Redevelopment of the Project Pascalis Properties and a 4-story, 228-vehicle, $7 million “structured parking solution” for national lab project leads Aiken City Council’s development priority list for 2023.
by Don Moniak
February 28, 2023
Updated March 4, 2023.
One hour and fifty minutes into its Monday, February 27, 2023 meeting, with the audience dwindled to a fraction of its original size, Aiken City Council quickly and quietly approved three “action items” (1) from its January 27, 2023 “New Horizons” work session. With the exception of the Powderhouse Road to Whiskey Road connector road that will facilitate largescale development and city growth, the prioritized actions involve the future of former city administrative properties and the city’s commercial property portfolio known as the Project Pascalis properties.
The vote on the matter took place during the “petitions and resolutions” portion of the meeting. If the wording of the priority list—coupled with its lateness on the agenda—was intended to mask controversy, the effort was successful. Nobody in the audience addressed the topic.
For the second consecutive year, a “structured parking solution” is in the works, this time in support of the proposed Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) “Workforce Development” office building and computational laboratory (2) that is currently on center stage in the city’s latest downtown demolition and redevelopment efforts. Council intends to further subsidize the federal lab’s new off-site facility—which already has a $20 million plutonium funds allocation—with hospitality tax revenues and plutonium settlement funds presently allocated to downtown and Northside redevelopment.
At the top of the priority list is:
“Downtown core improvements to include upgrades to Richland Avenue parcels, construction of a surface parking lot on Newberry Street, and pursuing a structured parking solution adjacent to the current Municipal Building.”
In this case, some translation is necessary:
- “Richland Avenue parcels” = Project Pascalis properties stretching from Hotel Aiken to Warneke Cleaners.
- “Surface parking lot” = 86 vehicle parking lot on the 100 block of NW Newberry Street on property owned by the Aiken Corporation.
- “Structured Parking solution” = a $7 million, 228-vehicle, four-story parking garage between the new City Hall on Chesterfield and the Aiken Corporation’s Newberry Street building, where Department of Energy (DOE)/ Savannah River Site (SRS) contractor Amentum is presently the tenant.
(Update: On March 3rd, the City of Aiken and Cranston Engineering submitted an application to the city’s Design Review Board for a three-story, 162-vehicle parking garage).
According to the meeting minutes for the New Horizons workshop held the morning of Friday, January 27th at the Lessie B Price Senior and Youth Center, City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh told Council he already “submitted an application for the $20 million” of plutonium settlement funds for the “SRS lab.” He added that:
- “We want to construct the parking garage concurrent with any construction for the Lab.”
- “ The proposed parking garage would be for 228 spaces. It would be a four level garage with the fourth level not covered,” is estimated to cost $7 million, and would be on both city and Aiken Corporation property.
- “ The Aiken Corporation has a lot on Newberry Street which could be used for parking with about 86 spaces.” (There are actually three adjacent lots totalling 1.0 acre).
- The 320 combined parking spaces “should provide the parking needed for the Lab.”
- “We could fund a portion of the cost for a parking garage from the plutonium funds. We also have some funds from the Hospitality Tax that could be used by borrowing from the Hospitality Tax revenue to pay for a portion of a garage.”
The downtown national lab office complex has endured an interesting ride in its first month of public visibility. After the project was introduced with great fanfare and finality on January 23rd, the vision was tempered during a public forum on Feburary 6th regarding a project “feasibility study.”
At that meeting, moderator K.T. Jacobs stated, “what was said (two weeks prior) is not necessarily what is going to happen” and there were no drawings, blueprints, or plans to review. Jacobs, representing the architectural firm of McMillan, Pazdan, and Smith, chose not to disclose the firm’s “client for this study is the Aiken Corporation, not the City of Aiken,” until Feburary 23rd. If the lab project proceeds as planned, the Aiken Corporation will likely be the lab facility’s landlord.
