Catch up: NorthMark Compute & Cloud Community Tele-Town Hall – 10/08/26

NorthMark Compute & Cloud (NMC²) Community Tele-Town Hall

Thursday, October 08, 2026

Recording length

20 minutes 32 seconds

Automated transcript with punctuation and paragraph breaks added for readability. Speaker labels follow the introductions and handoffs in the audio. Timestamps show elapsed time from the start of the recording. Bracketed notes identify uncertain wording.

—Transcript starts—

[00:03] Daniel (Moderator): Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining this live telephone town hall tonight. I’m Daniel, your moderator, and I’ll be turning the call over here to Sarah Knox from NorthMark Compute and Cloud shortly. But before I do, I’d like to let you know that this is an interactive event, and we’d really like to hear from you. So if you want to ask questions any time during the call, please press Star 3.

[00:31] Daniel: And one of our staff will come on the phone and take your question. Then you’ll go back to the main call, and you can listen to what we’re talking about there. And again, that’s star three to ask a question. And now I’m going to turn things over here to Sarah Knox with NorthMark Compute and Cloud. Sarah, you’re up.

[00:54] Sarah Knox (Director of External Affairs, NMC²): Hey, Daniel. Thanks so much. Can everybody hear me okay? Great. I’m going to take that as a yes. Well, welcome, everybody, to our October tele-town Hall. I thank you guys for being patient with us as we rescheduled from the 29th, or the 25th, I think it was, had some exciting news to share that we brought on a new staffer, so we wanted to wait for this call to bring her on so we could introduce all of y’all to her.

[01:23] Sarah Knox: But, again, I want to thank all of you who are joining this call tonight. Like our other two tele-town halls that we’ve held, we’re going to replace this recording on our website for anyone to listen to later. We’ll also have it transcribed so that you’re able to read it. So again, for those of you who are joining live, thank you.

[01:47] Sarah Knox: For those of you who might be listening at a different time, thank you for listening. And also, just like our last call, we’re going to start off by giving some updates on the project. And then we’re going to take your questions and answer them to the best of our ability. And so one of the things that we’ll do is I’ll just go ahead and introduce some of the staff around the table tonight.

[02:10] Sarah Knox: And then we’ll do a little bit of a longer introduction for our newest staff member who’s joined. But around the table tonight, just like in our previous calls, we have Lane, who will talk to us about all the work she’s doing, Joel, Brian, and Stephanie. It’s our trusty gang here tonight that we normally have around this table when we do these calls. And additionally, I’m excited to have for the first time on one of these calls, our new external affairs manager, Katie.

[02:40] Sarah Knox: And so I’m going to turn the phone over to Katie for a second to chat with you about herself.

[02:49] Katie: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m Katie. I am, as Sarah mentioned. I’m joining the team as the manager of external affairs where I’m excited to be here, excited to meet the community, meet everyone in the community, and kick things off. So thanks, Sarah.

[03:05] Sarah Knox: Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much, Katie. So I’m excited to share that Katie is going to be leading community relations and charitable giving within Spartanburg County. And we’re really looking forward to all the great work that Katie’s going to do on the team here and within the Spartanburg community. So, again, super excited to have her here tonight. And I think let’s go ahead and jump in to some of our project updates. So on the last call that we had, we told you we would be launching what we are calling the Good Neighbor program this fall.

[03:39] Sarah Knox: I am pleased to announce that we have an official launch date of October 22nd for that program. If you are a neighbor of ours that lives within a one-mile radius, you will qualify to participate in this program. For those of you who heard about this program or maybe heard about it or didn’t hear about it or you heard about and forgot, we are going to sort of recap all the things that this program, what is going to be involved with this program.

[04:10] Sarah Knox: So I’m going to let Joel and Katie walk through what you can expect. And so Joel is going to sort of just remind everybody what benefits they get, and then we’ll talk a little bit about the website launch. So Joel, why don’t you remind everybody sort of what the program entails?

