Mortgage Broker in Nexton, SC

State Rep. Jordan Pace says he, like so many others, felt the frustration when his internet and cable went out nearly two weeks ago. (WCIV)

BERKELEY COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — There is a question of should there be some sort of oversight on internet providers if and when there's an extended outage.

State Rep. Jordan Pace says he, like so many others, felt the frustration when his internet and cable went out nearly two weeks ago.

Read more: Several Home Telecom customers still experiencing internet issues 6 days later

"About 5 or 6, I think once the load on the network started expanding and people started coming home from work, started experiencing outages and inconsistencies," he said. "That kind of thing for several days in a row."

Pace knows for many of his neighbors, Home Telecom is their only option because big name companies don't offer services.

"In the bulk of my statehouse district Nexton, Carnes Crossroads and Cane Bay - those other options haven't expanded out that way yet," he said.

Pace says free broadband initiatives presented by President Joe Biden's administration and by politicians like Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina help out people living in rural areas, but they don't guarantee people in his district more options. He says the issue is too much involvement from the government.

State Rep. Jordan Pace says he, like so many others, felt the frustration when his internet and cable went out nearly two weeks ago. (WCIV)

"It makes it very inherently expensive for competitors to come in and operate because of the overregulation," Pace said.

Pace says South Carolina has a lot of expensive hurdles for smaller companies that may want to come in and create internet access.

"If they're out of state, they're going to pay 13.5% on all the equipment they own, all of the assets they have that isn't real property every year forever, unless they're big enough to have lobbyists to get them special deals," he said.

Read more: Home Telecom responds to recent internet outage

Pace says he's filed a bill to eliminate the state income tax to make it easier for businesses to move into the area.

"What we can do on the state level is make it as business friendly as possible," Pace said. "Lower that corporate income tax, personal business property tax. Lower the state income tax."

"Allowing entrepreneurs to bring about different alternatives (is) the solution," he continued. "Not more involvement or more scrutiny from the government."

Other internet providers were asked if they have any plans to expand services to portions of Berkeley and Dorchester counties. Xfinity says its working to do that now with its 10G network and finished an expansion to Moncks Corner.

The financial impact of the South Carolina tourism industry hit a new high in 2022, climbing more than 11 percent to $29 billion as the hospitality business continued to benefit from pent-up demand among pandemic-weary travelers.

The newly released figure broke the previous high of $26 billion set in 2021 and the pre-Covid-19 peak of $24 billion two years earlier.

Lodging revenue came in at $6.6 billion for 2022, also a new high, according to the S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

A deeper dive into the data is on its way, with a report expected in the spring. For now, state tourism chief Duane Parrish said that “South Carolina is on the right track.”

“The most amazing part is how quickly the industry statewide recovered from Covid,” Parrish said. “Partly because of the power of what I call cabin fever, but generally it was a time when many prioritized or rediscovered travel. Similar to the resurgence of golf and other outdoor recreational activities, travel and tourism just took off.”

The early numbers were released at last week’s annual visitor industry conference held on Kiawah Island. They’re based on credit-card spending on air travel, hotels and other hospitality services.

Three years ago, tourism’s economic impact posted a rare decline, falling to $18.5 billion as health-related restrictions and lockdowns for most of 2020 kept many travelers at home. At the time, Parrish said it was expected that 2024 would be the earliest the state would get back to its 2019 levels.

Instead, they snapped back within a year.

Parrish attributed the rebound in part to the fact that roughly 80 percent of South Carolina visitors come by automobile, not airplanes.

Also, the state doubled down on efforts to market itself in new ways starting in 2020 by leaning into the image of a place with no shortage of outdoor recreational opportunities, from golf courses to beaches. South Carolina got an extra boost of publicity from the 2021 PGA Championship held at Kiawah and a state tourism campaign featuring country singer and Charleston native Darius Rucker.

“Many of the events that returned in 2021 and 2022 came back twice the size with double the impact compared to their 2019 event,” Parrish said. “Festivals and events, big and small, across the state each contributed to that success.”

