Beaufort City Council candidate Q&A: Mike McFee

Name: Mike McFee

Age: 58

Office: Beaufort City Council

Challengers (two open seats): Nan Brown Sutton, David Taub

Question: Why do you think young families are leaving Beaufort —the city lost 25 percent of residents age 20 to 44 from 2000 to 2014 —and how specifically might you work to attract and retain young people to the city while in office?

Answer: It's the availability of well-paying jobs, decent-paying jobs — opportunities are less here. Digital is a great opportunity. It could be based here and still operate in the virtual environment. It gives the opportunity to have better well-paying jobs as compared to going to more urban areas in the state or outside the state to get viable jobs. That I think is one of the more important things, some of what we’re doing with the Beaufort Digital Corridor and Don Ryan (Center for Innovation). We have an opportunity of growing that as well as our collaboration with TWEAC (Transitional Workforce Education Assistance Collaborative), keeping some of our transitional military with skills in our marketplace and finding jobs. They’re not all going to be in the city, obviously but they contribute to the economy of the general region, and that’s a healthy attribute from the standpoint of the city.

Q: Beaufort has multiple economic development initiatives/incubators now —The Beaufort Digital Corridor, Beaufort Black Chamber of Commerce and a new partnership with the Don Ryan Center for Innovation. In a city as small as Beaufort, are three incubators sustainable? And how would you help ensure they all work?

A: There should be partnerships. The Black Chamber has never approached the city about doing anything in partnership with reference to their incubator. I would welcome the conversation as to what they could do. I feel like in the three or four years we’ve been talking about econ diversity it would have been an appropriate position for the Black Chamber to say we want to do this or we want to do that. I don't know that it’s really the city's responsibility to approach them on doing a partnership, because we don’t know what avenues they have available to them or grant programs available. We know what we have available to us. We’ve been trying for many years to push that. I don't think our agenda is a secret from the standpoint of diversity of economic development. I certainly would welcome the Black Chamber.

The Don Ryan Center for Innovation in Bluffton had the opportunity to really satellite with us on the Beaufort side. There are a number of success stories through Don Ryan that are in the local marketplace, so we feel like that's just an arm to the Don Ryan center that would be a plus to encouraging businesses that want to locate in Beaufort or want to further their business in Beaufort. Don Ryan is not going to relocate to Beaufort. They are going to stay in their Bluffton marketplace. And the Charleston Digital Corridor success ratio over the past 10 years has just been phenomenal, and we think there is enough geographic dislocation that the businesses in the southern part of the state would benefit from having that avenue accessible here (through the Beaufort Digital Corridor).

I think they are sustainable. I would welcome activity and a partnership with the Black Chamber of Commerce if they felt that was an appropriate thing, we haven’t been approached

Q: What should the city do about the downtown parking garage and improvements to Waterfront Park and Southside Park if the capital projects sales tax does not pass?

A: Specific to the parking garage, one of the reasons we have hired a consultant in doing a structured parking area was to identify what opportunities may be available to us from a longterm financing arrangement —that’s one of the strengths they have with reference to being able to provide information to us. And I think if the private parking garage is built in the downtown area it will lessen some of the strain. Either way, we’re going to move forward with the consultant to determine what our best options are with reference to more efficient parking in the downtown area. It would be great to have the 1-cent sales tax to provide for some of the renovations in Waterfront Park and the parking structure. If a private parking structure were done, I think the need for as large a parking structure we initially were talking about would not be as great. So that may give us an opportunity to leverage those additional dollars for surface parking in different areas that would help alleviate some of those parking issues.

In the last eight years and maybe as much as 10 years, I think we have been very good about looking at longterm capital improvement projects which hadn’t been looked at really seriously or kept to a strategic planning scenario. So I think we will continue with those and utilize the fund resources we have.

This story was originally published November 3, 2016 at 11:49 AM with the headline "Beaufort City Council candidate Q&A: Mike McFee."