the $25 million plutonium settlement allocation for “Downtown and Northside Redevelopment.” The full agenda packet of the meeting includes budget and revenue data.