When 2022 rolled around, the Palmetto State was front and center again as it welcomed two televised PGA Tour events and was featured in several new films and streaming series. including HBO’s “Righteous Gemstones” and Netflix’s “Outer Banks.”

At last week’s conference on travel and tourism, Gov. Henry McMaster said his advice to industry leaders was simple: “Think big, be bold.”

“There’s there’s nothing that we cannot do with the assets and talent that we have,” he said. “When Darius says (in the ad campaign) ‘Come see why I love this place’ it resonates because there’s not another place quite like this. Other states have a lot of beautiful things, but they don’t have the combination of things that we have.”

Parrish said he expects another successful year in 2023, maybe another record-setter.

“We will continue to target those that have discovered South Carolina, and we want to bring them back,” he said.

Other experts have also shared optimism about what’s ahead. By most accounts, tourism is already off to a strong start based on the huge crowds that flocked to Charleston last weekend for the annual Southeastern Wildlife Expo, the traditional kick-off event each year for the industry.

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SUMMERVILLE — After years of traffic concerns, the town is getting started on a $21 million road project to improve Maple Street.

The road runs from West Richardson Avenue downtown to Nexton Parkway. The project includes widening Maple Street from two to four lanes just east of Shamrock Drive to West Richardson Avenue; adding turn lanes at all approaches to U.S. Highway 78; installing a traffic signal at West Richardson Avenue; and adding a new alignment from West Richardson to Parsons Road, where it will transition from three lanes to two lanes at the Parsons Road connection.

Even mid-morning traffic on Maple Street is notable; it becomes easily congested due to it being a two-way street. If one car needs to turn left, several cars will be held up waiting for the vehicle to turn.

The Maple Street extension has been in the works since 2015 and is one of many road projects the Dorchester County 1 percent sales tax will fund. The tax, which voters elected to continue last year, began in 2004 and has paid for improvements to several roads such as Bacons Bridge Road, S.C. Highway 27 and Patriots Boulevard.

The town of Summerville and Dorchester County are partnering on the project.

Officials said the project will help alleviate congestion in a town beset by traffic concerns as its population has exploded in recent years.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the town’s population has jumped from 27,752 in 2000 to 50,915 in 2020. The Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments projects the 2030 population to exceed 97,000.

“The Maple Street Extension Project will help alleviate traffic congestion and improve safety,” Mayor Ricky Waring said. “I am grateful for the support from our agency partners and the Dorchester County voters who supported the transportation sales tax referendum that helped fund this project.”

Up to $11 million of the project — including construction and engineering/inspection — will be funded by the town’s midtown tax increment finance district funds. Dorchester County sales tax referendum funds will cover the rest, totaling the construction costs to just under $21 million and engineering costs around $1.2 million.

“This project will be one of the first opportunities the county has to utilize funds made available to us through the continuation of the Transportation Sales Tax,” Dorchester County Council Chairman Todd Friddle said. “The Maple Street Extension Project is a great example of what can be accomplished when we collaborate to improve our community, and we look forward to working together again on future projects.”

Construction will start in April or May, with the goal of completion by spring 2025.

The company that’s building out a master-planned community in Berkeley County that’s as large as the Charleston peninsula is set to come under new ownership.

California-based Brookfield Residential announced this week that it is acquiring Newland, the developer of the 5,000-acre mixed-use Nexton neighborhood between Interstate 26 and U.S. Highway 176 near Summerville.

The sale of San Diego-based Newland, which is involved in 20 large master-planned projects around the country, is expected to be finalized June 1.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

A Nexton spokeswoman declined to comment on the pending sale.

“No major, significant operational changes are expected,” said Brookfield spokeswoman Krista Ellingson.

She said the company’s specialty is supplying homes and lots in constrained real estate markets such as Charleston, where a scarcity of homes on the market has dropped to less than a one-month supply, triggering bidding wars and pushing up prices.

“We just aren’t a homebuilder, we invest in land to build homes and sell to homebuilders,” Ellingson said. “We want to show our partners that we are in it with them.”