[04:26] Joel: Thanks so much, Sarah. As Sarah mentioned, those who are qualified or anyone that live within any of our neighbors that live within one mile of the edge of our property in every direction. As I mentioned before, I’ve still kind of bummed out that I just missed out on that deal myself. But I’m glad that a lot of my neighbors do get to participate in that.

[04:51] Joel: And for those qualifications, once we get this stood up, and I know Katie’s going to talk about a little bit about the website launch as well. But once we have this stood up, we’ll get this communicated out to all the residents that qualify. And what you get in this good neighbor program is everyone will qualify for a year’s worth of home air furnace filters, home air furnace filters.

[05:20] Joel: And frankly, our plan is that you would change the filter every month, which, heck, I’m lazy. I don’t even do that. But that’s what we want to provide for anybody who does that, and that will allow for up to four air filters or four air returns per household. In addition to that, we will provide up to two, two year subscriptions [wording unclear] to the premium top-level car wash package at our local car wash, and those vendors will be shared soon.

[05:55] Joel: And that’ll be two per household for a year. And then finally, for all those within three quarters of a mile of the property, we want to offer a home wash service, exterior home wash service once and then if you’re within half a mile of us we want to offer two of those and all of this is really is this is our recognition that you know it’s a lot of work out there and there’s dust and heck I’m getting my truck wash pretty regularly myself and between the dust and the mud on the job site and we want to just again this is kind of a pardoned our dust is another way of putting this and we just want to offer up these solutions while we’re in the middle of the construction phase of this project.

[06:47] Joel: So we’re really excited to be able to get this launched out. It’s a lot of work and effort, not just with our local vendors and partners, but as well as try and get the website up and going. So with that, I’ll kick it over to Katie as well talking about that.

[07:01] Katie: Yeah, so you’re probably wondering how do I sign up? How do I, where do I find this link? So there’ll be a specific link added to our webpage. It’s southpinestreet.com. It’s the website. And it will launch, as Sarah mentioned on October 22nd. So you’ll be able to find it there. On that page, there’ll be a link for you to go and see if you qualify, if you’re within that area that Joel mentioned. You’ll put in your information and it will allow us to enroll you in the program.

[07:26] Katie: Then once you submit your application, what you can expect next, we’ll receive a copy of it and we will begin to process it in our system. Then we will confirm that you qualify and send it over to the service providers. So you’ll be on the list with those companies. And then they will reach out to you specifically and schedule your service or tell you when to come in and get your filters. If at any time you have questions, concerns, issues, or just want to chat about the program and learn more about it, please feel free to email us, also found on our southpinestreet.com website.

[07:58] Katie: So there’s a link there for you to do that.

[08:05] Sarah Knox: Well, thank you so much. Katie and Joel. For our second update tonight, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the charitable giving week kickoff that we had. We did right after our last call and let you guys know about the process for applying for funds from our charitable giving are moving forward. So we were thrilled to, at the beginning of September, partner with Spartanburg Community College, the Spartanburg Science Center, and the Middle Tyger Community Center as well as several other groups to launch our charitable giving arm in Spartanburg.

[08:38] Sarah Knox: Along with that, we also launched a brand new website that is solely dedicated to charitable giving, and that website is nmc2giving.com. So that’s NorthMark Compute and Cloud, nmc2giving.com. And so on this website, you’re going to be able to apply for funding from our charitable giving arm.

[09:03] Sarah Knox: When you apply on this website, we will receive your application and then we’ll begin the process of reviewing it. So we are just to talk a little bit more about some of the details about how this works and the sort of funding opportunities that we are looking for. We are looking to partner with 501(c)(3)s that are located in or served directly in Spartanburg County.

[09:28] Sarah Knox: And we are particularly interested in funding projects that fall into one of our four core categories of funding, which are STEM education, workforce development, resource stewardship, and public safety. So those are our four buckets of funding. And again, we are looking to partner and find 501(c)(3)s that are located in Spartanburg or serve Spartanburg County and fall into or they have projects that fall into one of those four buckets.

