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Orangeburg: A county that didn't give up |
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Tuesday, 18 December 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
‘A better time’ ahead
On Russell Street, the heart of the city of Orangeburg, about a 20-minute drive from the Jafza property, anticipation is building for work—and hiring—to get under way on the project.
“Excited? You can say that,” said Roy A. Chandler, owner of the Ferse Variety Store, a five-and-dime that has been serving Orangeburg since 1906.
“If they put all the people to work that they say they will, it can only help my business,” he said as he stood amidst a dazzling array of merchandise a few steps away from the check-cashing booth he operates at the end of a long aisle.
Chandler bought the variety store 22 years ago, and described his experience in Orangeburg as being that of a man who “stepped in and survived the downtime.
“Now, we’re hoping to ride the wave of a better time,” he said.
The question isn’t whether change is coming or whether the shopkeepers will benefit—they all expect to—but, rather, what the change they’ve always dreamed about will actually be like.
“This idea of change isn’t something we’re afraid of here. I think we all realize change is inevitable in every venue,” said Dean, owner of the haberdashery.
“The thing you have to understand, however, is that redevelopment and opportunity are things we’ve been striving after for quite some time now. Orangeburg got serious about economic development six or seven years ago, and our vacancy rates downtown have gone down precipitously as a result. The table was set for something like this Dubai deal to happen.”
But, he conceded, there is something different in the air in Orangeburg now. Where local civic leaders planned and worked with an emphasis on slow and steady growth over time, the opportunities Jafza represents are on a whole other order of magnitude.
“We were working from a premise that the big anchor stores will never come back to the downtown, and that in order to be vital, we needed to foster the founding and growth of niche and specialty stores,” Dean said.
“And if you look up and down the block, we’ve done pretty well. But now, we’ve gone from a community reinvigorating itself and looking to eliminate storefront vacancies to one that will be a major (force) in the Northern hemisphere.”
The joke around town, one repeated by Won Young, owner of Star Beauty Supply on Russell Street, is “Who’s going to buy the gas station closest to the Dubai development?”
“That’s the person who’ll really make a killing on this thing,” he chuckled.
Which counties benefit?
But as Young swept out his store on a recent late afternoon, he also pondered a more serious question: Which counties stand to benefit the most from what Jafza has in store for the state.
“With 8,000 to 10,000 jobs being discussed, this is going to be a regional phenomenon,” he said. “As far as the question of who benefits is concerned, I think that depends on which county provides the greatest employment pool.”
David L. Coleman, president of the Orangeburg County Chamber of Commerce, has also pondered the question, and feels confident Orangeburg County will reap its fair share of the economic benefits of the project.
“Obviously, at this point, no one knows how far the impact of this project will extend, but what we do know is that the benefits will extend beyond Orangeburg to Clarendon, Calhoun, Berkeley and Dorchester counties,” he said. “I think that’s inevitable given both the project site’s location and the fact that within that radius there’s been a real concentration of rural poverty.
“This will be the spark that enables many communities to begin to create other things, other opportunities.”
In his office across the street from the Edisto Memorial Gardens, a memorial to the 600 Confederate soldiers who temporarily defended the Edisto bridge halting the advancing Union soldiers, Coleman said the first time he met Chuck Heath, Jafza International’s managing director, he came away with the feeling “that perhaps we hadn’t been dreaming big enough.
“We always knew we had a good location and that the Port of Charleston would be an important part of the mix, but Heath was talking about creating a logistics center that also serves Savannah; Wilmington, N.C.; and Norfolk, Va. In that sense, ‘reach’ is what this project is all about,” Coleman said.
“At the same time, I think the real impact of this facility on our community will be in an area other than distribution facilities. To me the real potential of the development and its ability to create good, high-paying jobs, will be in the area of assembly and packaging—the kinds of businesses that provide added value to imports.”
Today, Coleman said, many companies import their goods and send them to sites in Memphis, Tenn., and Cincinnati, Ohio, to be assembled and packaged for retail.
“Why send goods inland if you’re only going to ship them back East to market?” he said.
Coleman is confident Orangeburg County has a work force available that would be compatible with whatever activity transpires on the Jafza site, he said.
“And we’ve got the Orangeburg Calhoun Technical College here, and ReadySC, the state program that trains workers for incoming industries, so we have the capabilities to train any and all the workers they need,” he said.
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