During its February 13th meeting, City Council was relatively muted about the project, with a few members claiming it was still new to them. But Council was made aware the path forward for the lab project will not be as contentious as Project Pascalis, when support was articulated by Luis Rinaldini— who is a plaintiff in the ongoing Blake et al vs City of Aiken et al lawsuit alleging multiple violations of state and local law during the Project Pascalis process. Rinaldini stated:
“The consequence of your actions is that, for example on the Savannah River National Lab deal, you are now a negative despite all your good work on it. The public reception was very hostile and we’re having to work very hard to turn them around. If we defend you they hate us for defending you… I personally am a big supporter of that project.”
Later, when speaking about Council’s plan to assume the duties of the AMDC, Rinaldini, who is also an Historic Aiken Foundation board member, stated that “we’re trying to explain to the community why a preservation organization and others might support the lab project.”
Also during the February 13th meeting, during a discussion on plutonium settlement funds utilization, Historic Aiken Foundation President Linda Johnson spoke in favor of paying off the $9.6 Project Pascalis debt from the $25 million settlement allocation. Johnson also suggested a path for Aiken’s northside—-which currently stands to receive little or no funding from the plutonium funds allocation—to receive a few million dollars from future sales of the properties, stating:
“Regarding the fact that we have $9.6 million to use to pay off the bond, presumably sometime in the future we could recoup some of that by selling properties, etc. She said she would like to see the City make a commitment to set aside the recouped money for special projects, possibly something like more for the northside which did not really get a big part of the money.”
Last night, Council adopted its path forward on the lab project without ever saying its name, contradicting the decisional timeline put forth during the February 6th public forum (3). Prior to the meeting, Council was scheduled to “receive a legal briefing on the Blake v. City of Aiken lawsuit,” during a closed-door Executive Session. The lawsuit is presently in a mediation phase (4). Council provided no comments about the briefing.
Read next: “It Doest Look Like Aiken.”
Footnotes
(1) City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh’s supporting memorandum for New Horizon’s Action Items.
(2) During the January 23, 2023 “State of the City” public relations extravaganza, SRNL Director Majidi described the office complex not only as a workforce development facility, but one for computational work.
“SRNL employees will perform some of our computational modeling and simulation. We’ll have a team of employees working with the university to increase our engagement with faculty postdoctoral and graduate students interns and minority serving institution programs. Some of our employees will work on non-proliferation training programs while other will work on Workforce Development and HR functions moreover as a collaboration Hub.”
(3) SRNL downtown office facility “Feasibility Study” schedule presented on February 6, 2023:
(4) A mediator was assigned to the Pascalis lawsuit on January 31, 2023.
I’m truly proud that the few of us that have the forthrightness to speak up have continued this tug of war with a very shameful corrupt city government.
The “Slick Willy” non disclosure of a parking garage – hell bent on spending monies that should be appropriately spent on brown water issues downtown. The Northside is getting the brunt, it appears the city council considers this area less than worthy of any opportunities for clean up and repairs. It’s very concerning the city government doesn’t know where the city begins or ends except where their pockets are concerned.
