Development in downtown Florence is nothing new.
“We were planning and designing a parking deck…we knew we were probably going to locate it in this area on Cheves Street,” mentioned Mayor Stephen Wukela.
However, earlier this week Florence City Council approved an 85 unit apartment complex, which will wrap around a four story parking deck in downtown.
It will be located near the intersection of South Irby and West Cheves Streets.
“There’s a number of cause for the need of parking downtown. So we wanted to get ahead of this issue. You don’t want parking to slow the growth of revitalization downtown,” Wukela explained.
“You got downtown revenue paying for downtown infrastructure,” he added.
Altogether, roughly a $14 million project that couldn’t have better timing with the construction of Francis Marion’s Health Sciences campus on West Evans Street.
“That was absolutely done on purpose. We want to make sure this is up and running before health sciences facility is open, but we also want a place for those students to live. When we get well into the spring, it’s going to be a lot of construction activity in downtown Florence,” said Wukela.
The design and review board met on Wednesday to discuss building plans.
Construction is expected to start next month and will wrap up in 2016.
