COASTAL OBSERVER

Planning for the redevelopment of the former port of Georgetown was due to get underway this week, nearly three years after Georgetown County took ownership of the 46 acres on the Sampit River.

“A huge component of this effort is going to be the public engagement with the residents from Georgetown County and, obviously, Georgetown itself,” said Lee Gastley, the managing principal at SeamonWhiteside in Mount Pleasant.

The planning, engineering and design firm is the lead consultant for the port project, which includes seven other companies with specialized skills.

County Council approved the selection of the firm in April. The contract was signed earlier this month, at a cost not to exceed $250,000.

“It’s obviously a complicated project and it has a lot of different areas that need to be addressed during the development of the plan,” Gastley said. “We put together what we think is an extremely strong and talented group of consultants with expertise that we’re going to need in order to deliver a first-class master plan to Georgetown County.”

The county wants to redevelop the port for a mix of uses, and the plan will identify those and how the redevelopment will be carried out.

Since the county acquired the property, the adjacent steel mill and paper mill have both closed and are now under contract for redevelopment through a New Jersey-based firm River Development Equities.

“We are definitely going to communicate and collaborate with our neighbors,” Gastley said. “We can’t develop this in a bubble. It has to relate to what’s going on around it.”

A key goal of the county is that whatever is built at the port fits in with the Georgetown waterfront across the harbor. That’s something that River Development Equities said it wants to do when it announced it would acquire the International Paper mill site.

“The goal is not to come in there and develop St. Augustine or even Charleston. It’s to develop something that’s appropriate to Georgetown and reflects its architecture and its history and values,” Gastley said. “I don’t think you’re going to see something that’s ultra-contemporary and modern next to something that looks like it’s been in Georgetown for 150 years.”

While the redevelopment will reflect the community’s aspirations, it will also be based on market realities. Bridge Commercial, a Charleston real estate firm, will do the market analysis to help create “a real estate plan that we believe is realistic and actionable and can be taken to market,” Gastley said.

The county has talked about finding the highest and best use for the property, but Gastley said that is likely to be subject to interpretation. 

“Trying to gain good-paying jobs is an important goal of this effort, so it’s going to be an interesting balancing act of the mixed use, appropriate uses,” he said. “It’s kind of one of those projects that’s why I got into architecture years ago.”

Gastley, who will serve as the project manager, earned a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Georgetown and was the first outside hire at what is now SeamonWhiteside.

“Landscape architects through their training do tend to be a little more holistic in their mindset and see the bigger picture and how pictures come together,” he said.

Gastley was due to meet last week with the county’s economic development director, Kelly Robertson-Slagle, to kickoff the project. The first public meeting could be held in a month or two, he said.

The final plan could be delivered around March next year. It will be one that the county can act on, Gastley said.

“The last thing we want to do is develop a plan that’s beautiful looking, but sits on somebody’s wall or shelf for three, four, five years and nothing really happens,” he said.