Justice Dept. relocating some operations to SC

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The U.S. Department of Justice is relocating some of its U.S. attorney operations from Washington to South Carolina under a 20-year lease agreement with the state’s flagship university, officials announced Monday.

The federal agency will be relocating its Executive Office for United States Attorneys to the building that now houses the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business, Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden said during a news conference in Columbia.

“I think it’s a good thing to get government out into the rest of the country,” Ogden said.

The move will bring more than 250 high-paying jobs to Columbia, a small fraction of the roughly 100,000 who work at the Department.

The effort, known as the Palmetto Project, will consolidate much of the DOJ’s attorney training program for the whole country in South Carolina. In 1996, the Department broke ground on the National Advocacy Center, a $26 million facility in Columbia where federal, state and local prosecutors participate in a variety of training programs. Since it opened two years later, more than 170,000 prosecutors and law enforcement officials have received training at the center, officials said.

Under the agreement announced Monday, the office that oversees that training program will be housed in USC’s 326,000 square-foot business school building next door. After it is renovated, the building will be home to new courtrooms, classrooms and meeting space for seminars and conferences. And Walt Wilkins, U.S. Attorney for South Carolina, said his office will also be relocating to the newly renovated building.

“It brings together the folks who work on this training operation,” Ogden said. “It’s win-win in that respect.”

A dollar figure for the lease agreement has not been announced, but officials say the move to South Carolina will save the Justice Department nearly $43 million over 20 years. It will take about four years to renovate the building and finalize the move from Washington, but U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham — who shepherded the project through congressional approvals — said the biggest hurdles have already been cleared.

“This has happened at, really, warp speed time for the federal government, said Graham, R-S.C., who has been pushing for the project for several years. “The new administration picked up where the old administration left off.”

Most of the jobs moving to Columbia will go to employees relocating from Washington, although Ogden said there will be some new hires from South Carolina.

“The people moving from Washington can do the same job for the federal government in a cheaper place, quite frankly. It takes a lot less to rent office space in Columbia, S.C., than it does in Washington, D.C. And the job that they will be performing is kind of scattered throughout Washington. They’re going to put everybody in one building. … It makes efficiency sense, it saves money.”

The rental agreement will allow the university to begin funding a new building for its business school. That new structure, university President Harris Pastides said will be part of Innovista, a public-private partnership near the school’s downtown campus that is aimed at nurturing high-tech companies.