The Effingham County board of directors met Thursday evening, September 25, for its monthly meeting. Last week’s regularly-scheduled IDA board meeting was postponed until September 25, because of a schedule conflict with the Georgia Economic Development conference that was in town last week according to John Henry, CEO at the IDA. 

The agenda, as well as the concluding comments of the last meeting indicated that all outstanding items needed from Medient to the IDA would be provided, including a supplemental Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Medient and the County that could be presented for final approval by the IDA board. 

However, no new documents were ready. “We are closer on the new agreement,” said Ted Corello, attorney for the IDA. “I think we’re a lot closer but we need another draft that will get kicked out and circulated to everybody. We’ve made substantial progress,” he said.

The IDA’s Medient Committee, along with Medient leadership and lawyer for IDA, have been meeting via regular Tuesday morning conference calls, to “stay on top of these outstanding items that are required for the master plan approval process,” said Henry. “We’re almost there,” said Henry. “The only thing we have left to address is the supplemental agreement. We’ve really focused on that and had to re-craft that.” he said. “That will act as an amendment to the existing MOU.”

Henry reported that Medient had delivered most of the other outstanding items, including the proposed development schedule, job creation estimates, cost abatement plan and capital investment commitment. “We are still waiting on a water/sewer demands, but that will come when the [new] master plan is fleshed out,” he said. “That is still outstanding but we expect it to be until the engineers have revised their plans a little further.” Also outstanding is the Development Regional Impact (DRI) statement.

Henry said he expects the proposed new MOU to be ready for the next board meeting, now rescheduled for October 21, to give the committee time to finish its work. “The next step is the workshop that was contemplated at the last board meeting so that we can set down with all the information here and go through it and actually file for the master plan,” said Henry. “I think we have enough information now that we can pull it all together and make some sort of decision once we have the supplemental agreement.”

The newest revisions of the documents are not available to the public yet, said Henry. “They are under attorney/client privilege right now until everyone has had a chance to review them and decide what the final documents are going to look like,” said Henry.