FOCUS, Palm: Local business leaders need to step up now

By Fred Palm, contributing editor  |  The Lowcountry is a dysfunctional area because in many situations, the business community organizes “business councils” that serve as sounding boards and advocates for enlightened public policy for the common good to achieve a turnaround. Unfortunately, they’ve been mostly dormant and now is the time for our business leaders to step forward to contribute community service for the common good. Here is why.

The fiction that ‘growth is good’ and that ‘growth pays for itself’ is exposed in Summerville for the shams that they are.   All elected politicians know them to be big lies.  Only some have the courage to give voice to truth and the reality of numbers – and to come up with workable solutions.

We should applaud and support the efforts of those elected officials who seek to come to terms with this poor hand left us by growth deceptions voiced by current and former elected officials. The unfortunate truth that the current situation has led to this maxim: You can pay the impact fee now or later — in the form of taxes — to build and put it place the reality of what you hoped would be here and by all reasonable standards- should be here; schools, roads, flood protection, and yes, the Lowcountry lifestyle. You have been deceived if you believed we could keep this lifestyle without paying the piper.

We lack the basics of municipal life because of the failed free lunch low-tax policies that gets repeated as if they are true and beneficial. Our taxes are low because they were given as an economic development incentives to attract business and by our foregoing the basics, to support the myth of low taxes. The jig is up in Summerville now as it is in or soon will be in other cities and towns in Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties.

We are in an all-hands-on-deck situation that now needs many good hands, especially from the quiescent business community. You can fatten your bottom line, staying silent with our tax money that we gave in the form of ‘incentives’ made possible by us deferring our hopes and dreams.  Had the taxes been calculated to pay for the needed infrastructure, they would have been spent on real infrastructure. You too have been deceived as we.

The educational infrastructure was grossly underfunded for years, and continues to be. That is why you cannot find potential employees. There or no real plans to fix this. Expect more poor performing students entering the labor force in our foreseeable future.

Potential employees that you offered a position to cannot think of taking the job offer because of the horrendous commuting time to arrive on time every time.  Your labor pool is actually shrinking with the passage of time spent dealing with inadequate roads, despite more people moving in. This is another indicator of major dysfunction.

We have a Charleston County Council that insists on building a $1 billion Interstate highway, not knowing where the funds will come from but willing to inherit the entire risk for inchoate and stale estimates, unadjusted for inflation, that will require reengineering to accommodate high water and all the construction overruns risks of building in a swamp.  This Interstate extension does nothing to address the county wide transportation needs and will make traffic worse. By accepting this massive, mostly funded county public works project normally done by the state, our entire community precludes any other funding for roads and flood containment for years. Add to this many of the current sections of I-526 used for commuting will go underwater at high tide, nuisance floods, king tides and torrential downpours that are expected to increase. It’s just more dysfunction in our forecast.

We have a major Pulitzer Prize newspaper that advocates tree plantings and accepts wholly insufficient funding for flood prevention that borders on irresponsibility.  It suggests a pittance level of funding is better that nothing, despite the fact that the scope of a regional response to massive flooding does not exist and cries out for attention. Thimbleful advocacy for doing much too little is unacceptable to advance the public debate on what to do about present and future high water.

Business leaders, you are stuck in a landscape totally lacking flood protection.  Instead, you are led by politicians selling us the fool’s errand to go and find funding, while nothing or too little gets done. Meanwhile, the bond raters are looking for a flood plan that holds water to assess the risk to their repayment streams and the protection that claims on assets, should the county or the city of Charleston enter into financial collapse and oversight monitoring. Higher interest rates and/or shorter terms for capital investments are in our forecast and reduce the flexibility we need now.

Even if your assets are on high ground, your current and future employees are not. They are involved in securing their families and not your mission. Now is the time for business leaders to step forward to contribute their community service for the common good.

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