The South Carolina Department of Education officially cut the ribbon on a new headquarters in rural Lexington County Monday, Aug. 12, 2024, moving out of its downtown Columbia location. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — The South Carolina Department of Education officially marked the move of its 940 employees out of the agency’s long-time downtown Columbia office building, cutting the ribbon Monday on a new, 150,000-square-foot headquarters built by a politically connected developer.

“For six decades that building stood sentry over South Carolina’s education struggles and triumphs as the home of the Palmetto State’s education mission and thousands of committed South Carolina Department of Education employees,” state Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver said of the agency’s former building on Senate Street, two blocks east of the Statehouse.

“Now, exactly 60 years later, we celebrate the turning of another page and the opening of a new, hope-filled chapter in South Carolina’s education story,” Weaver continued.

The education agency’s move was part of a larger $133 million contract over 20 years, signed in 2022, with Columbia developer Bill Stern.

Stern, who chairs the state Ports Authority’s governing board and makes regular campaign donations — mostly to the state’s ruling Republicans but also to Democratic incumbents — agreed to build two new office facilities at the State Farmers Market in rural Lexington County.

He will lease them to the state Education and Natural Resources agencies for 20 years.

Stern was not among dignitaries in attendance at the ribbon cutting.

The state Education Department is the first of the two agencies to move in, joining the previously relocated state Department of Agriculture on the Farmers Market grounds.

The agriculture agency paid Stern $7 million in 2013 for two pieces of property to expand the State Farmers Market, according to a 2015 audit requested by legislators. Auditors found the market was running a deficit and suggested the state find new ways to support the site, The Associated Press reported at the time.

The education agency’s move to the building 10 miles away from its downtown home is not yet complete. Some employees are still moving in. The process started in June.

The three-story structure, which Weaver called “a visible token of the Palmetto State’s investment in and commitment to the educational future of all of our students,” boasts a cafeteria, exercise room, an atrium for employee gatherings and a wide variety of conference rooms and meeting spaces to host trainings for teachers and administrators from school districts around the state.

Construction continues on the Department of Natural Resource’s building.

Two miles north, Stern is also taking ownership of another major office property that will house state agencies.

Dominion Energy named Stern the grantee for the utility company’s 100-acre South Carolina campus, according to filings on the Lexington County Register of Deeds website.

A new deed has yet to be filed, and the purchase price has yet to be made public record.

The massive headquarters, which Dominion inherited when it took over SCANA Corp. in a 2019 buyout, will be the new home of the state agencies that provide services for people with disabilities, mental health issues, and alcohol and drug addictions, as well as the state public health agency after its recent split with the state environmental department.

That state is expected to spend nearly $500 million relocating those agencies from the redeveloped BullStreet District in downtown Columbia. Similar to the new education and natural resources locations, the lease with Stern for the former Dominion campus is a 20-year deal.

Meanwhile, the University of South Carolina spent $2.2 million in December to purchase the education agency’s downtown office building.

The state’s largest university system is still exploring its options for the property, spokesman Jeff Stensland.

USC is in talks with private developers about the potential of converting the 14-story office tower, located just off the college’s historic Horseshoe, into a housing development.

Stensland said that could potentially include housing for graduate students. It would not be geared to undergraduates.

Previous plans by a private developer to turn the building into apartments in 2022 never materialized.

The building, constructed in the 1960s, has been on the market since at least 2017.

In 2015, then-Gov. Nikki Haley included the tower among properties she called “money pits” that should be sold.