I attended the lecture, “New Ideas in Downtown Development” at the historic museum on Newberry Street this past Sunday. The presenter, Louis Rinaldini, has taken lead rolls in the controversy over preservation issues involving the Pascalis Project properties, the Do It Right citizen group objecting to the city’s mismanagement of the project, and the law suit aimed at stopping the mismanagement. It was therefore surprising for me to hear Mr. Rinaldini say he did not understand why the Environmental Protection Agency has a role in preservation projects. He seems unaware of the public health risks involved in preservation projects. Old buildings are associated with the dangers of asbestos, lead paint, lead in old plumbing, and many other potential toxins. It was also disappointing to hear from someone who has assumed a leadership role in Aiken’s downtown preservation needs and efforts to say that he does not care where the money comes from as long as it comes, apparently alluding to the government funds (our tax payer dollars) that would arrive with the projected SRS lab building in the heart of our downtown, cherished for its old southern charm image and incompatible with federal nuclear laboratories and acres of cemented green space converted to the required additional parking. I was prompted to caution that we must be careful which camel’s nose we let under our tent, a comment he dismissed. I am curious why anyone sees such a possibility compatible with the quaint charm profile Aiken strives to portray. I am also confused about the government’s reason for wanting to relocate a nuclear lab and administration building to Aiken’s downtown district and away from the operational center of the Savannah River Site. There are hundreds of available unused acreage at the site. I was also surprised to hear Mr.,Rinaldini say that increased accommodation for bicycles downtown is not a good idea because they will scare the horses. Having lived in downtown Aiken for 23 years I felt obligated to say that horses are rarely seen downtown, to which he replied that horses are afraid of bicycles. Apparently Mr. Rinaldini does not attend the horse shows at Bruce’s Field where bicycles and golf carts constantly buzz between barns and arenas and around eventing horses. Being both a horse woman and a biker my immediate thought was “You’re not from around here, are you.” Another moment gave me pause for thought when Mr. Rinaldini said there are no decent restaurants in downtown Aiken. Not only did I find that remark unconstructive, it occurred to me he and a lot of people share different views on what defines a decent restaurant. Back to my caution about the camel’s nose, Aiken has apparently reached an impasse point where decisions must be made about the the future image our little increasingly unique southern belle of a city. Unless residents turn off their TVs and participate in the decision process we will get what Will Rogers warned of. We’ll get what we deserve.
Dr. Rose O. Hayes,
I attended that lecture as well on Sunday and I thought the same thing about a) horses and bicycles though in his defense maybe they don’t have bikes at polo matches? And b) the funding ….as I believe he said he didn’t care if it came from the devil. In case you didn’t see Mr. Moniak’s recent letter to the Joint Bond Review Committee regarding that Plutonium funding you can see it here.
https://aikenchronicles.com/2023/02/27/letter-to-the-joint-bond-review-committee/
I did want to give Mr. Rinaldini credit for the initial presentation at the museum though but then he revealed to the audience that it wasn’t actually his …..maybe he should refer to the slide that said People Don’t come to Aiken for :
1) Walmart
2) Zacksbys but It was spelled Sacksbys And I would suggest that Bomb Plant Lab could be added to that slide!
I signed the Do It Right petition and I didn’t recall it saying Support putting a federally funded Bomb Plant Lab on Newberry St but maybe that was in the fine print? I first saw him cheerlead for this lab at the Feb 6th meeting they had with the architect where he proclaimed “the lab is us!” and again at the Feb 13th City Council Meeting and frankly I was shocked….. and I wondered when he speaks as “we” on the record does that mean HAF? Does that mean DIR or does that refer to his fellow plaintiffs in the Blake et al case?
Wow, we left early and clearly missed that anything about a parking garage was on the agenda.
Let’s see 228 spaces at a 7M price tag …carry the one ……that’s 30K per space! Such a deal to support the “100” new jobs that the Bomb Plant Lab would bring. Who cares about the businesses ….the small privately owned businesses that this lab would snuff out right? Officials clearly do not care. They have learned nothing from the public outcry over Pascalis.
This is just Piggy 2.0 Nuclear Edition ….How about a Bomb Plant Lab with your parking garage? The handful of supporters can’t understand why a government funded Nuclear facility doesn’t make a Parking Garage any easier to swallow.
Anyone paying attention can see this and the few that are pimping it are definitely in the minority just ask around 😉 I happened to have been in two iconic places in Aiken just today and rest assured this latest incarnation of Pigscalis is wildly unpopular with most people. Why else would it be hidden something like petitions and requests as New Horizons Action Items. lol. But we will pay better attention moving forward. That nice architect on Feb 6th told us they were just starting the feasibility study and then whammo a parking garage disguised in the agenda just weeks later. Same deceit different day.
And why would that lawsuit need mediators at this point when it appears they have two openly pro SRNL project cheerleaders already on board with the City? Is there a debate on which shade of historic green the window dressings should be?
Kelly, I couldn’t have said it better:
This is just Piggy 2.0 Nuclear Edition ….How about a Bomb Plant Lab with your parking garage? The handful of supporters can’t understand why a government funded Nuclear facility doesn’t make a Parking Garage any easier to swallow.