Bob McLeod, Newland’s executive chairman, said the Brookfield deal “will provide more opportunities for the continued development of additional mixed-use masterplans well into the future as well as give us significant additional vertical development opportunities.”

As of this week, Nexton has 1,266 occupied single-family homes in four subdivisions — Brighton Park, Del Webb, Midtown and North Creek. About 200 more are under development within the neighborhoods.

Nexton also has about 900 finished apartments in three complexes, with another 600 rental units on the way.

When build-out is completed in about 10 years, Nexton will have about 7,000 residences with about 17,500 residents. That will make it roughly equal to the current populations of Moncks Corner and Georgetown combined.

Brookfield Residential currently has no real estate operations in the Palmetto State. The Newland acquisition will expand its footprint to eight new markets, including Charleston, Raleigh-Durham and Wilmington in the Carolinas, and five other areas where both companies have projects in the works.

Last year, Brookfield’s revenue from home and land sales was $1.74 billion, about $200 million less than in 2019, mainly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the company’s annual report.

During the first three months of 2021, total revenue topped $444 million, about 30 percent more than the first quarter last year, when the coronavirus began to spread throughout the overall economy.

Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Brookfield Residential is part of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management, which oversees investment totaling $600 billion and is headquartered in Toronto.

Newland oversees the development of the Nexton tract for North America Sekisui House LLC. NASH, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest homebuilder, bought the property in 2017 from paper maker WestRock Co.’s former real estate division for $90 million.

The Page family (Tony, Ashleigh, Courtney, and Chase) took the slow and steady route to culinary greatness, launching their restaurant in a smallish space on Mount Pleasant's Coleman Boulevard in 2006 and moving to a larger building down the street five years later. Now, long after Page's Okra Grill was established as one of the most popular eateries in the Lowcountry, its owners are about to take their recipe for success into other parts of the tri-county area and other aspects of the dining industry.

Although Page's already operates food trucks in Nexton and Moncks Corner; the restaurant will soon add catering to its repertoire, and, before long, another Page's Okra Grill will open its doors in Nexton.

"We always wanted to get into catering, but we wanted to wait for the right time so we could do it right - up to Okra Grill's standards," says Chase Page, the founders' brother and currently the operations manager for the two mobile units. "Great food, great value and great service. We feel like we can take everything we have learned over the years and provide great catering for our community - weddings, corporate events, sit-down catering, buffets, office lunches, private food truck events, and family dinners. We are excited to meet new folks and provide great food for them but also to serve our same loyal regulars, just in a different way."

The new 10,000-square-foot restaurant, to be built where the Nexton food truck currently does business at 142 Brighton Park Blvd, will include a large catering kitchen and private dining areas. It is expected to start serving customers sometime in the 2023 calendar year. Until then, the catering business will operate out of the Mount Pleasant location, with a menu offering many of the same dishes that have propelled Page's to the top of many of the area's "Best Of" lists, including Ashleigh's iconic Shrimp & Grits.

Chase says catering customers can expect "some surprising items" as well.

The Nexton version of Page's Okra Grill and the catering business will mirror the traditions that have been a hallmark of the restaurant for nearly 17 years.

"One of the most important things in the business is culture - the way you treat your staff and customers. It's totally separates from your processes. We kind of captured lightning in a bottle at Coleman," Chase points out. "Part of that is the quirky personalities of everybody involved. When our family started Okra Grill, it grew like wildfire, and we had to learn the hard way how to run a restaurant. It's all about the little things we like to do to make staff and guests feel like family."

Chase says he hopes the new restaurant will take some of the pressure off the Coleman Boulevard location. Page's Okra Grill in Mount Pleasant has become so popular, there are times when customers must wait for an extended period of time to be seated. Next year, Lowcountry residents will have the option to enjoy Page's Okra Grill's food and hospitality at either of the two locations.

With both the catering business and the new restaurant, Page's Okra Grill follow the same business model that has been proven so successful since 2006.

"We'll do it the way we've always done it," Chase explains. "Slow and steady. We don't want to lose any of the magic we've built up over the years."

To learn more about one of the Lowcountry's most popular restaurants, visit www.pagesokragrill.com.