[10:04] Sarah Knox: We’re going to be doing funding rounds every quarter. So please, if you are interested in receiving funds from our charitable giving arm, I would encourage you to go to our website that nmc2giving.com and apply for funding. If you have any questions, there is a place on the form where you can reach out to us to ask questions about it.

[10:30] Sarah Knox: As I mentioned earlier, Katie is going to be leading the charitable giving initiative in Spartanburg. So Katie will reach out to you if you have questions. If you would like to have us come out to your site and walk through, maybe see your nonprofit or anything that you would like to show us. We’re happy to do those meetings and happy to have those conversations. So please do reach out to us. We would love to hear from you. And do you go to that website to apply for funding.

[10:54] Sarah Knox: We are really excited about this charitable giving arm and hoping to partner with many of you to do some good work within the county. For our next update, we’re going to hear from Lane. The last, I’ll just say I’ll preview her update and that the last time we had the call, we gave you a really large update about all the remediation efforts that we had done to date.

[11:18] Sarah Knox: And so since that last call, we have some more remediation that’s occurred on site. And so Lane is going to give an update about the remediation that’s happening on site.

[11:29] Lane: Thanks, Sarah. So here recently, we were excavating and moving some soil [unclear] projects that we’re doing. And during the movement of the large quantity of soil, we found old crushed and rusted 55-gallon metal drums. They looked to have been buried for decades based on their integrity, so out of abundance of caution to our workers and to the environment, we immediately stopped work, barricaded, [unclear] off the area, and started sampling for impurities in the soil.

[11:56] Lane: We did find minuscule levels of benzene and then also very similar levels of arsenic. And the arsenic, that level is [unclear] to what is naturally occurring in the environment for the area. And I’ll tell you guys a little bit more about that here in a second, just so you are aware of, of what we’re seeing. These findings did not warrant a specialized landfill nor were they deemed hazardous waste, but to ensure our due diligence from the company, we removed 4,000 tons of earth and we’re disposing of it in a proper landfill and also spending approximately 354,000 to do so.

[12:35] Lane: Our commitment to human health in the environment goes unprecedented. We want to make sure our workers are safe, our community is safe, and also we’re taking care of the environment. On top of this remediation of land, we also performed air testing of the area. This was to ensure that human health was not at risk during the excavation activities. With arsenic found in the soil, the dust being distributed, we wanted to make sure that workers were safe.

[13:00] Lane: These results came back well below the OSHA permissible limit. That’s the PEL, the standards limit, so we were able to continue work safely. So that was a pretty big project. It stopped work for about two and a half weeks, I think. But, you know, that’s life of construction in this company, willing to take that work stoppage to make sure that the environment is safe and workers are taken care of. So on the arsenic, because that word is scary for a lot of people, but to give some natural occurring background of this area, as you all know, we have red clay for days.

[13:34] Lane: We can’t get it off of everything. It stains everyone’s house that I see out here. Therefore, Spartanburg County is in what we call the Piedmont area for soil type. And without going into the scientific verbiage for rock and soil, I’ll just kind of give an example of what this means. So imagine the red dirt we have is full of tiny bits of rust. That’s what makes it red. Iron rusts just like an old bike left out in the rain.

[14:00] Lane: Now, with this rust, imagine that arsenic is like the tiny bits of lint floating around. Have you ever rubbed against… something that’s rusted, it grabs everything. Rust is sticky like Velcro. When lint floats by, it sticks to the rust and stays there. So when rocks slowly break down and let arsenic loose, the rust and the red dirt grabs it and holds on to it. The arsenic mostly stays in the soil instead of washing away, and that also explains why dirt with more rust and more clay, where we have around here, usually has more arsenic in it.

[14:33] Lane: More sticky stuff means more lint caught in it. There’s plenty of stuff online about this through the county and other studies done by some of the universities around the area. You can look up. But [unclear] in total, we performed the remediation, no harm, no foul, and everything went really well. And we are excited that we got this done. And we’re just keeping our eyes out as we continue to develop the land.

