Monthly Archives: September 2023

Aiken Corporation, Pascalis 2023 - SRNL Lab, September 2023

“The Devil is in the Details” – The Aiken Corporation Study Missed the Most Essential Detail of All

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The Aiken Corporation Study Missed the Most Essential Detail of All: The Scope of the Study.

Less than two weeks after the long-awaited Feasibility Study was released to the public, the Aiken Corporation voted Monday morning to recommend a Newberry Street site to City Council for a $20 million “mixed-use facility.” This recommendation came almost 8 months to the day after the mayor’s January 2023 announcement that the City of Aiken was partnering with Savannah River National Lab (SRNL) to build  a $20 million “workforce development center” on the property known to most of us as the failed Project Pascalis properties. 

The Aiken Corporation is a not-for-profit entity doing business for the City as part of a “public-private partnership”. There are no elected officials on the Board and, according to their bylaws, membership is chosen by the Board.

In March — two months after the January announcement of the City of Aiken’s partnership with SRNL, and despite the fact that there was no signed contract with SRNL — the Aiken Corporation was awarded a $250K , no-bid contract to do pre-development work for the SRNL project. The contract identified a single downtown site on publicly-owned, Pascalis project properties to be evaluated for both the proposed SRNL facility and retail use. 

Three notable changes occurred between the January announcement and the September feasibility study release: 

  1. The size of the building was reduced from 45,000 sq ft to 36,000 sq ft.
  2. The project morphed from an SRNL workforce development building to a $20 million mixed-use spec building with no committed tenants.
  3. The number of potential sites grew from one to a surprising five options.

One thing that did not change were the terms of the March 2023 contract with the Aiken Corporation, which not only defined road boundaries, it listed specific property Tax ID numbers for the scope of the study. Had the Aiken Corporation read the details of their contract, they’d have realized that all but one of the properties in their study, including the Newberry Street site they recommended, were outside of the scope of the contract’s defined boundaries! More on this in a moment.

“The Unforced Error”

One of the biggest points of discussion preceding the Newberry Street vote in the Monday morning Aiken Corporation meeting regarded the major snafu at the second public input meeting on Thursday night, September 21. At that meeting, a citizen pointed out that the poster board presentation of the old Aiken County Hospital site, (which had been featured in the first meeting on September 14), was missing.

The Aiken Corporation panel was caught completely off-guard and meeting attendees were treated to the Aiken Corp’s version of Whose on First? Neither MPS nor the Aiken Corporation told the public on Thursday that the hospital site had been removed from consideration. In fact, it seemed like the Aiken Corp panelists had no idea the Old Hospital Site had been eliminated somewhere between their first public reveal a week earlier and the Thurs Sept 21st Q and A session.

One Aiken Corporation panel member offered that the reason was because the hospital property is under contract, as if that precluded it from being considered. The hospital property developer, Aiken County native Tracey Turner, had mentioned interest in the SRNL option to City Council during an August 14th work session meeting featuring his presentation of the project vision.

The Old Hospital property was the favored site by the majority of citizen attendees, who were also overwhelmingly opposed to the lab facility being built on the taxpayer-funded, failed Project Pascalis properties. Mr. Turner was in attendance at the Thursday, September 21 meeting and spoke on the topic of the missing poster board on this hospital property. 

By Monday morning, in the Aiken Corporation meeting, the narrative had shifted to state that the site didn’t meet the criteria of the study. The Thursday night snafu, which had the Aiken Corporation Board not giving notice on the removal of the hospital site poster boards, was deemed, “an unforced error.” Below is a video clip of KJ Jacobs of McMillan Pazdan Smith, the architectural firm tasked with the Feasibility Study, speaking to Aiken Corp Members via Zoom in the Monday morning meeting. 

Architect K.J. Jacobs: “Maybe the mistake was looking at the site at all because it never met the criteria of the study in the first place “

Scope of The Project

Newsflash: With the exception of the “Richland Avenue” site on the Pascalis project properties, not a single alternative site met the criteria of the study.

As reported in Three Missing Pages, the site boundaries and tax parcel numbers were defined in Exhibit A of the March 14th Professional Services Agreement. City Council was told on March 13th that “
The scope of the project is located on a portion of property between Bee Lane, The Alley, Richland Ave West, and Newberry St. Southwest .”
( March 13th City Council Meeting Minutes, Page 16)

These boundaries are highlighted in yellow on the map below. 

