City of Charleston looking at $14M West Ashley property purchase

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The City of Charleston is looking to invest part of its city operations to one of its most populated areas.

The City of Charleston’s chief policy officer, Logan McVey, says city firefighters and police officers could have a brand-new place to train if City Council approves the purchase of nearly $14 million worth of property.

“One of the mayor’s commitments was to not build apartments and housing where the infrastructure wasn’t caught up yet,” McVey said. “And with this area in particular, they’re struggling with the infrastructure being really far behind. So, city operations made a lot more sense.”

This land is located along West Ashley Circle next to the traffic circle and on the other side of Bees Ferry Road.

The city says they’re hoping to build a fire and police training center here and office space for them. This would, in turn, split their operations to give them a West Ashley hub, while still keeping the downtown facilities.

McVey says with most of their population being in West Ashley, it just makes sense to invest here. They also hope to bring an active public safety component as well.

“A ton of benefits to having public safety assets nearby,” McVey said. “It can literally lower your homeowner’s insurance. It can be a real benefit if you ever have an emergency. So, the people should be pretty excited and also just a conscious effort to counter some of the dated infrastructure issues we have here in the community.”

McVey says the funding for this is coming out of a $100 million city operations bond. He says part of the property purchases are also coming out of savings from the redesign of the downtown facility.

If Charleston City Council approves the property purchases Tuesday night, the next steps would be designing and engineering. For now, there is no set timeline for when this whole project could be completed.