Criminal Defense Attorney inJames Island, SC

|Updated: Aug. 21, 2024 at 7:57 PM EDT

JAMES ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - Lowcountry homeowners are being offered an opportunity to weigh in on a development project intended to build future stays for new families.

The James Island Planned Unit Development project would clear seven acres of untouched woods on Battery Island Drive and transform it into housing, greenspace and potentially, an inn.

The inn would include two buildings with 20 suites, and the subdivision would be made up of 15 homes. It is unclear what the buildings would look like.

The property sits in the middle of Beefield, an African American community recently named as historic.

“It’s a desirable area, so why not build developments or things like that for people? I think it’ll add to the island, James Island, and I think this is a positive,” Pro-development resident Jose Bardallo says.

Many, like Bardallo, believe development is essential around the Lowcountry to mitigate growth. He is also a supporter of finishing construction on I-526 to ease the flow of traffic conflicts.

“I understand people’s pain in reference to adding traffic, like I said previously. But the core issue is not the development, the core issue is really the lack of infrastructure,” Bardallo says.

Francine Burden calls Beefield her lifelong home. When she walks the half mile street, every neighbor is family or friend.

Opposed to Bardallo, she worries how the construction would create a shift in her community.

“I have mixed feelings about that,” Burden says. “This is where I was born and raised. This community has mostly elderly people, as myself, because we are aging.”

Neighbors believe this would increase foot and car traffic and risk drainage issues on Battery Island Drive.

Burden adds she fears bringing newcomers in could isolate their tight-knit community and be destructive to its history.

“It depends on the houses they build, houses that are not too overpowering or swallow the community. Houses that will mesh within the community, because we here a long time,” Burden says.

The City of Charleston Planning Commission is still accepting public input for the project, despite a receipt of majority approval from city processes in 2022.

The group will hold a meeting Wednesday night to collect those comments. To watch the meeting over livestream, click here.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

JOHNS ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - Members of the Johns Island community could be looking at the construction of a second hotel and living space.

New Leaf Builders is requesting to build JUBILEE on the corner of Maybank Highway and Wildts Battery Boulevard. The development would take up 13.3 acres.

The City of Charleston passed the plans through in a 7-0 vote on July 19. It is the latest in a series of conversations involving development on Johns Island.

Rich Thomas has lived on Johns Island for 16 years and says it is hard to recognize the lay of the land.

“The city and county have not paid any attention whatsoever to how Maybank and Johns Island in general can handle these developments,” Thomas says. “When you add up 100 housing units, commercial restaurants and things, it turns into a huge problem.”

Councilman Jim McBride says the development is classified as a Planned Unit Development, or PUD, meaning fewer units will go on the property than originally thought.

Developers say they intend to create a “vibrant, human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly community” and “transform neglected and underutilized natural resources into a beautiful hospitality village destination.”

The area is considered a central location for future public transit and connectivity. McBride says it would help to support the island’s future fire station and Trident hospital.

The plans fit the mold for a mixed-use residential office and low-density residential district. JUBILEE would become a spot for 140 families total, split into 75 hotel rooms and 65 residential cottages.

It is unclear how much each unit will cost or how much it will be to build the complex.

Each building would sit at a height of either three or four stories.

Darcy Whalen lived on Johns Island for six years but now resides across the Stono River in James Island.

Out her window, she still sees the impacts of traffic and growth bleeding into her community.

“Infrastructure is huge. We’re a little backwards, that we should’ve had that first before these things were approved,” Whalen says. “I don’t begrudge getting a hotel. There are a lot of people coming onto Johns Island and Seabrook. I think we have been done a disservice.”

Developers emphasized that Charleston has doubled in population since the 1970s. They claim the Charleston City Plan to develop the area over the next 10 years fits within their plans to build up Johns Island.

Charleston County Council will tentatively vote on the project on August 30.

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Traffic. Charleston is awash with it, and the same people who created the problem now want to put a new road through your front yard or your front door in order to fix it.

“You can just move,” they say. They are wrong. We live here.

Plato opined in 400 B.C., "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." However, no love interest ever whispered, “You had me at the latest traffic study.” It is boring.

I am not indifferent. I live here. Johns Island requires a new comprehensive plan (Main, River, Brownswood, Maybank, Bohicket, Edenvale) that includes the needs of James Island, West Ashley and Red Top. Whether you are Finish 526, Nix 526, Fix Our Roads First or something entirely different, we need fresh ideas.

We have them in the form of Rational Roads, Johns Island Advocate, Charleston City Councilman Jim McBride, Charleston Mayor William Cogswell, Charleston County Councilman Joe Boykin, Coastal Conservation League and Lowcountry Land Trust. It’s a new day.

We also have thousands of residents who have been mocked, underrepresented and silenced by a system that is flush with cash and politically connected. The “destroyers” in this system cite hurricanes and killer grand oaks as the reasons we should suffer instead of them.

