Plans for New $20 Million Town Hall

Mount Pleasant town leaders are moving forward with plans to construct a town hall that would cost at least $20 million on the site of Kmart at Johnnie Dodds Boulevard and Bowman Road.

Town leaders voted last week 7 to 2 to authorize Town Administrator Eric DeMoura to contact the owner of the building to begin negotiations. Kmart occupies the building on a long-term lease.

“I really think that’s the ideal spot for our new town hall,” said Mayor Billy Swails at a recent Mount Pleasant Business Association meeting. “We’ve got to do something. (The current town complex) is not functional. We’re sitting on more valuable property than (the Kmart) property up there.”

The town voted earlier in January to spend $50,000 to study how much a new town hall would cost.

Currently, the town operates out of a handful of buildings on Ann Edwards Drive. Opened in 1991, the central building at the complex was formerly East Cooper Private School. The town added buildings for police and for planning offices.

In at the corner of Ann Edwards Drive and Houston Northcutt Boulevard. The purchase and renovation of that building cost about $4 million.

Off Houston Northcutt Boulevard, between Coleman and Johnnie Dodds boulevards, the complex is sandwiched in one of the town’s busier retail corridors.

The $20 million estimated price tag takes into account profits the town might receive from the sale of its current complex, less the price to construct a new building.

Swails said the new town hall won’t be built quickly, but there is a deadline.

“I certainly won’t be mayor with that sucker is built, because it will take a while to get everything to get done, but we need a one-stop shop,” Swails said.

But the town would have to construct the building before 2017 if it plans to use Tax Increment Finance District money.

Those funds generate about $8.6 million yearly for capital projects, and town councilmen, when planning how to spend the $30 million in remaining money, listed the town hall a priority behind a Coleman Boulevard revitalization project and the construction of a parking garage at Shem Creek.

That vote came on Tuesday, the same day the council authorized DeMoura to initiate negotiations. Councilmembers Linda Page and Chris Nickels voted against the negotiations.