Mike Dawson of the River Alliance

MidlandsBiz:
When was the River Alliance formed? 

Mike Dawson:
The River Alliance started as a fallout of a Chamber intra-city visit in 1994.  We took two busloads of visitors to the Riverbanks Zoo and the comments we heard overwhelmingly were, Gosh there’s a river down here; why don’t you have paths along it?

That was really the genesis of the Three Rivers Greenway project and the River Alliance. 

MidlandsBiz:
What early hurdles did you have to overcome?

Mike Dawson:
The problem in Columbia was there was no concept of public ownership of the water.  We had to figure out how to overcome that mindset?

At the time, you had very limited access to the Broad River; in most places it was nothing but kudzu-invested jungle. If you wanted to risk it, you could walk past the prison and up the canal itself, but it was pretty deserted and not really a very pleasant experience. 

On the Congaree, two boat landings existed – one each on the Lexington and Richland County sides and there was a one boat landing down below the Congaree swamp by Highway 601. You could access the river at these points with a boat, but otherwise it was trespassing. 

 

 

MidlandsBiz:
What is the structure of the River Alliance?

Mike Dawson:
From the outset, we deliberately structured the River Alliance Board to reflect this need to communicate across boundaries and ensure that all of the major downtown parties would be sitting across the table. The only new entity to join the Board has been the Convention and Tourism Board, because they were not around at the time. 

The story behind the River Alliance over these past 15 years is regional cooperation. I know people sometimes point fingers at Columbia and say that governments don’t work together, but that simply has not been the case here.  The leaders of all five of the local governments took considerable political risk to cooperate outside their boundaries in order to make these series of greenway projects a reality.

The lesson learned is that the local consumer, the local resident really doesn’t care where the boundaries are – they just want a final product that their families can enjoy.  Bob Coble, Avery Wilkerson, Bobby Horton and many others bought into this vision and worked hard  to make it happen. 

MidlandsBiz:
How is the River Alliance funded?

Mike Dawson:
We formed a non-profit corporation that is funded by annual requests for donations from the two counties and the three cities, and also from private entities.

MidlandsBiz:
How are the greenway projects funded?

Mike Dawson:
Early on, the role of the River Alliance quickly evolved from just planning to also include implementation.  We needed to put teams together to ensure that the greenway was respectful of the neighborhoods in which we were operating. 

Under South Carolina law, you can designate downtrodden areas of your city for improvement and finance the project as tax increment district by issuing bonds.  Of course, you have to have some reasonable expectation of a final product that will increase the revenue base so that you can pay off the bonds.

The River Alliance helped to put the financing in place by recommending the establishment of tax increment solutions and secured Federal Transportation Funds for the three cities.
 
MidlandsBiz:
Has this financing strategy proven effective?

Mike Dawson:
Absolutely!  In fact, we totally miscalculated the financial impact of the increase in the tax base.

Two overarching strategies have played out over these past 13 years.  How do we provide public access to the water and how do we get people to live, work and play in the downtown? 

The greenway policy and execution combined with the market interest in downtown has made this whole thing come together.  A paradigm shift in people’s thinking about downtown has occurred.  Thirteen years ago, nobody believed that anybody would want to live in downtown Columbia let alone Cayce or West Columbia. 

The peripheral projects have also played a key role in changing the mindset.  EdVenture, the renovation of the State Museum proved to be early benchmarks of success. People could see that there was stuff starting to happen downtown.

It’s a work in progress, but to see the CanalSide houses start to go up on the old prison site, to see the town homes selling along the river, to see the baseball stadium being built – there’s some really cool stuff going on. 

MidlandsBiz:
What is your leadership style?

Mike Dawson:
In some other communities, they have taken the top-down approach to river front development and pushed large projects: casinos, luxury hotels etc.  We do more of a community-based planning model where we ask people (our customers) what they want. 

MidlandsBiz:
What did the customers say they wanted?

Mike Dawson:
People wanted linear, lighted, secure pathways with access to the water and with standardized amenities – benches, bathrooms etc.  That became how we defined greenway.  Slowly, but surely, we have been pushing this idea up the hill over these past 14 and we now have produced 8.5 miles of greenway. 

 

 

MidlandsBiz:
What metrics do you use to measure the success of the greenway?

Mike Dawson:
Whether it’s to bike, walk, attend an outdoor concert, or simply skip a few stones in the water, we measure our success by the number of people on the greenway.  Our main metric is traffic flow. 

