City To Pour Another $153.9 Million Down Innovista Drain

Just when you thought the government-run economic development crowd in South Carolina couldn’t possibly be any dumber, along comes a hair-brained scheme to dump another $150 million into a failed “research campus” – one that has already sucked up $150 million in taxpayer dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it but empty government buildings (and emptier promises of capital investment and job creation).

The “Innovista” research campus project – which exemplifies the colossal failure of government-run economic development efforts in South Carolina – is slated to receive an estimated $153.9 million from a special “Tax Increment Financing” district that received preliminary approval from Columbia’s City Council on Thursday.

The money – part of an elaborate plan to shovel additional public resources into the failed project – will inevitably lead to huge tax increases for other city businesses and residents, who will be called upon to cover the revenues that will be lost to the TIF.

That represents another gigantic taxpayer investment – which is being approved in spite of the fact that the Innovista project has been marred by costly failures and has managed to land only two small private sector tenants.  It has also failed miserably to produce the “thousands of high-paying jobs” it promised just a few short years ago.

Worst of all, Innovista’s so-called “main draw” – hydrogen fuel cell research – has turned out to be a private sector loser, which goes to the heart of why we believe government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the private sector in the first place.

So what have South Carolina taxpayers received for their investment?

A whole lotta “nada.”

Unable to land private clients, USC has resorted to moving its public health and business schools into the otherwise empty campus, and has relied almost exclusively on federal grants to conduct what limited “research” is taking place there.

Innovista has been a huge embarrassment for its leading backers – S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell, Columbia Mayor Bob Coble and USC President Harris Pastides.

In fact, the failure of Innovista is also reportedly one of the main reasons that Coble is stepping down from his post after twenty years as Columbia’s mayor, although sources tell FITS that mayoral front-runner Steve Benjamin is on board with the TIF proposal.

Typical.  The morons who turned Columbia, S.C. into the “Face of the Recession” while running up multimillion-dollar deficits are now going to somehow turn the state’s most infamous boondoggle into a financial success?

Please.

Innovista’s failures are already being investigated by the S.C. House of Representatives, but as we predicted, the whole thing appears to be nothing but a whitewash aimed at protecting Bobby Harrell.

Not surprisingly, the taxpayer-funded bureaucrats responsible for this massive failure are going back to their old promises in an effort to justify the massive new expense.

“Innovista will enhance and strengthen the Midlands, the region and the state economically by bringing jobs to the region,” University of South Carolina spokeswoman Margaret Lamb told The Free Times, a local weekly paper which has led the way in exposing the failure of this project.

Sorry … but we’ve heard that one before … $150 million ago, in fact.

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