This road welcomes travelers flying into Columbia. Why’s it so hard to make it look nice?

The most direct path from the Columbia Metropolitan Airport to downtown goes through Cayce and West Columbia. But when the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was in town for a session at Colonial Life Arena in 2019, that’s not the route the buses transporting the eight competing teams took to get there.

Asked about the appearance of Airport Boulevard, the roughly two-mile stretch that starts the quickest route into town for travelers flying into the area, both Bill Ellen, president and CEO of the local visitors bureau Experience Columbia SC, and Mike Gula, president and CEO of the airport, pointed to the NCAA avoiding the road as proof of why it needs to improve.

“They hated that strip coming through the Cayce/West Columbia area,” Ellen said, calling it a “very poor representation of coming into the capital city.”

Airport Boulevard is lined with older, in some cases dilapidated, buildings. There are hodgepodge auto lots and declining hotels and little in the way of landscaping to bind and beautify the area. As it stands, it’s not a route local leaders are anxious to show off, nor is it one the NCAA wanted to highlight.

“They got onto the interstate as soon as they could and went around,” Ellen said, adding that they’re likely not the only group bringing people to town who choose to avoid it.

“I would imagine, based on that scenario, that corporations, maybe hospitals, when you’re trying to recruit doctors or employees for whatever business, and they’re finding candidates, they have to consider those kinds of things,” he said.

Ellen said he doesn’t know of an event or company that was looking at coming to the Columbia area that directly chose not to on account of Airport Boulevard, but he believes it was likely a factor in some of those decisions.

“It could be like the phone call that you missed that you never knew about,” he said.

Efforts to improve Airport Boulevard

Local leaders are hoping to start making Airport Boulevard look a little better. Cayce and Springdale which, along with West Columbia, contain the street, are preparing to get started with a landscaping plan for a one-mile stretch running roughly from the Interstate 26 interchange to the turn off to head onto the Columbia Airport Expressway.

A variety of trees, including holly and palmetto, and other plants will be installed along with irrigation. Lexington County kicked in $500,000 to help pay for the installation alongside other donors. The work is part of an unified effort to beautify eight regional gateways organized by the Midlands Business Leadership Group, with various local entities coming together to pay for upkeep.

The landscaping, Cayce Mayor Elise Partin said, will help the area look better in ways both immediate and secondary, explaining that she hopes it will help attract new businesses to the corridor.

“Businesses go where the government’s paying attention because they know that their investment is more likely to be protected,” she said. “So a flower is not just a flower. It’s actually sending a message that says, ‘Come do business here, come visit here, come have fun here.’”

In teaming together, Cayce and Springdale are overcoming one of the key challenges to rekindling the area: the fact that it’s split between three municipalities. While the three governments get along well, Partin said, the reality that none of them can individually enact measures to help slows things down.

“Some of the different entities having different ownerships, that does affect it,” she said.

As with development in other areas of Cayce and West Columbia , it’s tricky to accomplish without uprooting local businesses that have found a home there. Partin discussed the coming improvements while lunching at La Estrella, a beloved Mexican restaurant, bakery and market that has found a home on Airport Boulevard.

“We’re always interested in bringing folks in and new stuff, but at the same time, we try to do that in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the folks who have been over there running business for decades,” said West Columbia Mayor Tem Miles. “There’s a challenge in trying to balance the competing interests, always.”

‘We want to put on a good show’

Overcoming these challenges and improving Airport Boulevard is important for the entire area, said Gula, the airport president, adding that it’s the first impression many visitors get of the area.

He added that he’s glad to know a maintenance plan is in place for the new landscaping, as a previous effort to beautify the area didn’t receive such follow-through, leaving the trees to die.

“We want to put on a good show for those that are coming into the city, and I think it’ll go a long way,” he said. “Now I can’t say that it’s going to create a tremendous increase in traffic. But as we try to beautify this whole Midlands region, I think that’s one of the main corridors that needs to be corrected.”

The next project up on the list of regional gateways to be improved is the doorstep of Fort Jackson at the Interstate 77/Forest Drive interchange.

Also on the list for improvements, with no order given for their completion, are:

• Lexington Gateway: I-20 and U.S. 1

• Harbison Gateway: I-26 and Harbison Boulevard

• Downtown Connector Gateway: I-20 and S.C. 277

• I-20 and I-26

• I-20 and I-77

• I-77 and I-26

Ellen, chief of the local visitors bureau, said he’s glad to see the initiative first turn its focus to two critical areas.

“Some of these gateways may not have as many first-time visitors to Columbia as these two,” he said. “With people coming in, flying in for the first time for a meeting, for a convention, for an interview, for whatever, an event, maybe their first visit to Columbia, and that’s their first impression. And I think that happens a lot coming from the airport. Obviously, their flights are up, the number of flights and the number of people flying in. So it’s only more impactful now than it was in previous years.

“Fort Jackson, other than the university, it’s probably the biggest draw for visitors, or one of the biggest in our city, because of all the families that come in for graduations,” Ellen added. “Most of the time, they’ve never been to Columbia and may not come back, but they travel down that corridor to Fort Jackson, and of course, it feeds off of I-77, which is also well-traveled. So I think those corridors are very important.”