FORT MILL -- A request from Carolinas Healthcare System for a letter of support from the Fort Mill Town Council stalled Monday as the six council members present deadlocked.

CHS is one of four companies vying for state approval to build a 64-bed hospital in Fort Mill Township.

Council members Guynn Savage, Danny Funderburk and Grady Ervin supported giving CHS a letter of support similar to those the council has already given to Piedmont Medical Center and Presbyterian Healthcare. Mayor Charles Powers and Councilmen Ken Beam and Waddell Gibson opposed the move. Councilman Ken Starnes was absent.

Beam opposes supporting either of the nonprofit companies (Presbyterian and CHS) because he favors PMC, which as a for-profit company will pay local property taxes. CHS and Presbyterian would not pay as much taxes.

"How do you plan to offset the cost you put on the citizens of Fort Mill?" Beam asked. "I don't see how your hospital will pay for the additional police and fire department and water and sewer needs. You say there will be more ancillary organizations coming to the town, but I'm not convinced."

"We're going to pay user fees for water and sewer and it's my understanding the burden of extension lines will be on the shoulders of the developers, not the city," CHS Senior Vice President Dennis Phillips replied.

However, when Beam raised similar objections about Presbyterian, the council lent its support to the company anyway because its proposed site falls inside the town limits.

In making the request for support Monday night, Phillips said CHS intends to request annexation into Fort Mill if it is awarded the right to build the hospital. In the end he demanded the council support CHS because it had supported PMC and Presbyterian.

"I hope you consider doing that because it gives them an unfair advantage," he said.

It is unclear exactly how that annexation might happen though. The CHS site is south of Sutton Road on 50 acres currently owned by Crescent Resources, west of I-77. Between the CHS site and the Fort Mill town limit is a 400-acre tract belonging to the York County Culture and Heritage Museums.

Previous annexation talks with the museum went nowhere, but Phillips believes his company will be able to find a way to make the hospital site contiguous with Fort Mill. However he could not provide details of how it would work. Another arm of CHS would be handling that, he said.

Representatives of Cherokee Investment Partners, the museum site developer, were unavailable for comment Tuesday. It remains unclear if any or all of that property would need to be annexed for the hospital site to be annexed.

Phillips said his company plans to come back to the town council with at least a letter of intent to request annexation and a more detailed plan of how that process would work at a later date.

The other hospital operator in the running is Hospital Partners of America. The HPA site north of Gold Hill Road would not be in a position to be annexed into Fort Mill, and the company has not asked for a letter of support.

Next Friday, Sept. 23, the CHS, Presbyterian and HPA applications will be published in the state register. When that happens any interested party will have a 30-day window to request a public hearing on any or all of the companies' proposals, according to Joel Grice, the director of the S. C. Department of Health and Environmental Control Bureau of Health Facilities and Services Development.

PMC's application has already been published in the state register and a public hearing on the PMC plan was requested by HPA

Grice said he expects to hold one hearing with all four companies in the Fort Mill area, probably sometime in November. After the hearing his department will have 60-120 days to make a decision. So it could be next March or later before DHEC awards the Certificate of Need to anyone.

"I've learned from experience that everything is always in flux," Grice said.

Michael Harrison contributed to this story.