Patriots Point to Meet With Town Leaders

The board for embattled Patriots Points plans a noon joint meeting today with Mount Pleasant’s Town Council.

Both sides say there won’t be earth-shattering news from the joint session, but town leaders say they are concerned about Patriot Point’s future.

After all, the military tourist attraction is the single-biggest draw for the town, and it holds Mount Pleasant’s most valuable chunk of real estate.

“Patriots Point is the city’s waterfront gateway,” said Eric DeMoura, town administrator. “We just want to meet with them to discuss our mutual interests.”

In addition to Patriots Point’s waterfront military attractions, centered around the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier, it also has more than 360 acres of waterfront property.

In the last year, Patriots Point has increasingly been criticized for allowing those Naval assets, the Yorktown and warship USS Laffey, to deteriorate over the last 30 years without much of a plan for how it would pay for repairs.

It borrowed $9 million from the State of South Carolina in 2009 to dry dock and repair the Laffey, but last year its board chairman wrote state leaders to say it could not repay the loan and needed more time.

That debt, along with an estimated $100 million price tag for restoring the Yorktown, has many people speculating as to whether Patriots Point should sell its real estate to shore up its shaky finances.

Today’s meeting, however, isn’t likely going to solve that quandary.

“We have a really new board. Six of nine of our members have been here less than a year,” said Mac Burdette, Patriots Point’s executive director. “We just want to present some information, and tell them what we’re going to do out here next year.”

And those plans hinge very much on the town of Mount Pleasant and the State of South Carolina, Burdette said.

“Our board is looking possibly at future development at Patriots Point, and that comes under the rules of the Town of Mount Pleasant,” said Burdette. “We are also owned by the State of South Carolina, so nothing we do in terms of land can happen without the legislature’s approval and then approval from the town council.”

There has been some fairly specific discussion about whether the South Carolina Research Authority, currently located near the Boeing manufacturing plant, will relocate to Patriots Point.

Neither Patriots Point nor SCRA rule out such a move, but both parties say any deal is in the very distant future.

“We aren’t even close to anything like that,” Burdette said. Talks with SCRA are “exploratory at best. There are too many things involved at this point to even know if that could happen.”

SCRA’s spokeswoman Micki Howard said the private-public research institute is looking at a dozen or more sites for relocation and that any talk about Patriots Point being the group’s future home is “incorrect.”

“That’s down the road. There’s no agreement, there’s no date,” Howard said.

So on Tuesday, when Patriots Point and the town council meets, there likely won’t be big headlines, said both DeMoura and Burdette.

“It’s just kind of a getting-to-know-you thing,” Burdette said.

“We think Patriots Point is a huge asset. It’s the third-largest tourist attraction in the state,” DeMoura said. “I suspect we’ll tell them that at some point on Tuesday and then talk about the future.”

The meeting starts at noon in the town council chambers.