At 10 a.m. today, there was a groundbreaking ceremony for the new technology park, known as iTAP, that will be situated directly between Myrtle Beach International Airport and The Market Common at the old airforce base.

The technology park has been a collaborative effort between private companies and governments. Both SCNow.com and WMBF have briefs on the park and the groundbreaking.

If it seems odd that private sector utilities like Horry Electric and Frontier Communications are cutting large $300,000 checks for MB iTAP, it could be because they are excercising their option to finance local infrastructure improvements as a tax write-off. According to the South Carolina Rural Development Act, each taxpaying utility can defer up to $300,000 of its annual state gross-receipts tax obligation to finance job-creating infrastructure improvements on the local level.

The official MB iTAP website isn't very informative in terms of the facility or planned development. The Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development has much more information on their website with this PDF file . There's also this brochure type PDF you can yawn over.

Since the type of industries this facility is designed to attract has much higher average wage jobs than the tourism and service indsutries, this could be a great boon to diversifying our local economy.