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:
- The size of the building was reduced from 45,000 sq ft to 36,000 sq ft.
- The project morphed from an SRNL workforce development building to a $20 million mixed-use spec building with no committed tenants.
- 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.