So, not only did the Old Hospital Site not meet the location criteria as defined by the city, none of the other sites, which had somehow been added to the study without the public’s knowledge, met the location criteria.

The only site that meets the scope of the project, because it falls within the prescribed boundaries, is Site 1 — Richland Avenue. The other four sites all fall outside of the study’s boundaries, including the Newberry Street site that was recommended by the Aiken Corporation. 

If the Aiken Corporation can’t adhere to the most basic condition, the scope of the study, how can we have confidence of their oversight moving forward?

The relevance of this question is more pronounced when examining other points of contractual noncompliance, including the lack of a mandated public “goal-setting” forum intended to “create consensus among stakeholders regarding the goals of the project,” and the absence of an “internet web site published specifically to chronicle” all public forum proceedings and feedback and information gathered during the process. The Aiken Corporation website only contains the feasibility report, but no feedback, input, comments, or any data used to reach conclusions.

The Details

When it came time to vote on the Newberry Street site recommendation during the Monday morning Aiken Corporation meeting, two of the members abstained from voting but stayed in the discussion. If Aiken officials learned one thing from failed Project Pascalis it should have been how to properly recuse from meetings when potential conflicts of interest are at play.

Ironically, that evening, during the regular Monday night City Council meeting, Aiken Corporation’s Vice-Chairman, Pat Cunning, went on to tell Council, while extolling their success with public-private partnerships such as this, “The devil is in the details. We just watch the money.”

FOOTNOTES

The $250k, no-bid contract received by the Aiken Corporation to do pre-development work came with a defined territory of study as listed in the March 13th, 2023 City Council minutes and the March 14th, 2023 Professional Agreement signed by the City.

A December 9, 2022 contract between the Aiken Corporation and McMillan Pazdan Smith was also referred to in a March 14 Professional Agreement and a Nov 30th letter which was signed Buzz Rich on Dec 9th also references the location

30 November 2022
ATTN: Mr. Tim O’ Briant
Chairman Arthur W. ” Buzz” Rich
Aiken Corporation
111 Chesterfield Street
Aiken, SC 29801
RE: Goal Setting Programming for New Office Building + Meeting Venue
City of Aiken, South Carolina
Dear Tim:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide this proposal related to your proposed new, mixed- use building in downtown Aiken. We understand that the proposed site is an +/- 0. 55- acre, T- shaped parcel bounded by Richland Avenue NW, Newberry Street NW and Bee Lane. The project, which will be constructed and owned by the Aiken Corporation, is conceptualized as a mixed- use building containing approximately 30, 000 square feet of office space and a 10, 000- 15, 000 square foot exhibition hall with associated meeting and support spaces. The site is currently occupied by a variety of existing buildings, some of which may be of cultural of historical significance.

Aiken Corporation, Editorials, September 2023

Editorial: Thoughts on the Aiken Corporation

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Should the Aiken Corporation be dissolved? This question is not new, but the question is being raised more often today as growing numbers of citizens take a critical look at the purpose, performance and history of this organization and ask, “Whose interests are being served?”and “Has it been worth the cost over the past 25 years?” The thoughts, below, will be explored more fully in an upcoming article on the Aiken Corporation’s “Amentum Model.”

Every so often, the Aiken Corporation gets a wild hair to do something big. It seems the bigger and boondogglier the project, the more urgent the push to get it done. Accounts from old newspaper articles, editorials and letters-to-the-editor regarding these projects suggest a habitual lack of organization, cost overruns, management by crisis, a disregard for citizen input, and promises of the economic prosperity to follow.

This all started in 2000, with the Amentum (nee Knudsen-Morrison-Westinghouse-Washington-URS-AECOM) building on Newberry Street, when the Aiken Corporation helped stage a corporate coup via an SRS contractor which transformed a modest community project into a $7.7 million boondoggle. The Amentum building project was plagued with so many cost overruns that the interior had to be finished with volunteer labor. The exterior suffered for lack of funds to extend the brickwork around to the backside of the building. There was talk for awhile of planting some shrubs to cover their derrière, but that idea passed.

