Five years after declaring bankruptcy, the Southern Connector sees climbing revenues – and a future as the main artery for a burgeoning health care industry corridor
Few topics in the Upstate elicit as strong and polarized reactions as the Southern Connector, the 16-mile toll road stretching across southern Greenville County.
After failing to meet ridership projections after opening in 2001, the privately built association overseeing the road declared bankruptcy in 2010, and in 2012 restructured its debt payments and began the path to recovery. Three years later, its leaders report record ridership and climbing revenues, and say it could serve as the backbone of a burgeoning economic corridor in the future.
“Until the Southern Connector was built, there really was no main infrastructure in the southern part of Greenville County,” said Caleb Freeman, noting his 340-acre, 650-unit residential mixed-use development Acadia would not have been possible without it. “It was impossible to get to this land unless you knew the back roads. … There really was no way to develop efficiently these large tracts of land.”
Today, he said, the Southern Connector has already made a difference by making the development tracts more accessible and minimizing travel time to destinations like downtown Greenville. In addition, recently announced plans for a life sciences and biomedical industry cluster (Innovations in Medical Economic Development, or IMED) will spur all kinds of development along the corridor, he said.
“You may not see it now, but in the next 10, 20, 30 years, this stretch of the Southern Connector will be really focused on the health care industry,” Freeman said, predicting the corridor could develop and thrive along the same lines as CU-ICAR. “It might be offices for pharmaceutical companies, and more residences for doctors and medical-related people. … We’re going to start to look at our land and say what we want to do, how do we want to develop it.”
While some motorists argue that the $3 per car fare on the Southern Connector is too expensive, more and more are using the tollway to avoid congestion in other areas, said Pete Femia, the executive vice president and general manager for the Connector 2000 Association, which oversees the road. For example, traffic jumped more than 10 percent to 5.2 million transactions in 2014, while total revenue increased 8.7 percent to $7.6 million. Palmetto Passes make up a third of all transactions, said Femia, which speaks to a significant portion of people choosing the Southern Connector as a regular part of their commute or travel around the area.
While the county’s southern half includes some economic drivers – think the S.C. Technology and Aviation Center – the area has lagged behind in development compared to its northern counterpart in the last few years. That means southern Greenville County still has hundreds of acres of large, industrial zoned tracts available for development along the connector, according to Greenville Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Mark Farris. While many tracts may not be “shovel ready” for companies, others with access along the connector such as The Matrix Business and Technology Park are some of their most frequented site visits.
“We show The Matrix more than half the time. We went out there twice already this week,” said Farris, who said most companies he works with will prioritize workforce high above the physical and geographic attributes of a potential site. “I think it’s a safe bet that that corridor is going to be very active for the next decade.”
In recent years, Femia said part of the road to better financial health has been cutting excess expenses, to the point of doing their own building maintenance.
“Over the years we’ve saved thousands of dollars by doing things ourselves rather than contracting for something as simple as fixing a leaky pipe,” he said. “We’re lean. There are no extra bodies here.”
