Some ideas seem to be too dreadful to just roll over and quietly die. The construction of speculative, county-owned, commercial buildings is one of these truly bad ideas.

Beaufort County has tried implementing economic development along these lines in the past. We built the “industry ready” Quick Start II building in 2007 by investing $2.75 million in a project that sat empty until 2013. When it sold for $1.05 million, later reduced to $850,000 by additional city and county tax concessions, the buyer’s spokesperson told the Beaufort Observer, “…if [we] hadn’t showed up, that building would still be empty today.”

In the Washington Daily News on June 18, 2016, retired commissioner Al Klemm resurrected the idea of creating more of these buildings by writing, “New and expanding industry prefers good existing buildings of which we have none. When you have none, they go elsewhere and find one.”

This literally describes a situation where economic developers in surrounding counties have created a stock of vacant buildings in hope of attracting new businesses to their communities. When new businesses eventually do express interest in locating anywhere within our overall region, they have the opportunity of playing each county off against the others as various economic developers race to the bottom in their attempts to unload those unsold properties. This scenario occurred in March 2012 with Beaufort losing out to Martin County, and again in 2013 when a Beaufort County business began negotiations to receive a package of grants as an incentive to move into the industrial park. During those discussions the Weir Building became available and drew our buyer away with a steeply discounted price, leaving the industrial park’s grant-supported negotiations to collapse.

Beaufort County taxpayers are being asked to add to the inventory of unsold buildings and step into a trap from which we will immediately be struggling to escape.

The belief that firms require prebuilt, county-owned structures before they move into a community is untrue, and the Economic Development Commission’s lack of research for this claim is well established. Almost every single commercial building in this nation is a private undertaking; even locally, private initiative built the Wal-Mart store, the Lowe’s stores and a factory for Fountain Boat. Within freely operating capital and real-estate markets, the construction industry can create an engineering solution for any enterprise imaginable.

It is an entrepreneur’s job to find and pay for that solution, not the taxpayer’s.

Historically semi-finished shell structures costs roughly $50 per square foot to build. In Beaufort County over the last decade, the highest price any commercial building has brought in the market place was Quick Start II’s gross price of $1.05 million, i.e., $21per square foot. Since these buildings do not recover their costs, how do we cover the loss? Beaufort County has just run through $7 million in reserve cash, increased taxes and fees by over $2.5 million and will be recording a $1 million deficit.

We’ve tried this and it didn’t work. Don’t make the same mistake again.

Warren Smith is a Beaufort County resident.