____________

The 2002 Washington/Amentum Center building project went on to be repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, in the controversial Railroad Depot project on Union Street, which likewise promised to draw tourists and bring prosperity to the downtown. The Depot was to serve as the Aiken Visitors Center, the office for Aiken, Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department, a railroad museum, and an events space. The facility would be self-supporting, with rentals for events, reception and business meetings covering the operating and maintenance costs.

The Railroad Depot project was widely protested from its pre-2000 inception through the 2008 groundbreaking — and onward past its 2010 completion. Per the Amentum model, the Depot costs repeatedly overran the original projections. As one local resident wrote in a July 17, 2007 letter to the Aiken Standard:

“The Aiken Corporation and Depot Committee pat each other on the back and tell each other everybody loves their plan. I disliked this project for the original $300,000; for $3 million I hate it.”1

In this same letter, the citizen commented on the latest design changes to the Railroad Depot along with the Aiken Corporation’s request for another $250k:

“On Monday, the Depot project presenter used the Washington Center and Newberry Street as references. The Washington Center project and the problems that are now glossed over were a big mess — changing designs, not enough money, incomplete business plan. How soon Council forgets. This Depot seems on track for more of the same.”1

Another local citizen, who described the Railroad Depot project as a “D.C.-style bailout,” wrote in her August 23, 2010 letter to the editor,

“Ten years after the mayor and city council told taxpayers that the railroad depot would be privately funded, they have gone back on their promise, and now the taxpayer will be on the hook to complete and maintain the newest downtown money pit.“2

And speaking of pits, the self-supporting Railroad Depot was recipient to $0.9. million in plutonium money in 2022. The money will be used in the transition to “discontinue using the existing Depot as a Visitors Center and to use it for an upscale railroad museum.” 

_____________

Why is the Aiken Corporation pushing so urgently to shoehorn Pascalis 2.0, into the heart of our historic downtown? And is it our imagination that City Council seems to be pressing harder still on the accelerator pedal this September, as if there is a hurry to get someplace before November?

After the Amentum fiasco in 2002, there were calls for an independent, 3rd party audit. This never happened. After the Railroad Depot boondoggle in 2011, there were calls to dissolve the Aiken Corporation. This never happened.

It’s 2023. We’re eight+ months into the Aiken Corporation’s latest big project which has piggybacked atop the AMDC’s (Aiken Municipal Development Commission’s) failed $9.6 million Project Pascalis. Promised deadlines came and went. The long-awaited Feasibility Study revealed little. Taxpayers who footed the $250k bill for “predevelopment” work on the SRNL office complex would like to know what they bought with that money. The public has been very vocal for months now in their rejection of putting this lab in the downtown — and in the accompanying parking garage that this office complex would likely necessitate.

Citizens have been urging, ever since the SRNL project was announced, that properties outside the historic downtown core be considered. The old Aiken County Hospital property, whose buyer is clearly amenable to developing the SRNL office building on that property, has been perhaps the most favored site, followed by the various empty office buildings on the southside.

During a September 25, 2023 morning meeting, the Aiken Corporation Board described their consideration of the Hospital property as an act of “appeasing” and of going “above and beyond” in assessing it. Public participation in the upcoming City Council meeting was equated with “a circus.” There it is again — that disregard for public input.

It would appear that little has changed since 2002 and 2010.

This might be a good time to revisit the November 9, 2011 guest editorial in the Aiken Standard, written by then-Councilman Dick Dewar, who called into question the Aiken Corporation’s “financial and management acumen” in the wake of these projects.

On the Washington [Amentum] building, he described the Aiken Corporation’s latest request to change the terms of their $3.4 million loan — the third such request. On the Railroad Depot, he wrote:

“Without city Council approval, the Aiken corporation expanded the scope of the depot project and in the process spent over $2 million and incurred debt of over $800,000.”3

He also wrote,:

“In summary, the Aiken Corporation has repeatedly initiated projects for small amounts, or to be funded privately, but has an expanded the size incurring debt and responsibilities they cannot support. They then appeal to the City Council to use taxpayer dollars to meet these responsibilities. Given the history of financial and management problems with the Aiken corporation, I think the city Council needs to restrict their ability to initiate projects without adequate funding.”3

Laying the responsibility onto City Council to impose stringent costs controls on the Aiken Corporation, he finished with this:

“If City Council cannot get the Aiken Corporation under control, it should be dissolved.”3

This isn’t about disliking the individuals on the Aiken Corporation Board. This isn’t about disliking the Railroad Depot, the Amenteum Center, or the Savannah River Site. It’s about, among other things, returning the control over the decisions that affect the City to the people.

