Granite Countertops in Jedburg, SC

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - ST. GEORGE, S.C. (WCSC) - Two massive warehouses will soon be coming to Dorchester County after the council voted to go into an agreement with an industrial developer.

The council unanimously approved an agreement with developer Dalfen Industrial that will see the warehouses, totaling over half a million square feet, to be built near Summerville.

The 75-acre complex is located off Deming Way near Hodge Road, which is less than a mile from the Dorchester County Jail. The developer will spend just under $49 million dollars to build the complex, but it’s unclear how many jobs will be created.

John Truluck, the county’s director of economic development, says the development will only benefit county residents.

“It could be that they are able to get a job there,” Truluck said. “They may be driving 20 or 30 miles to work, and they may be able to find a job much closer to them, which even for the same pay would be a raise because they’re not paying for gas money, and that’s time they’re not having to spend on the roads.”

On their website, Dalfen Industrial said the site will be home to two distribution centers, and that some of their tenants include giants like Amazon, U-P-S and FedEx.

Truluck says the county bringing in development like this can help combat inflation, leaving taxes low for county residents.

“The government can raise more money by imposing higher taxes on the people that are already here, or they can bring in new businesses that pay those additional taxes, so they’ll get more services for the same money, in essence,” Truluck said.

Tommy Feagin has lived in Dorchester County since the 1960s.

He hopes the money coming in from these developments will help pay for more infrastructure projects in the future.

“We need a lot more infrastructure because things are stopped up terribly,” he said. “We have several, several, several bottlenecks. Dorchester Road, you can’t get up and down. I-26, you can’t get in and out of Charleston.”

County officials said they expect the two warehouses to be completed in about a year.

What ultimately goes in those warehouses depends on who the developer leases the buildings to.

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A butcher shop is opening near Summerville while a new coffee shop is in the works in Goose Creek and a new fast-food restaurant is planned near Jedburg.

Business partners Devin Kelly and Hunter Bishop, a former Stingrays hockey player, plan to open New York Butcher Shoppe at 502 Nexton Square Drive in Nexton Square off U.S. Highway 17A by late August.

The two Charleston residents bought the franchise last October and purchased development rights southward to Savannah. They plan to explore options for new venues in the Beaufort/Hilton Head area as well as Savannah at a future date.

In addition to select cuts of beef, chicken, pork, veal and lamb, the shop will offer prepared dishes along with a selection of wines and specialty items such as cheeses, exotic sausages and international groceries.

"We will also have something that the other restaurants don't offer," said Kelly, a former Blackbaud Inc. employee. "We will have an in-house smoker, and we will offer some cooked meats as well."

The shop will be open 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

The New York Butcher Shoppe chain has eight locations in South Carolina, including three in its home base of Greenville. Others are on Daniel Island and the Isle of Palms and in Mount Pleasant, Columbia and Indian Land near Charlotte.

The Mount Pleasant shop is the original location, Kelly said.

Seven others are located in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

The butcher shop will be the 15th food-and-beverage venue to open in and around Nexton Square. Other restaurants in the shopping center include Halls Chophouse, Taco Boy and D'Allesandro's Pizza.

New perk

A new coffee shop is under development in Goose Creek.

Hurricane Coffee Co. plans to open at 2424 N. Main St. on U.S. Highway 17A near the developing Carnes Crossroads community, according to owner Mistina Chambers.

The 348-square-foot café will be a double drive-thru coffee stand serving gourmet coffee drinks and fresh-baked and locally sourced pastries and treats.

Chambers said she signed a 10-year lease on the property and plans to open in October.

On the way

A new fast-food restaurant is in the works for a developing Interstate 26 interchange in Berkeley County.

Jake Rasor of Newberry Restaurant Group Inc. of Greenville recently applied for a permit to build a 2,661-square-foot Arby's restaurant on Jedburg Road at Strathmore Drive, a frontage road on the northern side of the interstate.

The parcel is between the westbound I-26 onramp and a Spinx gas station and convenience store. It will be the restaurant group's first Arby's in the Lowcountry.

Rasor operates 10 Arby's restaurants in the Midlands and Upstate.

From Broad to King

A longtime downtown Charleston gift, linen and lingerie shop opened Aug. 2 in a new location.

The Boutique, formerly at 141 Broad St., moved to 302 King St. in the space recently occupied by a skincare shop that closed in 2020.

The Boutique, operating in Charleston for more than 60 years, was at Broad and Logan streets since late 2017 and at Broad and Church streets for 20 years before that.

The shop dates back to the mid-1950s when Bessie Braid, mother of novelist Alexandra Ripley, launched it. It has changed hands several times since then.

The shop, owned by Lois Daughtridge, is now on the same block as several other longtime retailers, including Croghan’s Jewel Box and M. Dumas & Sons clothing store. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

DORCHESTER COUNTY, S.C. (WCBD) – Some residents in the Summerville area are raising concerns about a homeless shelter that will soon be built near their homes.

