Chapin residents fume about planned 600-home Brighton development

Dozens of people lined up Wednesday to urge Lexington County Council against a $20 million land deal, even as the county moved closer to a legal showdown with the town of Chapin over a 600-home development outside of town.

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Lexington County Council hosted a public hearing on the proposed sale of the unused Chapin Business and Technology Park at Brighton to a developer who would turn the 200-acre site into a new neighborhood — something current residents of the town told council members they were uniformly against.

Residents who spoke shared their worries about increased traffic, overcrowded schools and the wear and tear on local infrastructure if the sale of the undeveloped property off of Columbia Avenue allows up to 600 new homes to be built in their community.

“This is about whether the county will acknowledge the consequences of unconstrained growth… and stop making the same mistakes,” Chapin resident Sandra Mann told the council on Wednesday.

Any use of the park is up in the air as the town of Chapin has held out on issuing any new sewer taps for the area, part of a push to limit new development near the town. Lexington County Council voted earlier Wednesday to, in the words of Chairman Darrell Hudson’s motion, do “whatever is legally necessary” to enforce a previous agreement with the town to provide sewer service to the development.

But Chapin Mayor Bill Mitchell, who implemented a freeze on additions to the town sewer system last year, showed up to the hearing to say he wasn’t planning on changing course.

“I’ve got solid legal grounds not to issue taps to you the county, to Mungo or the 500 people behind them who want taps right now,” he said, referencing a separate nearly 400-home development by Mungo Homes that’s also planned for Brighton.

The mayor said the town’s water system is already serving 7,700 customers, most of them outside the town’s limits. He said Chapin’s aging wastewater plant is nearing capacity, and the town will spend $42 million to double its capacity, but that process could take up to a decade to complete.

“Can you imagine if we broke that plant, what a problem it would be?” Mitchell said. “I don’t believe there’s a judge in South Carolina who would say (to issue the taps) and if you break that plant, it’s not my problem.”

Almost a decade after establishing a planned business and technology park between Chapin and Interstate 26, Lexington County has given provisional approval to selling the 200-acre site to Brighton Capital Partners LLC. Plans for the site would still include a “technology incubator” that would create between 2,500 and 3,000 jobs, developer Andy White previously told The State.

Read more Chapin residents fume about planned 600-home Brighton development

But the majority of the site would go toward a new neighborhood dubbed “Palatin.” White would build up to 600 homes, priced between $600,000 and $1 million. About half of the homes will be age-restricted to people 55 and up, White said.

Lexington County would be paid $20 million for the site, which has struggled to attract industrial tenants and today sits empty behind a sign and fountain off of Columbia Avenue just outside Chapin.

“You’re not very good at real estate, so I’d get out of it too,” Mitchell told the council members Wednesday.

But Britt Poole, executive director of the Central Midlands Council of Governments, said the Chapin wastewater system likely has capacity available. On paper, Poole told the council, Chapin has allocated 97% of its capacity of 2.4 million gallons per day.

“However, the actual flows through the plan tell a different story,” he said. The plant actually only handles 1 million gallons per day on average, or about 43% of its capacity. Depending on how the expected daily flow, Poole estimated the S.C. Department of Environmental Services could approve up to 1,600 additional taps on the system.

But for most Chapin residents at Wednesday’s meeting, questions of sewer capacity were beside the point. They were worried about the impact on their quality of life and whether their small town could adjust to 1,000 new residents if the Palatin deal goes through.

Despite the ongoing redevelopment of Columbia Avenue and other roadways in town, residents said traffic in Chapin already backs up far too often even during non-peak times.

“Come over and try it out,” resident Jeff Gover invited the council. “It’s getting worse on a daily basis, and I don’t see residential taxes being enough to fund those” improvements.

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