Nothing would sway SCANA

Mayor Bob Coble was ready to offer every legal financial goody the city of Columbia could offer to keep SCANA downtown.

USC president Andrew Sorensen had told SCANA chief executive Bill Timmerman for three years that the university wanted SCANA to locate in its future 500-acre Innovista river campus.

Developer Alan Kahn had whipped up a proposal for a SCANA downtown campus just off Main Street. In the end, nothing worked.

SCANA - one of Columbia's largest employers, with 900 workers filling much of two Main Street high-rises - announced it will leave town when its current lease expires at the Palmetto Center on Nov. 1, 2009. It has been there 23 years. When the company exits, it will vacate 16 floors in one of Columbia's most prominent office buildings in a single swoop.

SCANA, the Fortune 500 company that provides electricity and natural gas to 1.7 million customers, will move its headquarters across the Congaree River to Lexington County. In a woodsy location, just off I-77 in Cayce, SCANA will be on its own generally isolated campus, reachable only by car.

And no word or act that Coble, Sorensen, Kahn or any of Columbia's other political, business and educational elite could come up with could make SCANA stay one second longer.

"We left no stone unturned in indicating the extreme willingness of the city to do every financial incentive possible," Coble said Thursday.

Not true, said Kevin Fisher, the Coble rival whom Coble, the long-term incumbent, beat in the April mayor's race.

Several years ago, Fisher said, Coble and the city should have made SCANA promise to keep its headquarters in the city in return for getting rid of a public bus system it had a legal duty to provide. SCANA finally paid the city to take over its bus system.

"The city got a deal worth $72 million," Coble said. "It was the best deal we could get. Anyway, the election settled this issue."

Sorensen said he never offered SCANA CEO Timmerman, who lives in Charlotte, any direct land or monetary incentive to move his headquarters to the university's Innovista.

But Sorensen said he let Timmerman know how booming and progressive a place he expects the Innovista to be. With a river view, a new baseball stadium, and superstar professors, it is being billed as a future educational, retail and recreational Mecca.

Another leader weighing in with SCANA was Matt Kennell, president of City Center Partnership, the group that manages the downtown business district.

Kennell said he told Timmerman that Columbia's downtown is "the most convenient location for all his employees. We are at the crossroads. We have a nice pedestrian environment - hospitals, health clubs, restaurants."

That didn't work either.

SCANA spokeswoman Cathy Love said Thursday that cost savings and a more "work-productive" environment were determining factors in deciding to leave Columbia. For one thing, SCANA will build on land it already owns, reaping a considerable savings there, she said.

While Columbia officials were wooing SCANA, confining their talk to warm generalities, the utility quietly was negotiating with Lexington County officials, who offered nice tax breaks. SCANA has said the savings from those tax breaks was another reason it decided to move.

Security also was a consideration. High-rise buildings fronting Main Street aren't the most terrorist-averse locations that utilities - nerve centers in the modern world - can inhabit.

"In post 9/11 days, everybody is thinking about security differently," said Love, who pointed out that in the new location, SCANA "will control all access points to the facility." From its new headquarters, SCANA will be connected to its six coal-fired plants, six hydroelectric plants, nine natural gas plants and one nuclear plant.

Love said SCANA decided to announce it was leaving Columbia this week in part because a public hearing soon will be held in Lexington County to air its proposed tax incentives. Also, SCANA needs to begin talking with architects and others to design and build its new campus. Those talks, once begun, would have become public.

In Lexington County, SCANA will limit the height of its new buildings to three stories. Also, it will have acres of its own land for relatively cheap ground-level parking. In the city, many SCANA employees use expensive parking garages.

On Thursday, a day after SCANA's announcement, everybody was trying to make like it wasn't a big black eye for Columbia, which likes to bill itself as a boomtown for the future. Both SCANA and the city stressed how they will jointly try to find tenants to fill the rental space the utility is vacating.

"We will be just a few miles away," said SCANA's Love, adding that many employees still will drive to Columbia for lunch. "We aren't leaving town. We're just leaving downtown. We're still in the Midlands."

Coble said, "We knew SCANA was gone a year ago. The old days of the big companies that are the backbone of the community are gone forever. But it's no use crying over spilt milk. We'll be out there trying to find a replacement."

In recent years, Coble noted, big businesses such as First Citizens and the Nelson Mullins law firm have built big buildings downtown. "You can't win them all," the mayor said.

City Center's Kennell noted Starbucks - the immensely popular worldwide coffee chain -apparently has been scouting for a downtown Columbia location.

"We will have Starbucks," Kennell said, "but they (SCANA) will be close to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts."