Mayor: Arts venue must top Hilton Head's priorities for sales tax proposals

If Beaufort County voters agree to raise the sales tax in November, Hilton Head Island wants to use some of the proceeds to build a new arts venue and campus.

But specific plans for such a campus don't yet exist.

Although the island has long grappled with the question of the maintenance needs at the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina and artists' calls for another venue, there is no consensus about what a new campus would look like, where it should be built, who would own it, which groups would use it or even a remote estimate about what it could cost.

That shouldn't stop the town from trying to seize an opportunity to finally put funding behind an eventual effort -- whatever that might ultimately look like, said Mayor David Bennett, who has argued a new facility for the arts should be among the town's top priorities.

"Is it too early in the planning stages? Maybe. Are there other opportunities to deploy the potential capital associated with this referendum? Surely," he said. "But I think a proposal to develop an arts and cultural campus with Lowcountry flair and style done in such a way as to be iconoic -- like the Harbour Town Lighthouse is iconic -- is surely worthy."

Town Council members enthusiastically agree. They contend such a campus would transform the island's arts and cultural heritage community and that would cause ripple effects for tourism and tax dollars across Beaufort County.

"It's a game changer," said Town Councilwoman Kim Likins. "If we take this step, and it's a bold one, it really will help our community ... It just has all of the right ingredients of something great for our community and for Hilton Head to prosper in the future as it has in the past."

Town leaders plan to include the idea in their package for the county's Capital Project Sales Tax Commission, which was formed in October to create a referendum to raise the county sales tax by 1 percent to pay for major infrastructure and building projects across the county. The referendum is expected to raise $120 million over four years and would require voter approval this November.

The commission is soliciting project ideas for the referendum from each of the municipalities, which are due at the beginning of next month.

In addition to an arts campus, town leaders will submit to the commission requests for a yet-unspecified amount of funding for paving dirt roads on the island and an estimated $15 million needed to begin engineering studies on the expansion and replacement of the bridges to Hilton Head.

About $4 million in needed repairs to the existing Arts Center of Coastal Carolina and $15 million in road improvements along U.S. 278 between Squire Pope and Jenkins Island did not make the town's list.

Meeting the deadlines of the sales tax commission will put tremendous pressure on Bennett's plan to add an arts venue to the expected referendum question.

The commission has asked that presentations include documentation to outline full project descriptions and estimated costs for engineering, construction and eventual operation and maintenance of any facility.

None of that exists for an arts campus proposal today, but Bennett believes the town can get started immediately.

"In my view, we're simply creating a placeholder associated with these funds for that project," he said Tuesday. "The ultimate vetting of the project itself remains to be done."

That plan will be created in the coming months, Bennett hopes, by a new a committee of town leaders, arts community leaders and a professional planner.

They will build off the work of the town's recently completed Arts and Cultural Strategic Planning Committee, which studied the wants and needs of dozens of local arts and cultural groups over the past year.

That committee specifically did not address the issue of a venue, but it has laid the groundwork to decide what a new facility could include -- from performing arts space to exhibit space to new group partnerships, said Jane Joseph, who led the committee.

Most importantly, it has established that no more studying is needed, only action, she said Tuesday. Studies range as far as back a 10-year-old chamber of commerce committee to the $40 to $55 million performing arts campus plan floated to the town by Community Vision of Hilton Head in 2014, she said.

"It's not taking what we have now and moving it into new space. It's imaging what the future could be," Joseph said. "We have to think big. We cannot think little."

The idea is only "a work in progress" and will still be vetted publicly by town leaders, but the town's chance to get its foot in the door of the sales tax commission's process is too good to pass up, Bennett said.

"We have to move forward. We've been talking about it for how long," Town Councilman Bill Harkins said. "Everybody has to know there's something in it for them because this is going to be such a big project. I think the arts is a home run and we've got to get going on that."

Follow reporter Zach Murdock at twitter.com/IPBG_Zach and at facebook.com/IPBGZach.

Related content:

• School district may ask voters for nearly $480 million, Nov. 16, 2015
• New sales-tax referendum taking shape for Beaufort County's 2016 ballot, July 29, 2015
• Beaufort County Council quashes capital project sales tax, June 23, 2014
• Hilton Head group proposes 6,500-seat concert hall to revitalize arts, May 18, 2014

This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 7:47 PM with the headline "Mayor: Arts venue must top Hilton Head's priorities for sales tax proposals."