SANTEE – A consulting company held a public meeting at Santee State Park on Tuesday to obtain ideas from local residents on how to best entice tourists to visit the Santee area.

The New Carolina’s Tourism Cluster Committee in November 2005 commissioned a study by consultant Michael MacNulty of Tourism Development International in Ireland to complete a statewide tourism action plan. The completed plan included a call for planning at the regional level.

In 2007, the state legislature passed an appropriation for product development. Some of the money is being used to develop detailed, long-range plans for each of South Carolina’s eight product development areas.

The Central Core Product Development Area, one of the eight designated regions, will be the focus for comprehensive site visits during September. The counties in the central core are Orangeburg, Calhoun, Clarendon, Lexington, Sumter, Newberry, Kershaw, Richland and Saluda.

TDI team members are working with area stakeholders and S.C. Parks, Recreation and Tourism to develop a tourism development concept plan for the region.

Because four of the listed counties are within the Santee Cooper Country tourism region, the Santee Cooper Country staff is serving on the steering committee.

During the Sept. 30 public meeting, Peter MacNulty, TDI managing director, said the purpose of the meeting was to get community leaders and residents talking about the obstacles, as they see them, to increasing tourism in the area. He said the focus is to determine what the area has in terms of tourism assets and how the community might best match those assets to market opportunities.

Robert Cleverdon, TDI director of international projects, said, “This is an area that is headed for major, major, major change. Demographic change. The slated distribution center, the major new Beach Company project in Summerton and the continued influx of retirees that move into the area (are) all going to bring about change. You would like to retain the small town feel but have the benefits of growth.”

The major obstacle pointed out by some in attendance was the uncertainty of the water levels of Lake Marion. The drastic fall in lake levels discourages fishermen from making plans to visit the area, it was noted.

“The problems with Santee Cooper and the lake levels are not something that cannot be fixed with a little tweaking,” Cleverdon said. “We are talking about a big agency here, and to get cooperation is going to take more than what we can do here. It is going to take a lot of political pressure and movement to fix things. Yet, it is the key to this area.”

He said there seems to be a lack of coordination between adjoining counties and towns.

“The individual leaders of adjoining communities were exchanging business cards as if they did not know each other in our meetings,” Cleverdon said. The lack of coordination and forward planning hurts the effort to bring tourists to the area, he said.

The group as a whole agreed that golf is the major drawing card for Santee and the surrounding area and that the golfing community has done an excellent job of getting the news out to Canadians and the northern U.S. about the golf packages in Santee.

In summing up the first of four public meetings that will be held, those attending Tuesday’s session agreed that major changes are coming to the area and that more should be done to market Santee’s assets.

T&D Correspondent S.W. Shoptaw can be reached by e-mail at Swsx5@aol.com. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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