[15:00] Lane: Thanks, Sarah.

[15:07] Sarah Knox: Thank you, Lane. I appreciate that update on it’s always, I always like hearing the remediation updates because it’s always like I’m so proud of the team for doing such a good job on cleaning up the stuff that we find. It’s really, it’s really fascinating to hear. And really, I’m glad that y’all are doing the work that you’re doing to clean these things up. The next update that we’re going to give tonight is on beautification.

[15:33] Sarah Knox: So you’ll remember the last time that we had a call. Joel gave an update on some of the landscaping and beautification that we’ve been doing. And so we’ll hear about what’s happened since the last time we talked. And I’m going to hand it over to Joel to give that update.

[15:52] Joel: Yeah, thank you, Sarah. Yes, as many of you may have seen, we put in our partner, our Roebuck landscaping, has done, frankly, a very impressive job for us and moved very quickly so that we could begin planting trees, shrubs, some grass all along our South Pine Street perimeter side of the road.

[16:18] Joel: And it’s been very pleased with that. We do have to put a little bit of pause in it in some areas because as you know, again, it’s a big construction site. We’re trying to do our best to be intentional and smart with what we put in. We’re not just trying to put in anything that goes in the ground. Some of you may have noticed that we’ve had a little bit of a few pieces of some trees and shrubs that may have died or been damaged.

[16:47] Joel: And Roebuck’s done a great job in making sure that we can replace. Again, we try to move quickly. And for anyone who likes to garden or do landscaping, summer is not the best time to be planting trees. Roebuck was great advising us with the magnolias, which have done well, pretty well overall. As we get into this cooler weather, we know that this will only get better in the sense of tree transplant and plantings.

[17:16] Joel: And then we continue to plan to extend that to other areas and perimeters along the property as we can develop those areas. So that’s gone very well. What we’ve also begun in an effort to really contain some dust from the construction, as well as, again, just… There’s a lot of heavy equipment, and frankly, we know that it’s not really, you know, those, for example, the generators, people don’t like looking at those things, especially with all the heavy machinery and things moving around.

[17:48] Joel: So we are currently constructing a significant investment. We purchase a large, we’re calling the Great Wall of NorthMark, what we joke around internally, but a large green wall that will be, go around our main generator yard that you will be seen for the [unclear] side to, again, contain that space, hopefully more visually appealing.

[18:13] Joel: And Katie and I, we’re already talking about what maybe we could potentially put on that wall or whether it could be a mural or something we haven’t decided yet, but make every opportunity to be a good, to have a good image there. Again, it’s just, we call on it site beautification in this initiative. So that’s well underway, and we expect the wall installation to be complete within the coming month.

[18:39] Joel: And then, yeah, that’s where we are on that. I mean, Katie, did anything you want to add there? You’re good? All right. Sarah, that’s where we are with that.

[18:53] Sarah Knox: Well, thank you guys. Those are all of our updates for this October call. I’m not seeing any questions in the Q&A right now [wording unclear]. We’ll give it another second here to see if we get any other questions that come in. But we are, again, really excited to continue to do this work, hoping that we have a good rest of the October and rest of the year that we’re going to be investing in the community, working with folks.

[19:29] Sarah Knox: And yeah, looking forward to the work that we’re going to be doing. Well, I don’t see any questions in the queue at this point. So I was a little earlier than we anticipated, but I guess we’ll go ahead and tell everybody good night for tonight.

[19:54] Sarah Knox: We will have one more call this year before we finish out the year for these, these tele-town halls. Please do come with questions for the next one. We would love to answer your questions. Again, not seeing [unclear] in our queue, but would love to answer your questions as they come in. And so please do, we would ask that you come prepare next time to ask us any questions.

[20:19] Sarah Knox: We’re here to answer. So, well, with that, I guess we’ll go ahead and sign off. Thanks so much, guys. Have a good night.

—Transcript ends—