HARTSVILLE — Hartsville city officials say work to reconfigure Railroad Avenue, connecting it to Cargill Way at Fourth Street, should be complete in about three months.
While much of the work already has taken place at the site just off South Fourth Street, officials held a formal groundbreaking ceremony Monday morning for the project, part of the continued Vista development project.
Plans call for reconfiguring Railroad Avenue so that it connects to Cargill Way with a T-intersection, Hartsville City Manager Jim Pennington said. Once complete, Railroad Avenue, Cargill Way and Marlboro Avenue will be connected as one street.
The project also involves moving electrical lines, water and sewer lines and stormwater drainage, Pennington said.
Once this phase of the project is complete, it will open up additional property in the Vista area on Railroad Avenue — the old S.C. Central Railroad rail yard — on the Fourth Street end of the property in an area downtown where city officials hope to entice a hotel chain to build a new hotel, Pennington said.
Talks between the city and a developer over a possible hotel on the site are still ongoing, Pennington said.
“The city attorney and the attorney for a potential client are drafting language now, so it’s still in negotiations,” he said.
Among the issues remaining, he said, are making sure the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is in agreement with any such project on the former railroad site.
The project is being funded in part by a $5 million bond issue financed by the city’s 2-percent hospitality tax and approved by Hartsville City Council in 2007 to make improvements and upgrades to parks and recreational facilities throughout the city, as well as from $250,000 in state funding secured by Darlington County’s legislative delegation for the Vista development.
State Sen. Gerald Malloy and state Rep. Jay Lucas, both of Hartsville, were on hand for Monday’s groundbreaking.
Malloy said the effort to redevelop the railroad yard was in its infancy when he was first elected to the Senate in 2003.
“Obviously, Hartsville has made a great investment in this project,” he said.
The project ties in well with the construction under way to complete the new campus of the S.C. Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics just down Railroad Avenue from the site, Malloy said. These kinds of projects are making Hartsville the envy of other small cities and counties throughout the state.
“This is a long-running project,” Lucas said. “Sometimes, with projects like this, it seems like they won’t get done, but Hartsville is getting there.”
Once the street project is complete, officials will likely change the names of the three connected streets to one name, Pennington said.
“You’ve got three names for a section of street that is just not that long,” he said.
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