__________________


1. Stoker, Jenne, “Depot Project a Boondoggle?” Aiken Standard, July 17, 2007.
2. Pate, Kathy, “Depot Project a D.C.-style Bailout,” Aiken Standard, August 23, 2010.
3. Dewar, Dick, “Aiken Corp. Needs to be More Accountable,” Aiken Standard, November 9, 2011.

More on the Aiken Corporation: https://aikenchronicles.com/2023/07/13/news-release-aiken-corporation-issued-notice-of-violation/

Aiken County, City Government, Letters

Trash Can, Please?

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by Jerry Lang of Clean Up Aiken!

September 21, 2023

Clean Up Aiken! is a grassroots group that began organizing cleanup campaigns and finding other solutions to our county’s litter problem in early 2021, and became a not for profit, 501(c)(3) business just one year later. We have been recognized for our efforts by the Aiken County Council and the county’s Keep Aiken County Beautiful campaign. Our Facebook group has 1,300 members and growing.  

Clean Up Aiken! presented an ongoing problem and offered one solution to Aiken City Council on February 13, 2023.  Out of 100 restaurants we surveyed in the City of Aiken that have take-out service,  only 33% of them had an outside trash receptacle. Now this may not seem like a big deal or a real problem, but we have picked up at least 2,008 bags of trash since 2021, and a large part of what we pick up are restaurant/fast food containers, cups, bags and so on.

Clean Up Aiken! learned that 2/3rds of restaurants with take-out service do not have an outdoor trash receptacle.


The opportunity and solution presented to the city council was very simple:  require all restaurants to have a “minimum” of one outside garbage receptacle on their property/patio and in a place so their customers don’t have to go back inside to dispose of their trash. All too often customers who use the drive-thru, or do carry-out,  eat in their vehicles and then toss their litter out the window because there isn’t a convenient disposal option.  It’s also amazing how many of our restaurants with outdoor patio space don’t have a disposal option outside, which forces responsible customers to go back inside to find a garbage can.

Since February 13th, I have sent three follow-up letters/emails to our Aiken City Manager. I also spoke a second time to City Council on September 11th, and still received no response. A few months ago, I was told this issue and our proposed solution was sent to Planning,  but we have had no follow up from this department either.

We have offered to work with the city on helping to write a simple ordinance, or work with them to give the Aiken restaurants a solution to help keep our roadways cleaner. Perhaps this “ask” of each restaurant could be part of their business license? 

Clean Up Aiken! is ready, willing and able to assist in finding solutions that will help to keep our roads and ditches cleaner.  While South Carolina is known as the state with the most litter, we want to make Aiken the exception, and would like to see participation by the city in helping us achieve many small solutions that can solve a larger problem.

Jerry Lang spoke to Aiken City Council at the 39:00 mark of the September 11, 2023, Aiken City Council meeting. 

The meeting minutes for his speech on February 13, 2023 read: 



Editorials, Pascalis 2023 - SRNL Lab, September 2023

Editorial: Project Pascalis 2.0 – The Bomb Plant Lab Reveal …Bombs

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By Kelly Cornelius
September 19, 2023

Last Thursday, and five months behind schedule, the Aiken Corporation finally released the results of a feasibility study which was funded by a $250K no-bid contract awarded by the City of Aiken to the Aiken Corporation.

This need to do a feasibility study arose in January 2023 after the announcement of the partnership of the City of Aiken with Savannah River National Lab (SRNL) to put a workforce development center on many of the failed Project Pascalis properties.

The long-awaited big reveal in this dog and pony show sadly lacked the dogs, the ponies, and even the actual lab. Six months after dedicating a quarter-million dollars to the Aiken Corporation’s pre-development contract all there is to show for it so far is a study that lacked pertinent data, lacked any mention of SRNL, and only led to further questions about the project, not the least of which were, “What is the Aiken Corporation?” and “What exactly do they do?” 

