Women's Clothing Boutique Near Me Port Wentworth, GA

Residents of downtown Port Wentworth seemed largely displeased with the city's lack of communication after a town hall meeting on Wednesday to discuss a Habitat for Humanity development.

In step one of a long process to revitalize downtown Port Wentworth, Habitat for Humanity and the city signed a letter of intent in August 2023 to sell and develop land for housing in front of the Norfolk-Southern Railway and behind the Port Wentworth Soccer Fields.

The proposed development will be the first in the downtown area in more than 50 years. Plans include building up to 95 houses, but an exact number has not yet been decided on and further engineering is required.

Previously:Deal with Habitat for Humanity could bring affordable housing to downtown Port Wentworth

Public transportation:'This is a very big moment for the city:' Public transportation coming to Port Wentworth

Before City Manager Steve Davis could get through opening remarks at the town hall, there were already rumblings of discontent from the full house of residents.

One resident asked why they weren't informed of the development prior to the town hall, but Davis asked for all questions to wait until the end of the presentations. CEO of Habitat of Humanity Coastal Empire Zerik Samples presented, as well as Michael Hughes from Thomas and Hutton and Economic Director James Touchton.

When the time came to ask questions, some of those in attendance expressed their distrust of city officials after decades of being boxed in by industry and the lack of communication about development. Residents remarked that they had only known about the town hall because a friend or neighbor had told them, or they saw it on Facebook when it was posted there just a day before. Some said they received letters, but not early enough.

Others spoke about the lack of proper infrastructure to support the number of people that might move there. One mentioned that there are blighted houses downtown as well, and they should try rehabilitating those before developing more housing.

"Just looking at what we don't have here. We don't have any grocery stores. We don't have a laundromat. We don't have anything like that," said Linda Smith, a resident of Port Wentworth for 37 years and a previous member of city council. "Yet we're going to bring in some homes. I understand we're going to have a CAT that's maybe going to take us to the grocery store at the other end of the city, but how's this going to work?"

Touchton fielded that question and told the audience that the housing development would drive in other developers, like those that wanted to bring in more grocery stores.

"As we bring in housing it's going attract a new generation of folks," Touchton said. "There are so many examples I can give you. Look at Woodstock, Georgia. ... If I told you 20 years ago that the quiet town with a railroad track going through it would have $1 million townhomes, you wouldn't believe me. There's rooftop bars there, retail and entertainment and their median income was less than ours."

More:Port Wentworth announces $50 million investment in quality-of-life improvements

Manda Faye, who grew up in Port Wentworth, said that she feels indifferent after the meeting.

"There's just general distrust and lack of communication between the city and its residents," Faye said. "If we had more proactive representation, and more transparent representation, we would probably all feel better."

She was the first to ask Davis to speak to the infrastructure and trust issues.

"Just because you don't know something has happened doesn't mean it's not right and we recognize that we have a communication issue," Davis said. "We've hired a PR firm to get press releases out. We sent out text messages for this event. We discussed it at our last city council meeting. We had a presentation for this at one of our meetings way back in April."

As for infrastructure, Davis said the city has spent almost $150,000 restoring a well and they have several projects in process involving water and sewer improvements.

"We had some learning to do and some listening to do, dealing with infrastructure and the things we're trying to address," Davis said. "This administration has been here for 23 months, and we're working very hard at a rapid pace on a lot of different fronts. We're not just sitting idly by and waiting for things to happen."

This is the first town hall of the year, but there's more soon to come as the administration starts feeling out how to revitalize downtown. The city has hired Kimley-Horn, a planning, surveying, engineering and design consulting firm to help them eke out their downtown strategy. The second phase, after assessing the area, will pull in residential feedback to further develop the vision.

Destini Ambus is the general assignment reporter for Chatham County municipalities for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach her at dambus@gannett.com

PORT WENTWORTH, Ga. (WTOC) - The City of Port Wentworth is being sued by a former employee.

The city said they don’t normally comment on pending litigation, but wanted to because of the “staggering number of inaccuracies and omissions.”

Edwin Booth, the former city manager, is claiming he deserves almost a year and a half’s salary and a jury trial for the way he was treated.

The city, meanwhile, says it looks forward to “having the courts see it was not the City that failed Mr. Booth, but Mr. Booth that broke his oath and failed the City.”

In early 2022, Booth was one of a handful of city employees to resign. The lawsuit Booth filed within the last two weeks says, “The Mayor’s actions prevented (him) from performing the functions and duties as City Manager.”

