In the 1960s, the City of Sumter welcomed the Western Auto company’s opening of a 70,000-square foot facility on South Main Street downtown. By the 1970s, the business closed and the building became an eyesore for decades.
Today, the old Western Auto facility is no longer an eyesore. Instead, it is the home of Central Carolina Technical College’s Health Sciences Center, where nearly 1,000 college students attend healthcare classes in the heart of downtown Sumter.
The Health Sciences Center is an example of a city-college partnership that efficiently solved multiple problems. CCTC had a critical need to expand its healthcare training programs to address growing demand, but it did not have room to expand its main campus facility. City leaders, meanwhile, sought to eliminate blight, to attract more downtown visitors and to create more pedestrian traffic for downtown businesses. They struggled to find a retail tenant to fill the large, boxy space left vacant by Western Auto.
First, the city acquired the property by swapping the building for some surplus city-owned property then financed the remainder of the purchase price over a five-year period.
In perhaps the best example of collaborative funding the city had ever participated in, a large collaboration of partners raised the $13.5 million needed for the adaptive re-use. The funding came from state appropriations, bonds issued by CCTC, other CCTC funds, federal grant money, city funding, Duke Endowment funds and donations by Progress Energy.
The project did not end simply with construction of the Health Sciences Center and its opening. CCTC is now able to expand its curriculum and hopes to bring in more students to the downtown facility.
To increase interaction between the students and the downtown business community, the Center’s lobby includes a video kiosk and other promotional materials designed to promote the city to the students. The city plans other cross-promotional activities. The center already has had a positive economic impact by generating sales and traffic for downtown businesses and restaurants. A September 2010 article in the local newspaper profiled how many downtown businesses are benefiting from the center’s presence.
Perhaps even more importantly, the downtown Health Sciences Center is an example of how a city can collaborate with educational institutions and other non-traditional downtown tenants and engage in collaborative fund-raising to provide a win-win solution for an entire community.