In the simplest terms, the Aiken Corporation is the development arm of the City of Aiken, a 501(c)3 organization “organized in 1995 exclusively for charitable purposes.” There are currently no elected officials on the Aiken Corporation’s board, giving this group of unappointed, private-sector individuals immense power over taxpayer-funded assets. 

From Pascalis 1.0 to Pascalis 2.0: A Brief History on the Would-Be SRNL Office Project

Details of Project Pascalis were rolled out to the public in March 2022, and by May had triggered lawsuits, ethics complaints, a citizens’ petition campaign, and a Pigs of Pigscalis gallery of political cartoons — all in an effort to stop this project which had already squandered $9.6 million taxpayer dollars and planned to demolish half a downtown block. The wildly unpopular Project Pascalis, whose time of death was officially called in September 2022, seemed to gain zombie powers as it was quickly but secretly resurrected into Pascalis 2.0 in the form of a poorly defined office complex for Savannah River National Laboratory.

Pascalis 1.0 also likely contributed to the August 2023 ousting of the incumbent Mayor Rick Osbon who had vigorously supported the project. Pascalis 1.0 was the brainchild of the Aiken Municipal Development Corporation (AMDC), which eventually suffered a similar fate as Project Pascalis, being officially dissolved in May of this year but not before Public Trust was destroyed.

After the seeming death/cancellation of Pascalis in late September 2022, the citizens of Aiken breathed a collective sigh of relief. Little did they know, but Aiken City officials had wasted no time in attending secret meetings and plotting the Pascalis 2.0 — the Bomb Plant Lab offices — on many of the same $9.6 million worth of taxpayer-owned Pascalis properties. As happened with Pascalis 1.0, there were no public meetings, just more secrecy in advance of the eventual rollout to the public. 

The Big Rollout

The big announcement was made on January 23, 2023 in the Mayor’s State of the City address. From the “zero lessons learned department,” the City announced its partnership with SRNL (Savannah River Nuclear Laboratory) to build the lab on many of the now failed Project Pascalis properties— despite the fact the properties were still owned by an embattled AMDC that lacked even a quorum to vote. Citizens would later learn that the Aiken Corporation had secretly contracted McMillan, Pazdan, Smith for this project way back in Dec of 2022, again, despite the fact that the properties were AMDC-owned at the time.

On February 6, 2023 citizens were invited to a “listening session” wherein they were introduced to KJ Jacobs from McMillan, Pazdan Smith, who announced the intention, complete with an April deadline, to do a feasibility study on the SRNL project.

On March 13th the City Council, ok, four members of the city council because three of them recused, voted to approve the 250K contract with the Aiken Corp for this work. According to the minutes

The Study’s Big Reveal

Six months into the $250k contract, one might have expected details, preliminary renderings, and answers to questions. Instead, we received 21 pages of vague assessments, lack of detail and generic blue boxes or massings for buildings. The report is actually only 14 pages of information as 7 of those pages were cover sheets.

To those of us concerned with a government takeover of the downtown, the attention to detail was underwhelming. Citizens who attended the meeting reported that no actual questions were answered. The long-awaited and long overdue results of that taxpayer-funded study came to a reveal that, well, bombed. It seems that the Aiken Corporation didn’t even bother to put lipstick on this nuclear pig.

The existing view of the proposed SRNL building, as seen from the porch of Casa Bella Italian Restaurant on Chesterfield Street. (Photo courtesy of Lee Doran Thornton).

The view of this same Chesterfield Street site as it would appear with the proposed, three-story, 36,000 sq. ft. building.

What Now?

It seems as if this bad idea went from being named Project Pascalis pushed by the AMDC to the SRNL project being pushed by the Aiken Corporation. The organizational names have changed, but the lack of transparency, the thoughtless spending, and the lack of accountability remain the same.

There are currently no elected officials on the Aiken’s Corporation board, giving this group of unappointed private-sector individuals immense power over taxpayer-funded assets. The track record with the Railroad Depot project and the Amentum building — both of which were plagued with expensive cost overruns and lack of communication and accountability — has never really been addressed, nor the questions answered.

