Capital Palmetto Bancshares Inc., the Greenville bank holding company that owns Palmetto Bank, expects $100 million in private placement to institutional investors. CapGen Financial Partners will invest $55 million in the bank’s common stock, and another $45 million will come from other institutional investors’ capital commitments to purchase shares at the same price CapGen is paying, $2.60 per share. Then the bank can be termed “well capitalized.”

Babcock building

According to an informal survey run by Columbia

Regional Business Report as to what should become of the Babcock building after the sale of the 180–acre Bull Street property, 29 percent of the respondents recommended conversion into a medical office building. Conversion into residential condos was the choice of 19 percent, and 17 percent recommended razing the building.

What building(s), exactly? Also in Columbia Regional Business Report is a mysterious mention of an in–state $900 million real estate financial deal by Freehold Capital

Partners, based in New York City. As the Report

asks, what is the deal here? With whom? On what site? The home of the project’s final improved value, $900 million, is somewhere inside South Carolina, but where?

Broadband Citizens can go to Connect South Carolina (www.connectsc.org) to subscribe to high–speed internet. Connect South Carolina was awarded $1.7 million in stimulus funds.

Santee Cooper gets help from Google Before the year is out, state–owned utility Santee Cooper will begin converting methane gas from a Berkeley County landfill into electric power. Search engine Google, which has a data center nearby in Berkeley County, will participate in the program by buying the carbon offsets through 2013.

Commerce correction The S.C. Dept. of Commerce is dropping another 12 positions as of July 1. The department has reduced Secretary Joe Taylor’s salary by about 20 percent. During the current recession, Commerce has suffered a budget reduction of about 70 percent, which does not take into account the transfer of the Film Commission and the Board of Aeronautics to other agencies. For all of 2009, Commerce helped recruit more than 18,000 new jobs in S.C. Total investment attracted by Commerce in 2009 was about the same as they scored in 2008, despite the recession.

We’ll always have Paris Beginning with the fall 2010 semester, Clemson University is sharing part of a Paris campus, the IESEG School of Management at La Defense, for its two–year MBA program, where the second year can be spent in Paris. The program is termed the “new MBA/MIB collaborative,” and is accepting students. For more information, go to www.clemson. edu/mba/dual or call 864.656.3975.

Kentucky buses The South Carolina Dept. of Education is buying 85 discarded 18–year–old school buses from Kentucky, where the buses sold to S.C. are replaced with new ones. The S.C. Dept. of Education can take the Kentucky buses to replace its oldest part of the fleet, 27–year–old buses with more than 450,000 miles. In 2007, the S.C. Legislature approved an annual bus replacement cycle, but no funds have been provided for new buses in the past two years. According to GSA Business, a 2005 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists declared South Carolina had the country’s highest percentage of school buses manufactured prior to 1990 (60 percent). South Carolina has about 700,000 public school students, and roughly half take the bus to school each day.

Home sales across the state For April 2010, more than 4,350 homes were sold statewide, a 10.5 percent increase over the number of homes sold in March. The 4,350 number is also a 36.3 percent increase over the homes sold in April 2009. In greater Columbia, the increase since last year is 20.1 percent, while in Beaufort, it’s 73.2 percent. Across the state, the median home price in April increased to $141,000 from $139,000 in March.