Good news on the Wizard

Good.  We don't need to lose another MB golf course!

Always like to hear a course will not close in MB, thanks for the post.

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You just made my day @metric, thank you!

Thanks Metric

If only they had saved Witch. 

@brattenj 

Agreed. Traffic on 544 also getting bad.

The Witch was one-of-a-kind.

Maybe the should have kept the front9 open since they probably won't build on it.

JW11

The Sun News version.  

Developers have canceled plans to build on The Wizard. The golf course will remain open. 

 The Wizard Golf Links will remain open as a course after developers told county leaders they were walking away from potential plans to build hundreds of new homes on the property. Horry County spokesperson Kelly Moore confirmed Tuesday that the development firm G3 Engineering & Surveying has communicated to county leadership that it won’t move forward with a discussed rezoning request to build apartments and single-family homes on the course in the Carolina Forest area. “The county did receive notice from the folks managing that project that they weren’t moving forward with this project,” Moore said.  The golf course would have closed if the property’s zoning was changed to allow for a housing project and a sale to the developer was consummated, but course partner Claude Pardue said the proposal did not reach the point of being under a sales contract. “That really was a company that was testing the waters,” said Pardue, president of D.G. Golf Management, which owns and operates both The Wizard and the neighboring Man O’War Golf Club. “I will always listen to people. I’m never going to tell you or anyone else definitely ‘no’ to anything because I don’t think a smart person closes their mind. But right now we’re good to go and The Wizard is going to be spectacular this spring.” WHY THE PLAN WAS PULLED Felix Pitts, the developer with G3 Engineering who was leading the rezoning and development project, didn’t return a phone call seeking comment on Tuesday. But County Council member Dennis DiSabato, who represents the Carolina Forest area, said developers likely pulled out of the plans due to community opposition. “You saw what kind of feedback the community gave on that Plum Branch project on Gardner Lacy Road. It would have been 50 times worse,” DiSabato said, referencing a rezoning proposal Pitts and G3 Engineering sought earlier in the year that Carolina Forest residents organized against. “They recognized that it wasn’t supported by the neighboring communities.” At an October community meeting, G3 Engineering unveiled plans to build 683 new homes on 168 acres of The Wizard’s property, including 400 single-family homes and 283 apartment units. Plans also called for formally preserving part of the property, meaning it could never be developed. But Carolina Forest residents told county leaders and the developers at the community meeting that they opposed the project, and wanted the course to remain open. Several residents said they had a view of the course from their homes, and didn’t want to see that view become more housing.  “Right now we have a view of the golf course, it’s beautiful, that’s one of the reasons we bought the condo. Then they come up with this,” resident Raymond Britton, who owns a condo in the neighboring development The Fountains, said at the October meeting. “Now, we understand that it’s been shot down two other times, this is the third time. To be honest with you, we’re hoping it gets shot down again.” This most recent attempt to develop The Wizard into housing was the third time developers had pursued such plans. Two other attempts had been made, and abandoned, over the past 15 years. In 2019, a proposal to build 700 single-family and multifamily homes was met with strong opposition from area residents, and some council members including Danny Hardee, whose district contains the course, said they wouldn’t consider any residential rezoning until a Carolina Forest Boulevard widening project was complete. That project was finished this summer.

In 2006, a requested rezoning to a Planned Development District (PDD) with a proposed 650 housing units was denied by county council.   THE FUTURE OF THE WIZARD Carolina Forest residents said they opposed plans to build housing on The Wizard because more homes in the area would increase traffic and burden other infrastructure, like schools and public safety services. Residents in the Waterford Plantation neighborhood, for example, said they were concerned about additional traffic on their neighborhood roads, which some have described as already congested and dangerous. But such concerns are common in the Carolina Forest area, and Pitts said in October that G3 was pursuing the project with community needs in mind, knowing that past attempts had failed. He said they held the October community meeting to gather resident input before submitting an application to rezone the land from its current Planned Development status to residential. Due to the community pushback, though, the firm ultimately never submitted an application for rezoning the land, Moore said. G3 Engineering communicated to the county in recent days that no application would be coming, Moore said. DiSabato said Tuesday that he’s glad the golf course, a 6,721-yard Dan Maples design that opened in 1996, will remain open for the time being. “As much as those communities don’t want it developed into a housing community they also don’t want it as a blighted golf course,” he said. D.G. Golf Management, which also operates as Mystical Golf, was a three-course company until Nov. 21, when it closed The Witch Golf Links in advance of a sale to homebuilder R.S. Parker Homes, according to Pardue. A plan for a portion of that property approved by the county calls for a 326-home residential development consisting of 115 townhomes and 211 single-family homes and 6 acres of commercial development along S.C. 544. The Witch’s front nine, which will not be redeveloped, winds through swamps and wetlands off the Waccamaw River and was regularly flooding, leading to the sale, Pardue said. “To be honest about it I’m looking to buy,” Pardue said. “We sold one because of the problems we had with The Witch and we wanted to get out of debt, and selling The Witch did that, and I’m ready to rock and roll. I’m looking to buy a third one. . . . I feel very confident about where we’re going as an industry.”
 
DiSabato added that if the county completes road improvement projects in Carolina Forest — like connecting Gardner Lacy Road to International Drive and extending Postal Way to give an alternate route to U.S. 501 — developing The Wizard may be possible in the future. Such projects, though, are years away. The county recently purchased land to build an S.C. 31 interchange at Augusta Plantation Drive, though constructing that road could take years. And the county will likely have to wait until 2025 for funding for Gardner Lacy Road. “I don’t know what the future holds for that property,” DiSabato said. 

@artmbgolf 

Thanks for the Sun News version of this story. It seems that this third attempt for redeveloping the Wizard could be the last one for many years ahead. Another good news is that the Wizard will be is very good shape this spring.