Politics

What does $284 million buy?

By Bill Moss, Published: January 22, 2025

A four-story justice center, medical office buildings and recreational amenities will change the face of Hendersonville in the coming months and years courtesy of county, state and federal  taxpayers, private donors and medical patients and insurers.

The Henderson County Board of Commissioners committed last week to spend $13.6 million to build soccer fields, a softball diamond and tennis courts at Berkeley Mills Park and during a first pass at drafting a 2025-26 budget heard updates about the new $160 million courthouse and jail expansion, the Ecusta Trail and a footprint expansion of UNC Health Pardee that’s projected to top $100 million. The total cost of everything — roughly $284 million — is funded by a variety of sources in addition to county property tax money. The Ecusta Trail is funded almost entirely by state and federal grants; debt service on the medical buildings will be up to Pardee to cover; a federal American Rescue Plan grant is paying for the sportsplex.

Dream of fields comes true

Soccer players will enjoy high-quality fields and Hendersonville High School’s tennis and softball teams will have a home in the new Berkeley Park sports complex.

Commissioners voted unanimously to spend an additional $1.3 million on top of the base price for the sportsplex, which will now include four regulation-size soccer fields, six tennis courts for use by the HHS men’s and women’s tennis teams and a softball diamond for use by the Lady Bearcat team. The tennis courts and softball fields would be open to the public when not in use by the varsity prep teams.

The board, which had authorized the base bid in December, agreed to the add-ons after School Board member Blair Craven announced publicly for the first time a $600,000 donation by two HHS boosters to help cover two-thirds of the cost of the facilities for the Bearcat teams. The tennis courts will cost $585,000 and the softball diamond $375,200. Both items were among bid alternatives the winning bidder, Candler-based Tennoca Construction Co., submitted in November. The contractor agreed to guarantee the prices for 60 days, a term which would have expired in the coming days. American Rescue Plan money is paying for around $11 million of the total.

The costliest add-on was an extra $975,000 for a better quality artificial turf for the soccer fields. After a detailed presentation and a long discussion of the pros and cons of the playing surface, commissioners agreed to the higher quality, more durable top. Assistant City Manager Christopher Todd and a representative for the turf contractor described the advantages of the enhanced turf. It would be cooler and safer, would require less maintenance and would last longer, they said. There’s also a subtheme of “if you build it they will come” to the new county facility. The high quality fields in a brand new park in a desirable Blue Ridge Mountains town could attract statewide or even regional soccer tournaments, boosting overnight lodging, restaurants and retail sales.

Although they funded the soccer field upgrade and prep sports facilities, commissioners are not done yet. At some point, they’re expected to figure out how to shell out $1.4 million for lighting and $1.5 million for structures including a maintenance shed, restrooms and ticket booths. (Of those, no one considers restrooms optional.)

Commissioner Rebecca McCall, whose career as a corporate administrator gained her outdoor lighting expertise and contacts, said she had talked with a source about lighting the baseball stadium, tennis courts, softball diamond and soccer fields. One idea to offset funding is to partner with the Honeycrisps semi-pro baseball team. Still up in the air is whether changing ownership of the Berkeley land from the School Board to the county would allow beer sales at Honeycrisp games. (State law prohibits the sale of alcohol on property owned by public schools.)

Trail of destruction avoided

In Marcus Jones’s work life — play life, too, since he’s an avid road biker — the Ecusta Trail had a way of sucking all the oxygen out of the room. It was popular, it drew many passionate stakeholders and it was looked on by outdoors enthusiasts as a tantalizing box under the Christmas tree.

“I thought we were working on the most anticipated project in the history of Henderson County since indoor plumbing,” Jones, the county engineer, told commissioners, “and then Helene came.”

Two weeks after Helene arrived, when he was done with emergency response duties and the immediate crisis, Jones took a ride along the first six miles of the Ecusta Trail, which is under construction.