I recall when we first built the ramp down from the Broad River Bridge over Interstate 20, people came up to me and asked if they could actually walk down there along the river.  They had lived close to the river for years and had never actually experienced it.  Over the years we have seen a dramatic shift in traffic and in attitudes; it went from 3 people a day to 500 people an hour.

People like what we produce so that’s a good sign. 

We try not to be in the business of doing events, but several years back we started doing Saturday night concert events at the new amphitheater.  We had figured on 75-100 people a night to cover our cost; now we might have 1,000 people down at the river attending concerts.

People are starting to scout out routes that connect and they will call me to ask how they can ride their bikes through the city. I see our job as connecting the dots; providing an uninterrupted greenway where people can for example drop in by the dam at Lake Murray and pop up at the Bull Street project or at the new baseball stadium.   We don’t have a great tradition of bike-riding in Columbia, or in America for that matter, but that is one of the visions – to provide an alternative form of transportation.

MidlandsBiz:
What is preventing you from realizing that dream?  What are the next challenges?

Mike Dawson:
Our current focus is to connect the dots in the downtown area and build on those existing 8.5 miles.  While it may happen one day, it’s a heckuva long way from CanalSide to the dam. 

Finishing the greenway in an economic downturn wi
ll be a challenge.  It costs about $1M a mile to build greenway so the question remains: how you pay for it.  But now we can go to people and prove by comparing that greenway construction yields a good return on investment and a positive economic impact.

Continued regional cooperation will also be essential going forward.

The biggest challenge will be to continue to work and negotiate with individual landowners and convince them to allow public access through their land.  Our future strategy will be driven by building greenway in areas that have fewer property owners.  Each separate owner or lot line means more negotiation and a longer timeline for approval.

 

 

MidlandsBiz:
Why would landowners want to give up their land?

Mike Dawson:
Their land is sitting on flood way that is not worth a whole lot – maybe round $7,000 an acre.  So we are taking what landowners can’t really use anyway and turning it into public access. 

MidlandsBiz:
What is the difference between a flood plain and a floodway?

Mike Dawson:
Both are Federal definitions
Floodway is a horizontal line on a map; that is where no development can occur, but we can build Greenway. 

Flood plain is also defined on a map in width from the floodway and in vertical elevation.  The question for Governments and developers is whether it makes sense to build on the flood plain. 

MidlandsBiz:
There has been a lot in the news this summer about flooding rivers, particularly the Mississippi.  How susceptible to flood is Columbia? The Greenway?

Mike Dawson:
No doubt, it’s tough to see your whole community under 10 feet of water.  The whole business of where we build and how we build it should be subjected to a post-Hugo, post Mississippi logic.  The 100-year flood level sounds like a longtime ago, but you never know, it could be next week. 

All the physical structures that we build are in the flood way and are designed to take a total immersion. 

The dams up Lake Murray are not only sources of power generation; they are designed to mitigate the risk of flooding.

MidlandsBiz:
There was news earlier on about how the water in the rivers was polluted.  What is your read on the situation?

Mike Dawson:
DHEC went out and measured the level of pollution in the river earlier in the year.  The Sierra Club pushed pretty hard to put out a warning sign as a way of drawing attention to the importance of this issue. 

Point source emissions, sewage treatment plants, run off from agricultural waste, septic tank leaks, storm water runoff – these are just a few of the causes of pollution not just here but in rivers across the country.  Here in SC, stormwater runoff treatment is at a pretty primitive stage.  We may want to look to Oregon for solutions here; they are on the cutting edge of some new technologies and methodologies to deal with this problem. 

The larger issue is what is America going to do about water supply in the future?  What is South Carolina going to do about water?

MidlandsBiz:
Is water quality just as important as air quality?

Mike Dawson:
Air quality tends to get more attention because it directly affects federal appropriations for highway funding.  The waterways are more subtle because, as of yet, there are no direct appropriations implications. 

MidlandsBiz:
What are you most excited about going forward?

Mike Dawson:
We are looking to build a 12,000 year history park out by the SCANA campus.  It’s an abandoned piece of floodway that happens to have 12,000 years of continuous human occupation on it.  We are looking to bring people off of Interstate 77 and into the city, to tell the story of human history from Native Americans, to the early colonial period through the revolutionary and civil wars.

If you add up all of the projects – already established housing, housing in the progress of being built, as well as housing that is in the planning stage – we are   excited that there is $429M of investment along the greenway.

It’s going to be fun to see how this turns out.