Richland County buys 1,300 acres for $26 million. Here’s why
Richland County has purchased more than 1,300 acres in Blythewood to develop a massive business park.
At approximately 1,349 acres, the site could attract a firm as big as Boeing, or a gaggle of high-tech businesses, said Jeff Ruble, the county’s economic development director.
“It will probably be something smaller (than the Boeing or Volvo manufacturing plants near Charleston),” he said. “But you can’t land a whale unless you have a place to put it,” referring to what business recruiters call those kinds of mega-plants.
The wooded tract is south of Blythewood Road on the west side of I-77
Ruble said the county has been showing the tract to prospective firms “for years,” but now that the county owns it, officials will start making it more attractive to potential tenants. beginning with clearing some of the timber.
“It’s like eating an elephant,” Ruble said of the site improvements on the massive tract. “You do it one bite at a time.”
The new park will augment the county’s new Pinewood Industrial Park on Shop Road, site of the new Chinese fiberglass-maker Jushi.
Although the Blythewood site — called Blythewood Business Park — already has copious water and sewer, it does not have rail access, making a heavy manufacturing plant like Jushi unlikely.
There is enough space, however, to construct up to 5.3 million square feet of office and Class A technology and manufacturing buildings — the most likely tenants, Ruble said.
There will also be some retail and commercial development along Blythewood Road, Ruble said.
When the purchase was announced in August, Richland County Council Chair Paul Livingston said the new park would be “transformative for the Columbia region.”
“We are able to continue to compete with similar mid-sized metropolitan regions across the Southeast — and win,” he said.