The property which could be home to the new shelter is located near the corner of Beverly Drive and Miles Jamison Road. While some are unhappy with the plan, others say it’s a crucial need for many who are struggling in the community.

“Our whole mission is we engage with individuals who are homeless, who are seeking financial stability to acquire permanent housing,” explained Ginny Vicini, executive director of Dorchester County Community Outreach.

Dorchester County Community Outreach currently runs two homes on Central Avenue. “Hope’s House,” which eight women can use at a time, and “Home of Hope,” which 16 men can use at a time.

They are working to build facilities to help more people in need.

“We found a piece of property at Miles Jamison. It was ideally suited. It was zoned properly, and it was the size lot that we needed,” said Vicini.

They purchased the land in October of last year and plan to spend about $3 million building a 16-person men’s home, a 16-person women’s home, and a multipurpose building.

But the group has had some pushback from people who live in the community. They said a homeless shelter in a largely residential area is not a good idea – there is no public transportation and very few public services.

“We hope that we have been as responsive; I know that we’ve been as responsible as we could be,” Vincini said.

The group met with neighborhoods and are attempting to be annexed into the Town of Summerville to have access to Summerville services.

The property is zoned for use as a shelter whether it is annexed or not. Summerville Town Council is expected to take up the annexation on March 9^th.

So far, 843 people have signed an online petition against the shelter opening.

People who live near the property didn’t want to talk on camera Tuesday. They said they were not told about the property use before it was purchased. Several people said they are tired of this, and they don’t believe the outcome is going to change either way.

Vicini says they do background checks on their residents. “Our criteria for coming into our program — someone who is capable of managing your day-to-day life. Going to work, maintaining the property. We have a curfew at 8 o’clock at night. We have staffing 24/7.”

After hearing the public’s concerns about a proposed warming or cooling shelter at the site, they have decided not to provide that service.

Officials said they hope to have the men’s shelter finished later this year and the women’s shelter would be opening sometime in 2024.

D.R. Horton is asking federal regulators to approve filling 10.7 acres of wetlands and excavating 1.6 acres for road crossings and infrastructure on an 836-acre tract at Drop Off Drive and Sheep Island Road near Nexton Parkway interchange.

Real Estate

The residential subdivision would sit on 311 acres of higher ground "while avoiding and minimizing wetland impacts to the greatest extent practicable," according to the environmental permit application.

To offset disturbance of the wetlands, the Texas-based homebuilder plans to put restrictive covenants on 542 acres, including 504 acres of wetlands and a 25-foot buffer that encompasses 38 acres of high ground.

D.R. Horton is proposing that the preservation would qualify the builder for a 25 percent reduction in required mitigation credits, and it would buy about 106 wetland credits through a Palmetto State mitigation bank with a site in Berkeley County.

The homebuilder's move comes after Miami-based land-banking firm HIC Land LLC paid $4 million earlier this year for a 122-acre parcel in the same nearly 1,000-acre tract that Summerville annexed in 2020.

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The sold site extends from Drop Off Drive near I-26 to Sheep Island Road, near the rear portion of the age-restricted 55-plus Del Webb Nexton neighborhood.

The first 177 homes were approved last year near Linda Way for the initial two phases of residential development, according to Summerville planning director Jessi Shuler.

The nearly 1,000-acre parcel, including the sold tract, has been approved as a planned-unit development with about 700 housing units.

HIC has been shepherding the land through the permitting process, with D.R. Horton as the homebuilder for the tract.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

The large swath annexed by Summerville extends from I-26 to Wildgame Road, west of the 5,000-acre Nexton development.

It requires time, patience and purpose.

The S.C. State Ports Authority's $105 million acquisition of the former WestRock paper mill along the Cooper River in North Charleston is a textbook example. A decade or more will likely pass before the 280-acre waterfront property will begin its next life as a sizable shipping terminal.

"It's going to take a lot of preparation before that site could ever be utilized," SPA chief executive Barbara Melvin told lawmakers at a hearing in Columbia last week.

The sale of the mill with its 5,000 feet of future berth space along the Cooper River was finalized April 26, according to real estate documents recorded last week with the Charleston County Register of Deeds.

As part of the deal, WestRock Co. included a swath of undeveloped land off Jedburg Road near Summerville.

The Atlanta-based packaging company and successor to the old Westvaco Corp. announced a year ago it would shut down the 500-worker papermaking plant by late summer after 86 years, citing a "combination of high operating costs and the need for significant capital investment."

WestRock also stated that it was preparing the property for sale.

The SPA was an eager buyer for an obvious reason. The manufacturing site off Virginia Avenue near I-526 will enable it to more than double the size of its North Charleston Terminal right next door.

"It's very exciting for us when we're able to integrate that property into an existing facility," Melvin said.

Just not anytime soon.

