The empty parking lot, the graffiti-covered Movies at Polo theater, the mauled sand bluff out back. It’s hard to imagine the eyesore on Two Notch Road used to be part of Sesquicentennial State Park.

The 10-acre tract sold by the S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism in 1988 is one of the few pieces of public parks or forests turned over to private developers in the past two decades in the state.

That sale is pertinent again because of a U.S. Forest Service proposal to sell about 300,000 acres nationwide, including 4,600 acres in South Carolina.

A Senate committee this month shot down the Forest Service plan, at least for this year. But if the Forest Service can consider selling its land to pay for an underfunded rural schools program, conservation leaders wonder, what other forested land owned by state or federal governments could be sold to developers?

The answer is hard to pin down. Strict clauses in deeds make it nearly impossible to sell some government-owned natural areas. Much more public property would be difficult to sell because of the hassles and expenses of dealing with federal regulations. But in other cases, few restrictions prevent sales.

Except maybe the memory of the Sesqui deal. It’s no coincidence that the only state park land transferred since then has been handed over to other public agencies.

“I know whenever the possibility of selling land comes up, somebody brings up the Sesqui deal,” said Phil Gaines, director of the State Park Service.

More than 1,400 people signed petitions against the Sesqui sale. Gov. Carroll Campbell got involved, helping scuttle the original deal because there wasn’t an open bidding process.

In the end, the deal went through. Parks, Recreation and Tourism sold 10.42 acres to an Aiken County developer for $1.5 million. Proceeds went to the Recreation Land Trust Fund to be spent to buy other public land.

People in Northeast Richland felt like a kid who had a toy taken away.

“What griped me as much as anything was (Sesqui) was a gift from Columbia’s Sesquicentennial Commission,” former Richland County Council member John Monroe said. “They’ve always said the good Lord isn’t making any more land. And they sold that land away.”

DESIRABLE PROPERTY

Could it happen again? Government agency leaders cannot rule it out, but they also said they have no plans to sell desirable property.

Despite budget woes in recent years, most state agencies have been in the land acquisition mode. In most cases, they were taken aback by the Forest Service plan.

“It’s contrary to what we’re trying to do in this state, which is to preserve and protect our special places,” Gaines said.

From 1995 to 2005, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, the State Park Service and the S.C. Forestry Commission sold to private entities only 27 acres, all of those former rural fire tower sites.

Other governmental agencies would have more difficulty selling their land than the U.S. Forest Service, which traditionally acquires property only if it has no deed restrictions that might prevent it from being resold later. The vast majority of the land owned by the state forestry, parks and natural resources agencies has many restrictions on its sale.

S.C. Department of Natural Resources officials said all of the agency’s land, except the sites of a couple of its rural offices, has been purchased or managed with the help of federal funds. That means anyone who purchases the land would have to pay back those funds or swap comparable land as a replacement, said John Frampton, director of the agency.

The State Park Service frequently gets inquiries about portions of Sesqui, Gaines said. Because federal Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars have been used in recent years to manage the heart of Sesqui, the park service is restricted from selling most of the land unless the deal includes replacement land.

Two such swaps are on the table. One seems likely to happen, with Richland District 2 schools swapping property it owns on one border of the park for a sliver of park land to make room for a bus lane at a new elementary school on Polo Road.

Such swaps aren’t unusual. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for instance, swapped 412 acres in Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge for 421 acres that bordered the refuge in 1985.

In a more complicated swap, the S.C. Forestry Commission in the early 1990s turned over 12,521 acres in Manchester State Forest to the federal government for the Poinsett Bombing Range.

The state got the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base property, which in turn was sold and the proceeds used to buy 27,284 acres of forest land for the state.

More common is the transfer of property from one public agency to another. State parks handed over Lynches River State Park to Florence County in 2004, with deed restrictions limiting the land to use as a park. It sold Sgt. Jasper State Park to Jasper County for $200,000 in 1999, with the stipulation that 130 of its 144 acres be maintained as a park.

Only four state parks have no sales limitations on their deeds: Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site, Redcliff Plantation State Historic Site, Rose Hill Plantation State Historic Site and Goodale State Park, Gaines said.

The restrictions on others range from reverter clauses (the family of the original owners of the 1,255-acre Edisto Beach State Park would have the right to buy it before anyone else, at the bargain price of $5,000) to limitations on land managed or purchased with federal funds.

“There are limitations,” Gaines said. “It’s not that nothing could be done to any of the property forever, but there are limitations.”

State parks would like to buy land offered for sale by the Forest Service near Oconee State Park, but the vast majority of its land acquisition funds come from federal and state grant programs designed to buy land that isn’t protected. Gaines wonders if the Forest Service land would have to be sold to a private owner before the state could apply for grants to re-protect it.

“Where does the funding come from to protect land that’s already protected?” Gaines asked.

‘POWERFUL MESSAGE’

When the U.S. Forest Service selected potential properties to sell, one of the determining factors was whether the property was separated from core Forest Service land by a busy road, making it difficult to manage. If state agencies took the same approach, the S.C. Forestry Commission might put up for grabs nearly 300 acres of Harbison State Forest separated from the core of the forest by Lost Creek Drive.

Two years ago, Piney Grove LLC bought 36.4 acres of private land near Harbison State Forest for $640,000 for a patio home development. That translates into about $17,500 per acre. The section of Harbison State Forest across Lost Creek Drive from the main forest would be even more valuable than that parcel today, developer Stewart Mungo said. Even if it’s worth only $20,000 an acre, a sale could reap the state $6 million.

The nine-member commission that guides policy for the state forests has discussed in generalities the possibility of selling land, but it always comes back to “managing for the long term for forestry,” state forester Bob Schowalter said. The other state forests have stronger deed restrictions than Harbison.

Even when the land has no deed restrictions, there’s another strong disincentive for selling some state property. Two years ago, the Legislature stipulated that half of sales proceeds for state property would go to the state general fund. If a section of Harbison were sold for $6 million, the Forestry Commission would get only $3 million.

Before that change, however, the Forestry Commission never seriously considered selling the valuable Harbison land, even during severe budget crunches.

“That sends a powerful message on its own about how much we value it,” Schowalter said.

‘BIG DISAPPOINTMENT’

Mark Robertson, director of The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina, was among the chorus asking what is truly protected after the U.S. Forest Service proposal came out. As the initial furor has settled into a political discussion, he is less concerned.

“We don’t see any indication that any other agency has anything like this planned,” Robertson said.

But he never expected the Forest Service to propose anything like this. “It was a big surprise and a big disappointment because on the whole they’ve been good stewards of the land,” he said.

Many conservation leaders were certain the Forest Service plan would be scuttled or radically modified in Washington. Congressional leaders, especially from Western states, spoke out quickly against the plan and eventually shot it down.

Regardless, Robertson and other conservation leaders pledged they would be especially vigilant of public land transactions in the future. They think they have the public, and for that matter most of the public agency leaders, on their side.

“I think there is a very strong sense that people understand the benefits of these public lands,” Robertson said. “And in our system of government, people’s opinions matter.”

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366.