Category: Government

Committee Member ‘Offended’

WINNSBORO – Although two members of the County Transportation Committee chided Ridgeway Town Councilwoman Angela Harrison for opening remarks in which she referred to a partially CTC funded sidewalk project in Jenkinsville as a “sidewalk to nowhere,” the CTC during their Sept. 29 meeting voted unanimously to provide up to $9,000 for sidewalk repairs in Ridgeway.

The Committee also agreed in principal to work with Ridgeway on a more extensive sidewalk project of $50,000 once the details of that project are worked out.

“We would kind of like to structure it the same way you did Jenkinsville; however this would not be a ‘sidewalk to nowhere,’ it would be a sidewalk to somewhere,” Harrison told the Committee.

Last year, the CTC partnered with County Council to provide $100,000 in matching funds for a Department of Transportation (DOT) grant to the town of Jenkinsville to complete a sidewalk near Lake Monticello Park. The County, in a narrow 4-3 vote, agreed to kick in $50,000, while the CTC approved the other $50,000, paid in two equal annual increments.

Prior to the CTC’s vote in February 2015 to help fund the project, Dawkins resident Jeff Schaffer told the Committee that the sidewalk project was “a joke” and “a waste of County money.” Schaffer told the CTC that the “sidewalk starts nowhere and goes nowhere.”

Harrison’s remark did not sit well with two CTC members on Sept. 29.

“I enjoyed your presentation,” CTC member Clifton Hendrix told Harrison, “but I was offended when you said about Jenkinsville, the project –”

“I’m sorry,” Harrison apologized, “but that’s what I’ve heard from all our citizens.”

“Let me finish,” Hendrix said. “The people in Jenkinsville, their lives are just as precious as the lives in Ridgeway.”

“Yes sir. Amen. I believe that,” Harrison said.

CTC Chairman David Williams also lightly admonished Harrison for her remarks, but said she was “forgiven.”

Williams then questioned Harrison about the estimates on the sidewalk repairs.

“On your repairs, you’re currently at $7,000,” Williams said, “but you’ve got another bid that’s $9,000, so you don’t really know what the bid is. You say (in your request) ‘in addition the Town of Ridgeway is requesting $7,000 in C-funds for sidewalk repairs,’ but you’re saying it’s $9,000. It needs to be $7,624.18, if that’s what it is.”

Harrison said she was waiting on the final figures from Ridgeway Mayor Charlene Herring.

Last February, Ridgeway Town Council approved a $5,000 estimate to repair approximately 200 feet of sidewalk between the Lopez house and the Post Office on S. Palmer Street, with local resident Dwight Robertson donating the labor. But three months later, Council backed off the deal when the bid was revised to $5,900. The revision, which was to meet DOT requirements, sent the estimate over the $5,000 threshold for no-bid jobs, and Council was required to seek additional bids on the project.

Robertson’s offer was the lower of two bids, the second coming in at $8,200 from M C Rowe Construction.

At Council’s May 12 meeting, Councilman Heath Cookendorfer said he had received negative feedback from citizens who were concerned about the Town spending money on a state-owned sidewalk.

Sidewalk repair failed during the May 12 meeting on a 2-3 vote, with Herring and Doug Porter voting in favor and Cookendorfer, Donald Prioleau and Harrison voting against.

Ridgeway’s pending $50,000 request would cover adding sidewalks to the south end of town, Harrison said, down Highway 34 past Bishop Squirewell Road, as well as near the old Ridgeway School property where the Town plans to construct a playground.

Blue Bird Lane

CTC Engineer Bill Coleman told the Committee that while Blue Bird Lane in District 2 is on the list of roads likely to be paved in 2017, paving it would not make sense unless Wateree Creek Valley Road is also paved. But to pave them both would require an amendment by County Council to the road paving points program ordinance.

“Wateree Creek (Valley) Road is about a half-mile long and its gravel, its dirt,” Coleman said. “I can’t see paving a 400-foot Blue Bird Lane and not paving Wateree Creek Valley. In this case, you’ve got a little short road that’s due to be paved, but you’ve got to go through a half a mile of gravel road to get to it, so it doesn’t make sense to me to pave the short road without paving the other road.”

Coleman recommended putting Blue Bird Lane off another year and paving Skylar Lane in its stead. Meanwhile, the CTC would ask the County to amend the ordinance to read, in part: “this amendment applies to any road that becomes eligible for paving based on priority points. If the eligible road begins on an unpaved county road, the unpaved county road will be paved as part of the eligible road.”