“The initial assessment indicated that the trail did remarkably well through that storm event — downed trees, some shoulder scour — but all six of the structures were not impacted, the bridges,” he said. The stormwater management system turned out to be a model of how to harden public works against a catastrophic storm. “We not only replaced all of the cross-drainage structures, but we re-engineered them to make sure that they were appropriately sized. The entire drainage system did very well.”

Even so, Helene triggered a rarely invoked escape hatch.

“You’ve done contracts all your life, and you see this little clause — force majeure — whatever. No one ever pays attention to that,” Jones observed. “Well, that’s Helene — a 1,500-year storm. That’s an act of God.”

A French phrase meaning “superior force,” force majeure is a standard provision in legal contracts that relieves parties from fulfilling their contractual obligations when an unforeseen event of huge magnitude prevents them from doing so.

“In short, the impacts from Helene did generate a change order of $406,000,” Jones said. “That is certainly within the contingencies from the federal funding for the project and it did push the completion date back to June.”

JCAR rolls to starting line

A project as big as the $158.3 million expansion of the jail and Grove Street courthouse can seem like an unobtainable concept —the demonstrated need notwithstanding. The project is, after all, the largest capital investment ever by Henderson County, eclipsing the current record holder — HHS renovation and addition — by $100 million.

But when phrases like “guaranteed maximum price” are uttered aloud and bond market interest rates are divined, you can bet that groundbreaking is near. The timeline calls for the first of three GMPs to be adopted in April. A ribbon-cutting would take place in August 2028 if the project stays on track.

“That is the goal that this staff is committed to and we’re pushing both our contractors and our architects to hold their timelines,” Assistant County Manager Christopher Todd told the board. “We should this summer be turning dirt.”

Between the ceremonial dirt toss and the ribbon cutting, courthouse employees, the legal community and judicial center users will endure three years of disruption and noise. The project includes a new four-story courthouse — too large to be called an annex — a major addition of male and female jail beds, a new sallyport for inmate transfers and upgraded detention center administrative space.

Although the project’s acronym stands for Judicial Construction and Renovation, renovation got most of the budget ax. Commissioners trimmed the cost from $200 million to $160 million by scrapping a major renovation of the existing 1995 courthouse, which besides courts, clerks, prosecutors and public defenders houses the tax office, register of deeds and other county functions.

“This project will require some internal movements as well to the existing ’95 building because we are going to shift the current entry point that is located on the north side of the building to the south side of the building,” Todd said, “as the north side of the building will be the construction site for the new courts building.”

Wrapping up the discussion, board Chair Bill Lapsley turned to the project’s most aggressive proponent, Michael Edney, day job: attorney at law.

“Commissioner Edney, we’re going to see it,” he said. “It’s coming.”

Doctors in the house

County commissioners last year agreed to a request by Pardee’s board to underwrite the borrowing of $100 million for new clinical space in Hendersonville, Brevard and Mills River and a new operating suite on the county-owned hospital’s main campus.

First up is a 43,000-square-foot clinic on Spartanburg Highway across from Bryan Easler Toyota, John Bryant, Pardee’s vice president for operations and support services, told commissioners.

“I think maybe what’s most important to understand is this is a tremendous and exciting project for the expansion of services in our community, for the county hospital,” Bryant said. He compared the financial partnership to the one that resulted in the health sciences building and cancer center on the Pardee campus, “where the county has the opportunity to support the borrowing of those dollars and then the hospital repays that back in full. As you know, each and every hospital-owned structure, as well as all the property, is ultimately in the county’s name, and this allows us to better invest in the future and the opportunity to provide clinical services across our community.”

The $28 million medical office building will contain numerous services in addition to primary care.

“You’re going to see Pardee pharmacy services there and drive-through pharmacy services,” Bryant said. “That convenience is a key element for us, and we recognize that it’s a patient benefit. It will be also coupled with physical therapy services there. And then we’ve also got some space dedicated for a specialty rotation and specialty services based on what the needs are of the population that is served by those primary care.”