Hilton Head venue committee frustrated, calls on town for help

At least two members of a newly-formed committee — charged with studying whether a performing arts center should be build on Hilton Head Island — voiced strong concerns Thursday over what they call negative publicity.

“There are more (letters to the editor) about Honey Horn in the paper than there is about whether or not we’re going to build a performance hall,” said member and past board chairman for the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina Bob Lee at Thursday’s venue committee meeting. “We’ve got to get out in front of this, because it is killing us right now.”

Honey Horn and several other sites have been discussed by members of the community as possible locations. But no decision has been made.

The comments came toward the end of the two-hour meeting devoted primarily to presentations made from the committee’s various subgroups, or “task teams.”

The committee, charged with looking at a number of facets including cost and sustainability for a venue, was created on April 5 and is to report its findings to Town Council in December. Council members will have the final say on whether to build a venue, what it would look like and where it would go.

Both the committee’s chairwoman Cindy Creamer and town councilwoman Kim Likins have repeatedly said there are no foregone conclusions as to what, if any, a new arts and entertainment center would look like. Those questions, they say, will be taken up by the new committee, which has now met three times.

Still, the town came under fire when Mayor David Bennett and town leaders went before Beaufort County’s Capital Projects Sales Tax Commission, prior to the committee’s formation, asking for $30 million to help build a proposed performing arts campus. The campus, they said, would feature both a concert hall and outdoor amphitheater and cost as much as $65 million.

The $30 million funding request was later slashed to $6 million, and the arts campus was added to a list of projects that might be funded by countywide one-percent sales tax increase.

Committee members expressed frustration Thursday over the timing of the tax commission presentation.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been involved with something that was damned before we even get started because of certain actions that were taken before the committee (formed) ... like the sales tax referendum,” Lee said.

Without mentioning anyone specifically, members also seemed to take town leaders to task, asking why no one “from the town” had countered negative comments made by residents who are writing letters to the editor.

“Why is the silence so deafening?” said member Karen Attaway.

Creamer told the committee that Likins has been working with the town’s newly contracted public relations firm Rawle Murdy to “craft something.”

The town approved the Charleston-based firm’s scope of work described as “Arts and Cultural Public Communication Initiatives” at its April 5 council meeting.

“We’ve got to get out in front of this and let the public know that there hasn’t been a decision made,” Lee said. “The committee does exist, and we want their opinions.”

Mike Buxser, a general manager for several of the area’s radio stations, attended Thursday’s meeting and offered his thoughts during the public comment portion of the meeting.

Buxser said that he believed the area could sustain such a campus and that plenty of acts would come to the island “because they would have a contract and would get paid.”

“(But) you have to generate positive publicity,” he said several times throughout the course of his comments.

There will always be those who don’t want a performing arts campus on the island, he said.

“But you got to counter all this, or it won’t work,” he said.

This story was originally published May 19, 2016 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Hilton Head venue committee frustrated, calls on town for help."