He points to suspicions he had of a specific city contractor, ClearWater Solutions. In his resignation, Booth writing “it became apparent from the very start that ClearWater Solutions had control of the Council which greatly hindered my efforts.”

He claims he was investigating the company’s practices and was told to stop. The lawsuit also maintains his claims that working for the city was a hostile workplace.

“They have had a hostile work environment from the council. They have been threatened. The council has come in and said we’ll we have the majority, and you could be fired, not understanding what the charter says,” Booth said in 2022.

The city’s response to Booth’s lawsuit pulling no punches. They say in his final months in the job, Booth racked up a bill of $146,000 for being late on the city’s power bill. They call his actions “especially egregious” and an “obscene dereliction of his duty”.

They close by saying “Mr. Booth actively sought to harm the City, its residents, and its employees, while he was supposed to be its leader.”

Booth’s attorney, says his firm looks forward to representing the former city manager’s claims in court.

It’s worth noting that the company Booth was concerned about, ClearWater Solutions, was initially suspended by the city months after Booth resigned for several violations, including a failure to complete the main services they provided. Their contract has since ended.

You can read the full statement from the city by clicking here.

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NFI Industries' Savannah transload facility, in partnership with Georgia Ports Authority, seeks to save time and money with this first of its kind facility in Port Wentworth. The partnership, and facility, which helps to reduce costs, increase inventory flow and supply chain flexibility is also a mark of the Ports growth in the last decade.

The Ports have grown about 7% consistently over the last 10-15 years, according to Vice President of Sales and Marketing for GPA Flavio Batista. It is the third busiest gateway in the country, the second busiest in the east coast and has and will continue to expand in the future, Batista said.

"As the port continues to grow its capacity - in berth and in yard capacity - NFI is a great partner for us," Batista said. "As we grow, we bring more containers to the port and customers are looking at getting their containers in and out and getting their products closer to the final customer, and this NFI building will make it happen."

International shipping containers are taken from their ships at the Garden City Terminal to the transloading facility at NFI's request, before being taken less than a mile down the road to the facility. Once unloaded, NFI employees inspect, sorts, and loads freight to their designated domestic locations.

They're then loaded on trailers to be distributed across the U.S.

More:Georgia Ports is growing – here’s what it means

More:Georgia Ports Authority approves building a $127M rail terminal northeast of Atlanta

"It's very fast, very efficient to get to the inbound containers, because we're really close to the port," said President of Port Services for NFI Aaron Brown. "On the outbound side, we're translating 20 foot or 40 foot containers into 53-foot trailers, so we can get three inbound containers into two outbound containers. This building is built for capacity and for speed."

The facility has been running for about two months now, and Brown said they're still getting fully ramped up with about 100-250 employees.

"It's not unrealistic to think that we could have, five, six, seven, 800-plus employees working in the building once we get fully utilized," Brown said. "It's built to be seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, so we're really excited about the capacity to not just support our customers but to support job growth opportunities for Savannah."

GPA CEO and President Griff Lynch spoke at the ribbon-cutting Tuesday morning, thanking everyone who had made an investment to the conception and completion of the facility.

"We're happy to be partners with you, and we're looking forward to many, many years to grow together," Lynch said.

Sidney Brown, CEO of NFI also spoke at the end of the ceremony.

"We're ready, we're excited for the future," Brown said. "We want you all to be a part of this incredible journey as we look forward to the chapters ahead with NFI, GPA and the greater Savannah community."

Destini Ambus is the general assignment reporter for Chatham County municipalities for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach her at dambus@gannett.com

The City of Port Wentworth has a lot of projects bubbling under the surface that they hope residents will soon notice. One of these projects is a proposed development with Habitat for Humanity to bring up to 95 homes to the downtown area, a first step in revitalizing the area, and the first development there in 50 years.

A town hall meeting was recently held to get residents' feedback for the development. The verdict: residents were not pleased. Many residents said they weren't properly notified of the proposed development or the town hall meeting and the infrastructure can't support the flood of families that would come with it.

The meeting was the first in a series for this development. At the next Planning and Zoning Board meeting on Feb. 12, the board will hear a zoning map amendment application for the development area and recommend it for approval or denial by the city council. Also at 7 p.m. on Feb. 15, the city will having a public hearing related to this request during its regularly scheduled city council meeting. Council will vote on March 21.

