Industrial park on the Waccamaw is a bad idea all around

Grand Strand Water & Sewer Authority (GSWSA) was recently given state approval to construct an industrial marine “commerce park” in the rural Bucksport community. The project site is located on the banks of the Waccamaw River, right next to the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. The area is surrounded by the refuge on three sides and sandwiched between the Great Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers. This is one of the most natural, beautiful places in our county, and it is an area that is already relied upon heavily by businesses like ours. GSWSA wants to totally change this area by replacing the existing small recreational marina with industrial development related to boat building and other unspecified “support” activities.

This is a risky and foolish business decision. Though this project has been in the planning phase for years, GWSWA has not found a single business interested in or committed to locating there. What’s worse is that GSWSA is wagering on this speculative bet over existing, successful businesses in the community, including ours.

Gator Bait Adventure Tours is in its fourth year of providing guided kayak tours. We’ve doubled in size every year and lately have had to turn away customers because demand for our services exceeded our supply capacity. The outdoor recreation and tourism industry is a thriving and critically important sector of Horry County’s economy. In South Carolina, outdoor recreation generates $18 billion in consumer spending; 201,000 direct South Carolina jobs; $4.7 billion in wages and salaries; and $1 billion in state and local tax revenue. Those are direct local benefits, local revenues and local jobs that cannot be outsourced abroad or replaced by a machine.

Horry County is blessed with rich natural resources. People are drawn to the remarkable features of our area, including great rivers, the Waccamaw River Blue Trail, and the Wildlife Refuge. We witness daily that people want to go out and experience the beauty and peaceful calm of those places. People are traveling and paying for that experience, and growing businesses like ours are a proven economic driver in this community. However, once Bucksport is converted to a heavy industrial park, it will devastate existing businesses like ours that use this area, and it will eliminate the significant economic gains these businesses are generating for the County.

An industrial marina at this location will undoubtedly create excessive noise pollution, which will be amplified by the river and will disrupt recreational business operations. The project is also on the bank of a tidal river system that supplies public drinking water. Contamination issues from the site will flow not just downriver but also will be pushed back and forth with the tides and into the swamp, making it hard to contain and even harder to clean up. These impacts and more will be continuous and far-reaching, even after development of the site.

So why then is Horry County willing to take this risk? Why is GSWSA adamantly pushing industrial development at the expense of an existing, profitable sector of the local economy? If the objective is to bring in business, then they should embrace the flourishing outdoor recreation and tourism businesses that already exist and continue to bring economic stimulus to the area. At a minimum, the county could explore any number of other low impact industries that could go into this site instead.

We are not opposed to growth. Indeed, we’re business owners that benefit directly from increased tourism and commerce in the area. But good growth does not come from bad decision-making. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this situation before with the county making risky business decisions and not investing in growth in the right way. Just look at the blighted eyesore off U.S. 501 that was touted as Hard Rock Park. Despite the millions of taxpayer dollars the county spent in developing that site and professing the allure of economic potentials, the park dried up in no time because the plan was speculative and ill-suited.

The proposed industrial marina at Bucksport is characteristic of the same bad business model that we’ve seen fail time and again. GSWSA should learn from past mistakes and instead invest wisely in economic opportunities with demonstrable and reliable returns, which means the outdoor recreation and tourism sector.

The writers are co-owners of Gator Bait Adventure Tours and live in Horry County.

This story was originally published December 10, 2016 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Industrial park on the Waccamaw is a bad idea all around."