2017 Roads List

The CTC approved the 2017 paving list, which, Coleman pointed out, would be followed until funding ran out. Roads not paved in 2017 would be carried over to the 2018 list. Those roads are:

High Hill Lane (District 4, 303 feet); Elbow Circle (District 1, 1,938 feet); Rainbow Cove Road (District 2, 386 feet), Cypress Drive (District 3, 901 feet); Bob’s Point Lane (District 4, 2,275 feet); Shoemaker Lane (District 5, 1,356 feet); Valencia Road (District 7, 1,000 feet); Deck Drive (District 1, 520 feet); Hickory Nut Lane (District 2, 312 feet); Stoney Trace (District 3, 3,030 feet); High Hill Road (District 1,604 feet); Creighton Road (District 5, 984 feet); Horse Creek Road (District 7, 2,340 feet); Pineneedle Lane (District 1, 520 feet); Skylark Lane (District 2, 338 feet); and Rosewood Lane (District 3, 3,249 feet).

JENKINSVILLE – The Sheriff’s Office was called out after the president of the Jenkinsville Water Company decided the approximately 39 seconds one customer had gone over the three minute limit while speaking during the open discussion portion of Monday’s monthly board meeting was too much to endure.

But before deputies could arrive, Dee Melton had stepped down, and Water Board President Gregrey Ginyard said the deputies would not pursue the matter because they had not witnessed the disruption. Ginyard later suggested, and the board agreed, to have a deputy present at future meetings.

Melton, during his time on the floor, pressed the board for answers on the number of gallons lost to leaks in the last month. The operator’s report had earlier stated that the water company had produced 3,681,050 gallons from its wells, while the company also purchased 1,438,000 gallons from Mid County Water. The report also revealed six leaks during the month of September.

The amount of water lost through those leaks, however, was not included in the report.

Ginyard said the amount of water lost is tabulated in the office, but that office staff had been out sick and were not able to produce the water loss numbers in time for the meeting.

Melton also pressed the board over a secret meeting held by the board last week.

“Was the meeting open to the public?” Melton asked.

“In the beginning the meeting was open to the public,” Ginyard answered. “Once it went into executive session, no sir.”

Ginyard also admitted that the meeting had been held without public notice.

“It was a special called meeting where board members signed to say that because of the circumstances that we could do that,” Ginyard said. “The meeting was called to order and then it went into an executive session for legal matters.”

Ginyard later told The Voice that the meeting had been an “emergency meeting” to discuss “personnel matters.”

The S.C. Freedom of Information Act does provide an exemption for public notice of emergency meetings, but not for special called meetings. “Legal matters” or “personnel matters” are not considered adequately specific reasons, under the law, for closing a meeting to the public, however.

As Melton began to question the board regarding what he said was their recent approval of a water tap for a local gas station, Ginyard informed him that his three minutes had expired.

“It says a ‘minimum’ of three minutes on the agenda,” Melton pointed out.

Although the agenda did indeed say ‘limit three minutes minimum per person,’ and while one board member said the ‘minimum’ was a typographical error, Melton refused to yield the floor until after vice president Joseph McBride called 9-1-1.

Melton is currently entangled in a lawsuit with the water company, to include Ginyard and McBride, over the company’s refusal to provide additional taps for his Broad River Campground. That lawsuit was filed in September 2014.

Motion Carries Without Discussion

WINNSBORO (Sept. 29, 2016) – By shutting down public discussion by Council members prior to a vote following an executive session Monday evening, Chairwoman Carolyn Robinson likely paved the way for the County to sign a contract with Parker Poe Consulting, LLC, that would both eliminate the firm’s competition and evade the County’s bid process.

“Awarding a contract in this way, without allowing us to discuss it before we were asked to vote and without going through a bid process as outlined in our procurement code, takes us back to a period of how our recent predecessors did business on this Council,” Councilman Billy Smith (District 7) told The Voice following the meeting. “Our former Council Chairman referred to doing business like this as ‘unusual, but not illegal.’ The yes votes tonight represent this Council’s troubled past. I hope we aren’t headed back in that direction.”

At issue was whether Council would engage the services of Parker Poe, without considering other firms, to assist the County with legal matters relating to the forming of a partnership between Fairfield Memorial Hospital and another health care company that would come in and take over the hospital’s services.

The matter was first considered by the Administration and Finance Committee on Sept. 7 and sent forward to Council. Besides wanting to have the option to consider other law firms in addition to Parker Poe, a sticking point with some Council members was that Parker Poe’s legal and consultation services would cost more than $25,000, above the amount allowed to be approved by the Administrator. According to the County’s Procurement Code, any amount over $25,000 is subject to sealed bid.

When the issue came before Council on Oct. 12, County Administrator Jason Taylor suggested discussing it further in executive session before taking action. Following the executive session, no vote was taken, but Smith told The Voice he was glad Council held off and discussed the issue further.