The conversion from paper mill to port isn't projected to be needed or completed until the 2030s or possibly the 2040s, Melvin projected.

The acquisition is one piece in a complicated and expensive transportation puzzle that requires several other big-ticket projects to fall into place. All are tied to the emergence of supersized container vessels that the SPA and many other port operators are scrambling to accommodate to stay competitive.

Among the first items on the to-do list is the completion of the SPA's 3-year-old deepwater Leatherman Terminal a few miles away on the former Navy base.

Another is the proposed replacement of the nearby Don Holt Bridge with a higher span that will allow the mega-vessels to safely pass under I-526.

Also, the navigation channel in that section of the Cooper will need to be deepened by several feet.

For those reasons, Melvin said, the WestRock property “is not the next increment of capacity for us."

"We will build out the Leatherman Terminal before we move to that area because to utilize fully the paper mill site, along with any kind of modernization to our North Charleston facility …. we need to be able to handle the biggest ships there," she said.

Melvin and her predecessors at the SPA have stressed that planning how and where the port adds new berths and wharf space is a multigenerational process. it often requires early upfront investments and involves lengthy time horizons that can stretch decades into the future.

“Just permitting, financing, planning … all of that takes a lot of time," she said.

While the WestRock closure was regrettable based on the job losses, it also was a fortuitous once-in-a-lifetime chance for the port to secure and recycle an environmentally challenging site that will provide enough expansion space until at least mid-century, based on current projections.

“This is the future," Melvin told lawmakers, who are expected to provide $55 million in state funds to close the deal. "Port activity really takes 20, 30, 40 years sometimes to plan. And if we had not grabbed this opportunity with the WestRock property, in 20 years, whoever is sitting in this seat should have to answer the question, 'Who was asleep at the switch?' And that would have been me.”

The North Charleston Terminal is now the smallest of the SPA's three box-ship hubs, with five cranes that can move up to 500,000 containers annually.

Once the mill property is added to the mix, it'll be able to handle 10 times as much cargo, making it, by far, the largest.

“I’m extremely excited to open this new store in the community where I grew up,” said Mark Rocheleau, the store manager of the new Jedburg Food Lion and Summerville High School graduate, who has been a Food Lion associate for 33 years. “I’m proud to welcome my neighbors and family to shop with us and experience our expansive assortment and variety throughout our store. I look forward to seeing new faces, welcoming old friends and serving my community at our new location.”

Customers can choose from an extensive product assortment, including in-store fresh-cut fruit and vegetables, “grab-and-go” meal options to help make dinner easier, and a wide variety of catering selections. This new store also offers the Food Lion To-Go service, which enables customers to order their favorite items for convenient pickup at the same everyday low prices they can expect from Food Lion.

The store also offers a variety of Food Lion’s Nature’s Promise-brand beef, pork, poultry, milk, eggs, bottled water, cereal, coffee and other items. Nature’s Promise is Food Lion’s affordable brand of wholesome and organic products made with no artificial flavors, preservatives or synthetic colors.

Additionally, neighbors can find a wide variety of great local offerings, such as iconic sauces from Lillie’s of Charleston, great local beers from nearby Palmetto Brewing Company and delicious Italian sauces from Charleston’s-own Porzio’s, made from products grown by Lowcountry farmers and growers. A list of additional local vendors with products in the new store can be found here.

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Furthering Food Lion’s commitment to sustainability, the new store features energy-efficient LED lighting overhead and in refrigerated and freezer cases; doors on all beer, dairy and lunch meat cases; and motion sensors on all frozen food cases that dim the lights to 20 percent output when not being shopped by a customer.

Earlier this week, Rocheleau and other local Food Lion associates delivered lunch bags, snacks and surprises to staff at EMS Headquarters & Medic 1, Fire Station 10, Dorchester Habitat For Humanity and New Bethel Sounds of Praise food pantry to show appreciation for the store’s neighbors.

In another commitment to the Jedburg community, Food Lion Feeds is donating $3,000 in gift cards to New Bethel Sounds of Praise food pantry to help neighbors in need fighting hunger. The food pantry will also pickup food from the store nearly every day to distribute to neighbors in need through Food Lion Feeds’ industry-leading food rescue program.

About Food Lion

Food Lion, based in Salisbury, N.C., since 1957, has more than 1,000 stores in 10 Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states and employs more than 77,000 associates. By leveraging its longstanding heritage of low prices and convenient locations, Food Lion is working to own the easiest full shop grocery experience in the Southeast, anchored by a strong commitment to affordability, freshness, and the communities it serves. Through Food Lion Feeds, the company has donated more than 500 million meals to individuals and families since 2014, and has committed to donate 1 billion more meals by 2025. Food Lion is a company of Ahold Delhaize USA, the U.S. division of Zaandam-based Ahold Delhaize. For more information, visit www.foodlion.com or job applicants may visit www.foodlion.com/careers.