Laura, It seems like a few voices once opposed to Pascalis are now placated with the promise that the city will now put out an RFP for the hotel ( oh you mean like they should have in the first place?) a lot of us continue to expect more out of our officials. The hotel is only one part of this disaster ….Newberry St is equally as important. Are they truly that foolish to think we fought to get back Newberry St so they could Plant a Bomb Plant Lab on it? Charm not Chaos Huh? Tell me again what is charming about a nuclear lab? You said the bomb plant does funny things to people….well, the side effects of Plutonium Money even before its arrival are sure on full public display now.
Throwing a pot of plutonium money to an already financially-conflicted local government apparatus was like throwing gasoline onto a fire. And it certainly threw into high relief whose interests are being served. (Spoiler alert: not the interests of me or you or you).
It was encouraging, for a while, the diversity of people from all classes waging criticism at the corrupting influences of that plutonium pot. Turns out, the same doesn’t apply to the corrupting influences of bomb plant money.
Maybe this is because bomb plant money isn’t a one-off windfall, but is the trade of the most powerful and the most destructive industrial complex on the planet (ask Eisenhower) that peddles in billions and trillions of dollars. One can either be faithful to the gods of war or be a heretic, which will, in turn, affect one’s social and financial standing in the community.
So you are telling me I have to add Heretic to Nimby behind my name? Don’t lose hope…. Aiken is full of strong intelligent people (who don’t use their law firm’s letterhead to submit development proposals) and who are willing to fight no matter how big Goliath is because Aiken is so worth it! And about that social standing………..I suspect pimping a bomb plant lab on Newberry isn’t all that popular among the true blue bloods around here ……just like it isn’t popular among the blue collared. In fact, bomb plant white collars don’t seem to be all that keen on the idea either. If it were popular they wouldn’t have to hide components of it in the agenda like they did the parking garage but I do agree that some have changed their tune recently maybe in part to be Nuclear Appropriate which might be Aiken’s version of politically correct. Once they see it’s popular to be anti bomb plant lab on Newberry………,maybe they too will raise their Don’t Plant a Bomb Plant Lab on Newberry St Flags………and those who think using Pu funds to bail out this disaster will be looked at as the heretics. Until then THANK YOU and Mr. Moniak for the Aiken Chronicles as the stenographer over at the Standard usually fails to transcribe the entire meeting .
Thank you, Kelly, for your support and for your own contributions to the knowledge base at the Aiken Chronicles. And I don’t know that it’s possible to overstate the importance of Don’s work and his many, many contributions to informing the public on local issues, most prominently Pascalis, but much more than that. We’d still be in the dark if not for Don’s work.
“So you are telling me I have to add Heretic to Nimby behind my name?”
Hilarious!
Yeah, the first time I heard the term “NIMBY,” was when a member of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board raised the term in response to a comment I’d made. I was new at this, so I had to ask what the word meant. I learned that, in local discussions on the bomb plant, the word “Nimby” is the equivalent of the buzzer you hear on game shows when you give the wrong answer.
In my case, it was meant to reduce me to a dumb cliche for being opposed to the shipments bringing to Aiken those 9.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium. (As an aside, there was also opposition to the weapons grade uranium from Germany that was being being courted by SRNL).
It is of interest that downtown Aiken’s 2016 Nuclear Symposium, which I organized, publicized and personally catered to create a forum for sorely needed public information and discussion on these shipments ( https://energycentral.com/news/aiken-nuclear-symposium-raises-questions-and-concerns ) was primarily attended by out-of-towners, not locals. It’s a rare Aikenite can bear the heat of the Nimby and Heretic brands. Hence the almost non-existent support over the past 40 or so years for Tom Clements., nuclear watchdog extraordinaire of SRS Watch.
You’d think people would have better than blind faith to offer regarding the safety of the bomb plant but, with maybe a dozen notable exceptions, there has been next to zero concern expressed among locals over having Aiken serve as pay toilet for the world’s weapons-grade plutonium.