“Our discussion reinforced to me that we need to go through proper procurement procedures and issue a Request for Qualifications to secure legal services in regard to the hospital,” Smith said at that time.

Four days later, Chairwoman Robinson (District 2) issued an agenda for a special called meeting for the following Monday, Sept. 19, for the purpose of an executive session on the Parker Poe contractual matter. With only herself, Kamau Marcharia (District 4) and Mary Lynn Kinley (District 6) present at that meeting, and reminded by both Taylor and Marcharia that she did not have a quorum, the Chairwoman nevertheless crossed legal lines and called the executive session. Robinson later defended the meeting as “an unofficial meeting without a quorum.”

Following a fully attended executive session on Monday evening to again discuss the Parker Poe contract, Kinley made a motion to “give our County attorney permission to associate a law firm to represent the Council with the hospital issue.”

After the motion was seconded, Chairwoman Robinson, instead of calling for discussion, immediately called for a vote, effectively eliminating the opportunity for public discussion on the subject by Council members. The vote was 4-2 with Chairwoman Robinson, Kinley, Marcharia and Marion Robinson in favor of the motion; Dan Ruff (District 1) and Smith voted against.

Asked by The Voice following the meeting why she had not allowed discussion on the motion, Robinson said, “I guess it slipped my mind.”

Asked to explain the motion, Robinson said it gives County attorney John James full authority to choose an attorney to oversee the hospital merger without any further approval from Council and without the chosen attorney being subject to the County’s bid process.

“Hospital legal matters are not our County attorney’s area of expertise,” Robinson added, “so this allows him to choose an attorney for us.”

She defended skirting the bid process, saying the County’s Procurement Code contains a provision that allows Council to exempt certain items from the formal bid process, and that selecting an attorney is one of those exemptions. The Procurement Code indeed includes attorney services among exemptions, pending approval of Council.

“While we can legally do this, I don’t think we are justified in proceeding in such a way,” Smith told The Voice. “I think to proceed forward without any competition and without going through the proper procurement procedures for a Request for Qualifications is to deviate from much of what this Council has improved on in the past few years.”

Ruff could not be reached for comment.

Millage Unchanged, Budget Up

Earlier in the meeting Council passed unanimously a resolution establishing the FY2016-17 millage rate for the County at 181.8. Chairwoman Robinson announced that this was a reduction in millage from last year.

“This will be the third year in a row that the County has decreased the budget and the millage,” Robinson said.

However, a review of the resolution shows the millage rate of 181.8 is the same this year as it was last year. In addition, this year’s budget is up $765,564 to $23,331,415 and the County Debt Retirement is up $15,175, bringing the taxes required for this year’s budget to $23,331,415, up from $22,550,676 last year.

More Engineering Snafus

During County Council Time, Ruff asked Taylor to address a couple of new issues with the engineer who designed the new Ridgeway and Jenkinsville fire station retention ponds.

Taylor explained that both stations are designed with retention ponds directly in front of the front doors of the building. He said he didn’t see the ponds on the drawings but the information is included in the text that was apparently not picked up on when the plans were approved by Council a little more than two years ago.

“I don’t think this is safe,” Taylor advised Council. “I think erosion will be an issue. We have to have drainage, so we’re asking the engineer to come back and give us an optional solution for drainage, maybe a culvert type of drainage. It will cost some money, and we’ll see what that will be.”

Both Ruff and Marion Robinson asked about past issues with this same engineer (Ken Simmons and Associates).

“Does the plan show two ponds in front of the Jenkinsville EMS Station?” Robinson asked Taylor who confirmed that it did.

“Whoever this engineer is, I hope we never do business with them again. That is the most embarrassing thing,” Robinson said. “We need to look at this one too. It’s completely embarrassing.”

Taylor said he had two meetings scheduled with the engineer to discuss the problems.

Appointments

Council appointed three new members to the Fairfield Memorial Hospital Board including Yolanda Settles (District 4), Antoinette Melton (District 5) and Ron Smith (District 7).

 

WINNSBORO (Sept. 29, 2016) – The Fairfield County Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a series of candidate forums every other Monday in October at the Winnsboro Woman’s Club at 102 S. Vanderhorst St.

The forums begin next Monday, Oct. 3, with Ron Smith moderating questions for candidates for District 2 on the Fairfield County School Board (Paula Hartman, incumbent and Janet Mason), as well as for candidates for the District 17 seat in the State Senate (Democrat Mike Fanning, and Republican Mark Palmer).

Mike Kelly will moderate the remaining forums, beginning on Oct. 17 with candidates for County Council’s District 2 seat (Jimmy Ray Douglas, J. Renee Green and Clyde Wade) and District 3 seat (Kirk Chappell, Peggy D. Swearingen and Mikel R. Trapp Sr.). Both seats are open, with no incumbent running for another term.