What we don’t need are outdated traffic models, bureaucrats or anonymous sources saying that we should have “the moral rectitude to take the few steps necessary to remedy this existential threat" and that "the preservation of a few trees is much more important than peoples’ lives” and throw-away phrases such as “Developers gonna develop,” as metro columnist Brian Hicks wrote in his June 30 column.

Charleston’s City and County councils, the S.C. Department of Transportation, Mayors Joe Riley and John Tecklenburg, the Chamber of Commerce and their lackeys have sold out Charleston and made millions for Centex, Pulte, Toll Brothers, Kiawah et al., while proposing to bulldoze the property of folks who can’t fight back. The median price for a home on Kiawah in May was more than $4 million.

The county's proposed improvement to Segment C of the Main and Bohicket corridor would cut through acres of pristine wetlands in a highly sensitive area of Bohicket Creek, through the natural buffer of four protected conservation easements, destroy private homes and businesses and threaten the groundwater surrounding the Angel Oak while, according to its own studies, only modestly improving traffic flow.

Safety was not mentioned in the public handout provided at the public meeting in May.

Don’t be fooled. This is not about you. This is about money.

Andrew Geer, M.D., is a Johns Island resident.

JAMES ISLAND — If she can, Katie Zimmerman avoids riding her bike along Folly Road, a busy, mostly four-lane thoroughfare that cuts across James Island from West Ashley to the beach.

Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit Charleston Moves, said while she enjoys biking, the road is not pedestrian or bike friendly.

“It’s just bad,” she said. “You’ve got speeding vehicles right up against you. There’s debris in the bike lane because it’s not properly maintained. It’s a narrow bike lane. It’s not to standard. It’s incredibly unpleasant.”

Zimmerman isn’t the only one aware of safety issues on Folly Road. Bob Markisello, who leads Saturday group bike rides around James Island to Folly Beach with the nonprofit Coastal Cyclists, said he’s grown accustomed to Folly Road and the dangers to expect from leading the weekly group.

“I’ve had people say, ‘You actually ride on Folly Road?’” he said. “It’s like they’re astounded that we would take that risk.”

Zimmerman and Markisello are far from the only people who worry about commuting in the area. The growing concern is why the addition of bike lanes and sidewalks along Folly Road, or SC Highway 171, between George Griffith Boulevard and Sol Legare Road, and sidewalks along Sol Legare from Folly Road to the boat landing, is on Charleston County’s project list for the third half-cent transportation sales tax.

The county is proposing to extend the tax in order to raise $5.4 billion. It will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. If voters agree to keep the tax in place, the money collected will go toward infrastructure projects.

County officials selected 13 projects from a list of over 20 to go on the ballot. The Mark Clark Extension, a 9.5-mile road project that would link the end of Interstate 526 in West Ashley to the James Island Connector by running four lanes across a corner of Johns Island and part of James Island, is the only one labeled as a priority project. It’s expected to cost $1.8 billion — more than a third of the money allotted and more than the other 13 proposed projects combined.

JAMES ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - Charleston County Public Works is working to improve stormwater drainage in the Town of James Island.

One of the many projects that are a part of the Central Park Drainage Basin Improvements is located on Hollings Road. The Hollings Road Drainage Project focuses on diverting stormwater from smaller ditches that don’t have sufficient capacity to a county-maintained canal along Hollings Road.

The county plans to do this by installing a box culvert under Hollings Road. A box culvert is a rectangular shaped concrete structure that helps with stormwater drainage.

Some other drainage projects included in the Central Park Basin Improvements are on Central Park Road and Howle Avenue Park.

The stormwater project manager for Charleston County Public Works, John Primm, says that stormwater has been an issue on James Island for a while, but that these projects should bring some relief to the area.

“These projects, they won’t solve all of the stormwater problems, they won’t solve all of the flooding, but what they will do is improve the stormwater, improve the flooding as far as depth and duration, so the height of the stormwater, flooding should be reduced and the amount of time it takes for the storm water to drain after a storm should be reduced,” Primm says.

Primm says the county received one million dollars in state funding for the Hollings Road Drainage Project, but that it doesn’t cover all of the construction costs. The remaining costs will be funded through Charleston County Public Works funds.

This project falls in State Rep. Spencer Wetmore’s district and she says that the most common problem they hear about from people is stormwater drainage.

“This Central Park Basin, which you know as John talked about, makes up several different drainage projects, is probably the number one basin that we hear about in terms of flooding, it appears to be one of the most severe and one of the ones that touches the most neighborhoods,” Wetmore says.

Wetmore says that this project will not only help the residents that live on Hollings Road, but that it will touch on all of the surrounding neighborhood and help alleviate flooding.

“We hear so many awful stories of people not just having to move their cars on days that it rains, but their homes are flooding and they’re truly losing their property and the value that they’ve worked so hard for and we just want to do everything that we can to make sure that we’re addressing and mitigating as best as we can,” Wetmore says.

Primm says the next steps in the Hollings Road project are finishing up the design and permitting process before beginning construction in early 2025. Charleston County Public Works hopes to complete the project by 2026.

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