By Dan McCue

ORANGEBURG -- Baseball fields, public parks, nature trails and lush vegetation might not be the first things one typically thinks of when imagining a vast warehouse and distribution-based commerce park.

But those are among the highlights of the preliminary master plan created by Jafza International for the 1,300 acres it owns in Orangeburg County.

“We’re going for a campus feel and employing a strategy we hope benefits the public as much as it benefits our company and our clients,” said Chuck Heath, the company’s senior vice president and managing director.

The details of the plan—details Heath said likely will be revised at least a dozen times before ground is actually broken for the project in 12 to 18 months—were contained in a simple black binder he carried with him.

“This is what we envision, based on a preliminary evaluation by our traffic and environmental consultants,” he said.
Heath and other representatives of Jafza International have converged on South Carolina this week to start hammering out several aspects of the project. In addition to continuing conversations with public officials over incentives and infrastructure, the company also is actively talking with engineering firms and consultants that will assist in taking the project to the next step.

“I don’t know if we’ll ultimately find one local firm or utilize a number of them, but the one thing we didn’t want to do at the outset was bring in a big international firm that has projects going all over the world,” Heath said. “We want a very local focus to make sure that this project is done right not only from our perspective but also from that of South Carolina.”

For the first phase of the environmental analysis of the site, Jafza International did keep the work somewhat in the family, hiring Applied Technology and Management of Charleston, a company that’s partially owned by the government of Dubai through Island Global Yachts, in which it holds a large equity stake.

ATM helped formulate the environmental mitigation plan for the Port of Charleston’s Navy Base terminal project and has also done environmental mitigation work for the Port of Savannah.

At the Jafza site, ATM looked at wetlands on the property and, together with Jafza officials, determined that the best approach would be to leave the wetlands as is and install wooden bridges and walkways to incorporate natural areas into walking trails and recreation areas.

“The recreational components of the plan will all be outside the secured perimeter of the main warehouse, distribution center and manufacturing component of the facility, but some of these trails will also be inside the main development for use by employees,” Heath said. “Again it goes back to creating a campus feel for the property.”

Toward that end, the preliminary plan calls for an office complex to ring a large lake that former property owner Jim Roquemore built on the site.

A significant swath of the recreational space will be placed between the industrial uses of the site and the residential communities in Santee.

Heath said one of the goals of the preliminary master plan is to buffer existing communities as much as possible from what they might see as disruptive industrial activities.

“Going into this project, we’re adopting the attitude that we can’t do anything wrong, and that it’s in the build-up stage when you have the most opportunity to do the right thing,” he said. “Once something is built out, it’s very hard to go back and say, ‘If only we’d thought of (that amenity).’

“Mistakes or oversights you make in the planning stage only come back to haunt you as nagging headaches later on,” Heath said.

He said the company also is looking at strategies that will keep truck traffic entering and leaving the site far from S.C. Highway 6, the major artery that leads right into the Santee residential community.

“I don’t want trucks going through Santee on (Highway) 6, period,” Heath said. “It doesn’t do us any good to have traffic adversely impact the existing communities or even the commerce parks that are going up near our site.”