The forums conclude on Oct. 31 with candidates for County Council’s District 4 seat (Kamau Marcharia, incumbent; Bertha Goins and Quincy D. Pringle Sr.) and District 6 seat (Mary Lynn Kinley, incumbent; Gwen Harden; Cornelius Neil Robinson; and Mary Anne Tolbert).

The forums run from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature written questions from the audience.

 

WINNSBORO (Sept. 22, 2016) – The question of whether the Town of Winnsboro can provide enough water and sewer service for Fairfield County officials’ planned burgeoning industrial growth in the County was the focus of a workshop last week when Mayor Roger Gaddy and the Winnsboro Town Council met with Fairfield County Administrator Jason Taylor and a County entourage that included Economic Development Director Ty Davenport.

After asking the Town for a re-certification of current service it provides to the County’s Peach Road Industrial Park, Taylor quizzed Town officials about future availability of water and sewer capacity for the County’s industry.

“We’ve had some interest, some companies looking at us and they’ve liked some of the sites and buildings they’ve seen,” Taylor told Town Council members.

“The County is seen in a good light right now by the Department of Commerce,” Davenport added. “We’re getting activity, but we’re limited in the types of projects we can pursue because of limited water and sewer capacity. The more water and sewer an industry uses, the more investment they probably have in it, and also people who work there make more money. We’re missing out on some of the better projects. We have all the other pieces in place – location, workforce, etc. – but the infrastructure is not there.”

Davenport said the Department of Commerce has told him that five industries have rejected the county in recent years because of insufficient water and sewer infrastructure.

“At a significant dollar amount,” Davenport said. “So we need to get that rolling.”

And Taylor reminded Council that the County will be needing water and sewer for about 2,000 industrial-use acres the County is in the process of purchasing on the east side of I-77 near Ridgeway. He said his first and foremost preference is to get more water and sewer capacity from within the County.

“Our Alliance is going to step up and spend the money to serve that property with infrastructure,” Taylor said. “They say the quickest and easiest way is for a neighboring county to provide that. But that’s not creating any capacity in Fairfield County. If that same amount of money was spent here in the county on our systems, then we’d be creating capacity. My preference is to do this in-county, but we may be forced to go to another county – Kershaw or Richland (for water and sewer).”

While Gaddy and Town Administrator Don Wood acknowledged that Winnsboro’s water capacity took a hit following the drought several years ago, they assured their County counterparts that the Town would have ample water flowing from the Broad River by the end of 2017 to meet the County’s industrial needs. Wood was less optimistic about sewer.

“We don’t have any plans for additional sewer capacity,” Wood said. “It’s a money-loser because we can’t make it up on volume. And Ridgeway is pretty much maxed out, I think.”

Ken Parnel of EPG Engineering said the Town’s current available sewer capacity is between 600,000 -700,000 gallons.

“For us to market the county to industry, we need better numbers than that,” Taylor said.

“The biggest problem with the sewer is the expense of upgrades to the sewer plant and getting it to you,” Parnell said. “The entire sewer system from the edge of the town to the interstate is a series of pump stations and a small diameter pipe. It’s very limited in capacity.”

“Even if we could make all this work,” Wood said, “with our water lines and upgrades to our other facilities, we’ve maxed out our debt. That money’s got to come from somewhere else.”

The evening did not pass without a reminder from each Council member that the lines of communication between the County and the Town had not, in the past, been well traveled.

“Historically,” Gaddy said, “there’s been very little information shared between the County and the Town whenever industrial recruitment was being done. Maybe the County had all the information they needed. But from my standpoint, sometimes I felt if there had been more communication, we might have been able to decrease some rates, do something to incentivize people to come to Fairfield County.”

Councilman Danny Miller agreed, adding, “In the past (County) administration, we were made to feel like we didn’t live in the county, so we’re glad you’ve come to the table to sit down and talk with us.”

“We’re going to try to do a better job on some of these things,” Taylor said. “We want to make sure that Winnsboro becomes a vibrant, thriving community.”

Taylor said he felt the County Council would welcome any potential to partner with the Town for downtown revitalization.

“I’ve had conversation with individual Council members, and they agree we need to step up and do our part in the Town’s community revitalization,” Taylor said.

Councilman Jackie Wilkes then asked the big question.

“Would you find out from your Council if they’d be willing to put any money into the resurrection of the Mt. Zion building?” Wilkes asked. “We would like a definite answer so we can proceed with whether or not to tear it down.”

Town Councilman Clyde Sanders joked, “We’ll give it to y’all, and we even have a little money we’ll throw in.”

Taylor said the County’s strategic planner will be addressing several options for Mt. Zion during a full presentation on the strategic plan at County Council later in September.