Today, the questions continue. For instance, is SRNL even a consideration at this point? This controversial project, initially billed as “the community face of the laboratory,” was met with significant disapproval from the community after its January 23 announcement. By July — as evidenced by SRNL’s statement, triggered by this Fox 54 interview — SRNL showed a certain distance and lack of commitment to the process.

Is SRNL still a factor in this project?

Also, how does the non-profit Aiken Corporation manage the large rent it hauls from its prized Amentum building? Too, we have to ask, was the DRB asleep at the wheel when they approved that building? Is the Aiken Corporation able to do business in light of it’s recent violation for failing to file a key financial report?

In the bigger picture, why can’t a city of roughly 32,000 residents be managed efficiently by elected officials rather than cooked-up entities like the now-defunct Aiken Municipal Development Corporation (AMDC) or the Aiken Corporation? My attendance at an Aiken Corporation meeting and my ongoing research leave me feeling that this is a form of shadow government. There is zero accountability to taxpayers and no avenue for public comment at their meetings.

For a City that can’t even manage to provide clean water to its residents, this latest twist in the Pascalis plot that is being pushed from a lame-duck agenda can only promise, if approved, to drain and squander yet more millions from the taxpayers’ pockets.  As revealed in the article, Project Labscalis Annual Operating Costs, the funding of the lab doesn’t stop at the $9.6 million overpayment for the properties, nor the $250K cost for for a bombed feasibility study. There would be a yearly baked-in subsidy that city residents would have to swallow, even as the water out of their faucets isn’t fit to sip.

Laws & Bylaws, Pascalis 2023 - SRNL Lab, Project Pascalis 2022

Moot or Not Moot

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Second Judicial Circuit to hear City of Aiken argument seeking dismissal of the Project Pascalis lawsuit.

by Don Moniak

September 19, 2023

On July 5, 2022, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of nine plaintiffs seeking to stop the $100 million plus downtown demolition and redevelopment effort known as Project Pascalis. The ninety-six page filing alleged dozens of violations of State of South Carolina laws governing community development, local government comprehensive planning, ethics and conduct of public officials, and freedom of information; as well as the City of Aiken’s zoning ordinance.

The Blake et al vs. City of Aiken et al complaint named as defendants the Pascalis project developer, the City of Aiken attorney, and three City of Aiken institutions and its individual members: Aiken City Council, the Design Review Board (DRB), and the Aiken Municipal Development Commission (AMDC).

As reported in Cancelled, Stopped…., at one time there were fourteen lawyers from eight different firms representing twenty-eight different defendants. Eventually, attorneys from both sides agreed to remove individual city officials from the case, and move forward with only the City of Aiken, AMDC, DRB, and City Attorney as defendants.

After a year of filings, including defendants’ answers to the complaint, numerous motions to dismiss and shield officials from discovery, requests for more specificity, and two amended complaints by Plaintiffs, the City of Aiken filed a Motion for Summary Judgement on Mootness Grounds on July 21, 2023.

That motion will be heard today, September 19, 2023, by the Second Judicial Circuit Court of South Carolina. The hearing, to be held at 2 p.m. in the Aiken County Courthouse, Courtroom 5, is open for public viewing.


The City’s motion seeks to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint on the basis that “all of the issues raised by the Plaintiffs are now moot and that there is simply no longer a justiciable controversy for this Court to decide.” The city’s attorneys argue that since “Project Pascalis is no more,” and the AMDC was dissolved, no issues remain for the court to resolve; and it is not the court’s role to resolve “academic questions” submitted by the Plaintiffs.

As reported in A Continuation of Project Pascalis, on September 15th Plaintiff Luis Rinaldini submitted an affidavit arguing that two ongoing projects on the Pascalis properties now owned by the City of aiken “are simply a continuation of Project Pascalis.”

On September 18th, a Plaintiffs Memorandum in Opposition to City of Aiken’s Motion for Summary Judgement was submitted, which states:

“If the sole object of this lawsuit were to stop Project Pascalis, there might be some merit to the Defendant’s argument. The relief sought by the Plaintiffs, however, is a declaration that the actions of the city were unlawful and wrong…Despite the failure of the project, the City has not conceded that it did anything wrong or violated any provision of state or local law…”