If the zoning map amendment is approved, that does not necessarily mean that the development will happen. It just means that the area will be rezoned. A development agreement has not yet been drawn up and accepted, , according to City Manager Steve Davis.

Davis said that the city was working on a slew of infrastructure projects and improvements that have been in progress since they started the process about 23 months ago.

"This is a town that was founded in 1957, but it's been here since the 1700s," Davis said. "You've got a paper mill, a sugar refinery and the Port Authority right in our backyard. The infrastructure, the roads, the water and sewer lines all need to be addressed."

One of the first infrastructure issues that had been addressed was getting one of three wells functioning and operational again, which happened in December and was a $150,000 project. The second one is in the process of being prepared, and the third one is going back through the permitting process.

Among other water and sewer projects is upgrading the sewer main from an 8-inch main to a 12-inch main to connect it back to the wastewater treatment plant, which they are looking to expand.

Davis said they've replaced many roads, including Antrim Road and when they replaced the road, they found water and sewer lines running down the middle of the street that needed to be replaced and did that. They have also discovered old terracotta pipes that need to be replaced but will take millions of dollars to do so.

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Port Wentworth OKs development agreement for Ghost Pirates $25 million training facility

Other projects

Other projects the city is focusing on include recreation and improving traffic. Davis said the biggest complaint that the community has is traffic, but with major interstates and highways going through it there's little the city can do.

However, widening Highway 21 has been upgraded to a tier one project with the state, according to Davis. Funding has not been allocated and there's no timeline yet, but in the meantime, the Chatham Area Transit will be extending its route to the city in five weeks on March 1. The route has been renamed to route five since it was previously reported but will provide a new option to get cars off of the road.

Davis also mentioned the new fire station headquarters that will be at the entrance of the planned park at Meinhard and Highway 30. The headquarters will be completed in March 2025, while the first phase of the parks build out will be complete in July 2025, which will include parking, the soccer and football fields, the concession, splash park and the Ghost Pirates Training Facility.

Another project the city is working on to compliment the park is a way to connect all of the major neighborhoods to a trail pathway, which will hopefully eventually take more cars off the road.

Other plans for the future include redoing the comprehensive plan and rolling out their own fiber optic system to provide Wi-Fi to the entire city, including the downtown area. The city has also hired Kimley-Horn, planning and design consulting firm to help them establish a strategy to revitalize downtown, which they hope to have complered by the summer.

Destini Ambus is the general assignment reporter for Chatham County municipalities for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach her at dambus@gannett.com

Port Wentworth City Council unanimously approved a development agreement with the Savannah Ghost Pirates and Port Wentworth Development Authority for a new training facility.

In April 2023, the Ghost Pirates announced plans to construct the $25 million, 90,000 square-foot facility in Port Wentworth's planned 150-acre recreation complex, which will be at the corner of Monteith Road and Interstate 95, and signed a letter of intent the same month. The groundbreaking for the facility will be in March 2024 and construction is expected to be complete in the summer of 2025.

The 58-page document expands on the letter of intent signed by the Ghost Pirates and Port Wentworth in April 2023, laying out all the mechanisms by which the city, the Ghost Pirates and the Port Wentworth Development Authority will operate under the agreement.

Some of the city's obligations in the letter of intent include:

City Attorney Scott Robichaux emphasized during the meeting that there were a lot of protections for the city in the final development agreement.

More:Ghost Pirates' Port Wentworth facility will include public rinks, youth hockey leagues

More:First City Progress: West Chatham property was meant to host Ghost Pirates practice rink. What's happening instead?

"It lays out everything from timelines, how things are going to be at the actual site, what will be in there," Robichaux said. "It lays out that, if for some reason, there has to be a relocation in the next 20 or 30 years, it reverts back to the city, so it won't be sold to somebody else."

Robichaux said that the city had been operating under the letter of intent for so long, because it took time to negotiate the contract due to the state of Georgia having restrictions on how involved cities can be with private business developments. He mentioned that the attorneys for the city and Ghost Pirates are still hammering out final details, and if there were any major changes, he would bring it back to council to review.

The facility will include two regulation-size ice rinks, a sports bar and grill, a pro shop and other amenities. It will primarily be a practice facility for the Ghost Pirates, but will also host youth and adult hockey, public figure skating and learn-to-skate programs.

Destini Ambus is the general assignment reporter for Chatham County municipalities for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach her at dambus@gannett.com