The Infrastructure & Regulation Sub-Committee on Rural Civic Center met on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at 2:00 PM in Multipurpose Room B/C of the Horry County Government & Justice Center. The committee received a detailed schematic design presentation and financial update for the proposed Rural Civic Center, with a total project cost estimated at approximately $116 million. After discussion, the committee voted unanimously to accept the schematic design and move forward with full design development.
Welcome to our rural civic center meeting. It's been a while and so but I appreciate everybody coming. We're expecting some exciting news and some very good conversation over this. And as always, to start a meeting, we will open up with the invocation and our pledge of allegiance. If you could all please stand. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we're so thankful to have this opportunity once again together here. Uplift us and encourage our hearts and help us so that we would continuously hunger and thirst after your righteousness. Touch each and every home and family represented here today, meet the needs thereof, use us, help us so that we might be able to help others. Let all things be done. To praise and honor your name for we ask it upon our Savior's name, Christ Jesus. Amen. Attention to the flag, a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which you stay one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. Be seated. As we said, this has been a long time coming and a work in progress. We're hoping to be able to see a lot, a lot of big steps here today, and we appreciate everybody being here, the committee, the staff, Charlie and his crew, and so we appreciate all that. And um do we have any public input? Reproval, approval of the agenda contents, and so if we need a motion from somebody, please move. Second, all in favor. An approval of the meet of the minutes from the last meeting that we had. Motion and second. All in favor, aye. Moving on to the discussion items. Approval of a meeting. You're gonna have another. Oh, excuse me, it's uh had a heavy lunch. Okay, work with me now. Discussion items, introduction, Mr. Brandon Wagner, and so if he's been on this thing, and we appreciate it, Brandon. Good afternoon, Chairman, committee members. Uh it's an exciting day for the Rural Civic Center. We've uh crossed an important milestone with completion of the schematic design phase. Uh that's often referred to as the 15% complete of the design phase plans. Uh don't have them in front of you, but there's a whole stack of a hundred-page set of engineering drawings. Uh it's important because once you get to this phase, you can really start ironing down and narrowing in on your cost estimate and some other important information. Uh with that, we have the consulting team here to go over the schematic design and have Charlie Johnson with Johnson Consulting, overall program implementation and planning for the project, and then also we have Margaret Butler with MHM, and she is the architect. And with that, I will turn the presentation over to them. Thank you, Brandon. Hi again, my name's Charlie Johnson, the president of Johnson Consulting. Honored to be here today. As Brandon indicated, this is a pretty big step because it's starting to cost numbers are starting to come in, and all those types of things are starting to really look like a building and an event. And I want to remind everybody that we're starting today to build an institution that's gonna some of them are 200 years old. And so as we set the stage for this facility that Margaret's gonna go through, um, you'll see the vision, but you also have to focus, you have to start somewhere, and this is where we start. We've equipped ourselves today with some technical support. So if questions come up, we've got um engineering. Would you like to step up real quick, John? Hey, I'm John Richard with Thomas and Hudson Engineering. And we have our design team.