A whole bunch of money is about to swim across the Ashley River from the peninsula over the next 18 months and into various municipal parks projects.
Mayor John Tecklenburg’s administration is set to spend close to $35 million over the next year and a half in West Ashley.
And its arrival couldn’t come at a better time for Tecklenburg, who recently was handed a major defeat when City Council shot down his selection for a planning firm charged with charting West Ashley’s revitalization efforts.
“It is a lot of money,” says City of Charleston Director of Parks Jason Kronsberg, who is in charge of the projects.
Kronsberg says the funding for all the projects come from various sources, and that many of them have been a work-in-progress for several years, and that there is a different timeline for completion for all of the projects.
He said that the amounts budgeted include land acquisition, planning and engineering, and construction, where applicable. Some of the funding was the result of an 1.5-mill increase in property taxes pushed through in former Mayor Joe Riley’s final months in office.
Here’s a thumbnail of the projects headed our way:
• A new fire station in the Carolina Bay development, which is already under construction ($4.4 million).
• The Waring Senior Center at St. Francis-Roper, under construction ($9.5 million).
• A new fire station on land next to the Charleston Nine Memorial Park on Savannah Highway ($8.5 million).
• A new satellite police office for Team IV off Mary Ader Boulevard on the way to Glenn McConnell Park ($2.2 million).
• Enhancements to Ackerman Park that may include a permanent open-air multi-use structure that would support the city’s farmer’s market that was begun there this year ($500,000).
• Work on Bender Park along the Ashley in Ashleyville, to include rubble removal, historic tree care and more ($1.85 million).
• A new police forensics lab on Bees Ferry Road ($6.5 million).
• A new water-access park on Wappoo Road in the former spot of the WPAL radio station ($2 million).
Nibblers will eat up the rest of the money: median and landscape enhancements throughout West Ashley, joint effort with the Charleston Parks Conservancy to vastly improve the West Ashley Greenway and Bikeway into linear parks; new playground equipment at Lenevar Park, improvements to Randolph Park near the site of the to-be-built Stono Park Elementary.
Despite the largesse, there remains a division within West Ashley over Tecklenburg’s leadership in this part of town that was highlighted by a recent 9-4 vote by City Council to deny the mayor’s request for a half-million dollar contract to be offered to the aforementioned planning firm.
On one side is Councilman Bill Moody, who voted against the contract, miffed that the selection process didn’t directly involve the newly formed 19-member West Ashley Revitalization Commission. Moody was not comfortable with staff presenting the contract without direct commission input.
On the other side is Councilman Peter Shahid, who heads the commission and believes that it is staff’s job to deliver the best candidates for the massive project, and not rely solely on the laymen on his commission.
Moody points out that the vast majority of the $35 million in projects predated Tecklenburg and shouldn’t necessarily been seen as a feather in his cap. “But, he should be given credit for keeping them alive,” says Moody.
Shahid counters that Tecklenburg has already done what Riley couldn’t: getting a TIF, or tax incremental funding project for West Ashley passed that will fund even more improvements in this part of town for the next 20 years.
But Moody argues that the groundwork for the TIF began years before Tecklenburg took over.
Additionally, Shahid says it’s important to let the administrators do their jobs, and not micromanage projects, a paradigm that bedevils the county’s School Board.
“Charleston and West Ashley is going through different kinds of growth and growing pains,” says Shahid, whose commission met Tuesday. “The city is still growing and there are tons of demands on the city and they’re all coming from different directions. While the city is dealing with West Ashley more intensely than it has historically, all the demands are coming at the same time.”
Regardless of the division on City Council, West Ashley life is about to get a lot better.