That is, until the 600 million pot of plutonium money arrived. Only then could it be acknowledged that it might be undesirable to have 9.5 metric tons of plutonium dumped in your backyard.
Maybe you’re right — and I hope you are — that a line might finally be drawn in the sand on Newberry Street in answer to an industry that has enjoyed carte blanche for the past 70 years to take what it wants (the entire towns and communities of Ellenton, Dunbarton, Hawthorne — and, now, Aiken?), and to contaminate as it will in the course of creating deadly materials for weapons of mass destruction.
And this says nothing of the selective blindness of the locals — old-timers and new-timers alike — to the nearly $2 billion paid out to workers who were sickened or died early deaths from their exposures while working at that “safe” bomb plant. https://www.dol.gov/owcp/energy/regs/compliance/statistics/WebPages/SA_RIVER_SITE.htm
Here’s to the hope that discussion and decisions on the bomb plant lab’s incursion into the downtown will be about more than the Benjamins, more than company town loyalty, and more than blind faith, and prove to be the exception to the rule of the past 70 years.
The Renaissance-Pascalis-Nuclear-Lab saga is a cautionary tale about public-private development partnerships. How different the City’s narrative would read if they spoke plainly on City’s 2023 priority list:
– A $7 million, four-story, 228-space parking garage on Chesterfield St
– An 87-space parking lot on Newberry across from St Johns Methodist
– This, for a total of 320 parking spaces to accommodate the expansion of the Savannah River National Lab beyond the boundaries of the government’s 310 square-mile nuclear complex property along the Savannah River.
The bomb plant does funny things to people, always has. So if you’re among those who think the downtown charm comes from its shops, restaurants, parkways, historic buildings and Aiken’s thriving arts, music and equine culture; or if you’re among those who think the downtown could be better developed to meet the needs of ALL of Aiken and the visitors who have been drawn to this place for nearly 150 years to experience its small town charm; or if you’re among those who are opposed to the secrecy, closed doors and unlawful processes that enabled Project Pascalis to morph from an idea into a wasteful, scandalous $100 million boondoggle… you may now find yourself at odds with people who were your allies just a few months ago.
As long as I’m unwrapping euphemisms, I’lll offer that the City of Aiken, the AMDC and the Aiken Corporation are the “public” side of a corrupted apparatus that is being used to drive public-private development projects, mostly in secrecy, and whose winners are the ones whose pockets are being filled, whether directly or, (through good old-fashioned crony etiquette), indirectly — the developers, the lawyers, the consultants, the investors and other shareholders, plus those at the top who control the levers of power.
The losers are the rest of us — ordinary people whose tax dollars are being shoveled into the giant furnace of this secretive, profit-seeing apparatus, and whose public places are being overtaken, demolished, destroyed and rebuilt to serve big-moneyed interests whose employees, we are told, might enjoy having lunch downtown.
The nuclear lab’s original idea to set up office at USCA was apparently scuttled for lack of a good place for the employees to “live work and play” and to enjoy a nice lunch. Is this why they didn’t pursue another good choice — the historic Aiken County Hospital property that is succumbing day by to day to neglect, vandals and the elements for want of a developer?
The bottom line is the bottom line. By bringing the lab to the downtown, the Aiken Corporation (the City of Aiken) hopes to reap gobs of plutonium money and landlord income. And with all the billions being poured into the area by the war industry, SRNL/Battelle will likely not be the last corporate giant looking for a nice place to have lunch. And the City of Aiken will be there like the handle on the pump, ready to serve them.
The Pascalis Project has proven to be of particular interest to a large segment of the public. Therefore, it is incumbent on local government officials to communicate all pertinent information regarding the project in an arena that fully accommodates and informs affected tax payers. Rather than discussing Pascalis Project planning and/or implementation issues during regularly scheduled City Council meetings, special meetings, announced widely and in a timely fashion, should be held which provides complete transparency regarding the project and appropriate opportunities for public questions and comments.
We do not need the government throughout all the downtown area. We need development for private businesses, i.e. restaurants, stores, Aiken Hotel restored.