The Administration Committee of the Horry County Council met on Tuesday, July 22, 2025, at 1:00 PM in the County Council Conference Room. Chairman Tyler Servant presided. The meeting covered a range of financial, economic development, public safety, and land use items, with several unanimous approvals and a recognition of the Finance Director.
I would like to uh all start off by standing and um we'll start with the uh prayer Lord give us the wisdom to handle today's business uh in a way that is best suited for our constituents and people that we serve. We ask you to please give us wisdom in making these decisions, and we ask that you please uh offer veiled protection over all of our county employees, especially our first responders. In your name, we prayed. And one of the liberty and justice for all. All right, thank you. All right, we will start next uh with any public input. Is anybody signed up for public input today? Okay, no public input. Uh next, I'll entertain a motion for approval of the agenda contents. All in favor? Okay. Next I'll entertain a motion for the approval of the minutes of our June 24th, 2025 meeting. So we're moved. Sorry. Any opposed? All in favor? Okay. Next, we'll move on to new business. I'm gonna call up Sandy Davis to give us the Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development Update. Thank you. Um our quarter two update for 2025. Um, so far we have seen an increase in our area as far as leads. The MBREDC had 26 new leads this time last year in 2024. And as of right now, we are at 75 leads as of today. So you can see a big increase in 2025. That tends to happen a lot during an election year. Um slower, and then once the election passes, we seem to pick up. I will say that we have not seen the increase yet in visits, people come into the area. So mostly they have been learning us to video sending videos to FaceTime. South Carolina Department of Commerce has also been seeing pretty much the same. So we met with them last week and they showed us this new thing that they have. It's called Vision SC. South Carolina is the first to start promoting this, and it's where you use the goggles, and you can see everywhere. So we would get to put the information we want on the goggles, send it to them, and then while we wear a headset, they would wear a headset and be able to explore the areas that we think they would be a good fit for. So we are hoping to be able to move forward on that. Department of Commerce is going to have some grants available to be able to do this, and NISA is also trying to help um all of their counties to be able to get this. Those um headsets are actually $4,000 each, and just to sign up for the program is $15,000. So we will be working to try to do that. Um we do have close to 220 leads open. We're a little over that number, but I do think we've seen um an increase due to having available product as well. So we have the spec building at Ascot Valley, and it is a hundred a little over a hundred thousand square feet and expandable to 153,000 square feet. We have three projects currently looking, one existing company and two from out of our area. In addition to that, we have the spec building at um Palmetto Coast Industrial Park where we located Amazon and Pepsi. It's owned by a um private developer, but we are promoting it. It has been a huge asset for us. The third building that they have just completed on the exterior, it's going to be a multi-tenant building instead of a single tenant, like we did with Petsy and Amazon. That building is 178,000 square feet, and we are currently working with seven different companies to open operations in that facility. Most of them are existing industries that we're looking, and then two new businesses from outside the area, so we will keep you all posted on that. We are working 44 projects. Um projects are people who have actually visited, completed their project profile sheet, have an open incentive summary to um negotiate with us, tell us what they're looking for.