Beaufort County Council again delays vote on proposal to grab protected land for a library
A proposal by Beaufort County to take land intended for conservation out of the Rural and Critical Lands program to build a library and ball fields will have to wait a little longer for a decision.
The County Council delayed a vote on the proposal a second time last week to give the Rural and Critical Board more time to study the proposal.
The land swap, which the county first proposed in November, involves 60 acres of land in Okatie currently protected under the Rural and Critical Lands program. In return, the county is offering land in return at Camp St. Mary’s, a former Catholic youth summer camp and waterfront property the county bought in 1999, and a parcel of land off of Bluffton Parkway that combined total 18 acres.
The county has said while the tracts in the land swap are unequal in acreage, they are equal in monetary value.
The proposal will be decided upon by the new council during the Jan 23 meeting, giving the Rural and Critical Board enough time to see the properties in person and establish whether they meet the program’s criteria for protected land — the two key factors the board said they needed to make a recommendation.
Not everyone is on board with the land swap.
Councilman Brian Flewelling perceives the swap as doing “incalculable harm” to the Rural and Critical Lands program. Flewelling voted no to postponement preferring to have killed the swap Monday night.
“This particular motion has the probable result of killing our rural and critical lands program,” the outgoing councilman said. “I really advise the next council to be very circumspect and very thoughtful in their approach to this matter.”
Logan Cunningham also opposed the vote to postpone action saying the original delay was enough time for the board to make a decision, but unlike Flewelling, would have voted in favor of the swap, he said.
“Our initial goal with that property is still being met with the land swap and we’re adding more property [to the Rural and Critical inventory],” he told the Island Packet.
The area’s need for ball fields and a library, the site’s proximity to Sun City, and the county’s inability to identify other suitable locations all were factors that lead him to support the swap.
The new council will be more likely to pass the land swap than the current incarnation, Cunningham believes.
Board needs more information
When the Rural and Critical Lands Preservation Board met Dec. 8, the county had yet to appraise the Camp St. Mary’s and Bluffton Parkway tracts to avoid investing tax payer money, Deputy County Administrator Chuck Atkinson said, even though the county staff had already presented the swap to the council nearly a month beforehand.
Despite the lack of appraisals, the county has remained confident that the properties being swapped are of equal monetary value. But without them, the board was unsure about the swap.
“We’ve been talking about these swap pieces without really knowing how they look and back up against our criteria,” said the board’s Vice-Chair Arthur Baer. “Can we justify it to the residents that these are pieces of property that we think they should invest taxpayer dollars to conserve?”
The board’s criteria addresses both monetary and conservation value, the board said, but members of the board weren’t as interested in the monetary value of the properties.
“The monetary value doesn’t necessarily coordinate with conservation,” board member Beekman Webb said. “If that property is low [in value] and it’s got a lot of other reasons why it may not be as high a value as other properties, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have more conservation value.”
Public perception was another factor the board was concerned about, fearing what the public would think about land that’s assumed to be protected being taken out of the program.
“Public perception is really important for the integrity of the program,” said Jessie White, the South Coast director for the Coastal Conservation League. “It’s the public who approves the program and agrees to fund it, so having that trust that it’s going to be operated transparently according to the principles that are outlined in the ordinance to guide the program is really important.”
Atkinson, the deputy county administrator, made clear that the Rural and Critical board was more than welcome to change the proposal as they see fit. The board ultimately decided to wait until they had more information about the properties before making changes or recommendations for the council.
