Category: News

A Winnsboro man was arrested Saturday following a string of minor shoplifting incidents and one break-in over the previous five days at Ruff Hardware in Ridgeway.

According to the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office, someone cut the locks on a gate on the outside of the business during the night of Nov. 16 and stole four small animal traps of undetermined value. The following day, Andrew McKinstry, 64, of W. College Street in Winnsboro, entered the store and tried to walk out wearing a Ruff Hardware hat that he had not purchased. Deputies arrived and placed McKinstry in custody and a search of his pickup truck revealed a set of bolt cutters, a damaged lock and several green rings that had been attached to the stolen animal traps.

At the time of his detention, McKinstry complained of high blood pressure and was transported to Fairfield Memorial Hospital where he was treated and released into police custody. McKinstry was then transported to the Fairfield County Detention Center where he awaits a charge of petty larceny.

Agents with the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) announced last week the official arrest and filing of charges against former Winnsboro Department of Public Safety officer Michael Bernard Roseboro. SLED arrested Roseboro Nov. 14. The 43-year-old former officer, of Neason Lane in Winnsboro, has been charged with attempted murder, a felony that carries up to 30 years in prison. Roseboro was booked at the Fairfield County Detention Center.

Roseboro is charged with the attempted murder of his estranged wife, whom agents say he shot outside her home on 8th Street in Winnsboro on Oct. 28. The shooting set off a manhunt that ended Nov. 1 when Roseboro shot himself in the chest as officers closed in on him at Camp Welfare off Arrowhead Road.

Roseboro’s wife, Keisha Roseboro, an administrative sergeant at the Detention Center, continues to recover from wounds she received during the Oct. 28 shooting.

The case will be prosecuted by the Sixth Circuit Solicitor’s Office, SLED said last week.

An arrest warrant has been issued for an Eastover man after he allegedly fondled a 13-year-old Ridgeway girl in her bedroom on Nov. 9.

According to an incident report from the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office, 37-year-old Joseph Anthony Moye of Hezekiah Road in Eastover was a guest in the S. Dogwood Ave. home on Nov. 9 when, at approximately 1:18 a.m., he entered the bedroom of a 13-year-old girl living there. While the girl was in her bed, Moye reportedly pulled down her pants and began fondling her. The girl screamed, alerting family members. A friend of the suspect, a 35-year-old man living in the home, removed Moye from the home before Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene.

Investigators later contacted the 35-year-old friend of the suspect and advised him to bring Moye in to the Sheriff’s Office for questioning, but the friend reported that Moye had fled and was on the run. Moye is wanted on a charge of criminal sexual conduct with a minor.

Although the county’s unemployment rate (based on September data from the Employers Association of S.C.) edged down slightly to 10.6 percent from August’s 11 percent, the economic future for many Fairfield County residents may still not seem too bright. Putting those residents back to work is the mission with which the Deputy County Administrator’s Office has recently been charged by County Council, and the man who sits in that chair, Davis Anderson, has enlisted the help of Jackie Workman, a woman with years of grassroots organizing experience, to see that mission through.

“We have a cultural problem and we have an educational problem in Fairfield County,” Anderson said. “We’re going to try to fix that.”

Workman serves as the county’s community liaison, bridging the gap between citizens and employment agencies, educational foundations and employers themselves. Although she has a desk at the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) offices in Winnsboro, you are more likely to find her out knocking on doors or speaking to churches and other county organizations, tirelessly trying to round up Fairfield’s unemployed and guide them back into the workforce. It hasn’t been easy, as the chronically unemployed continue to feel powerless in the face of life’s obstacles, but in her first month on the job, Workman has helped put 10 people to work.  Still, the obstacles persist, and Workman and the county are working to help people overcome them. The most common obstacle, Workman said, is a lack of education – even a basic high school diploma. And even after earning a GED through either the Adult Ed program at the Fairfield County School District or through the program offered by Christ Central Ministries, more often than not, further education is necessary. Opportunities for advancement exist right here in Fairfield County, she said, at the Midlands Tech campus on Highway 321 N. And tuition costs should not be an issue.

“There are no excuses anymore,” Workman said. “You can get a degree. If you go to WIA and you have a GED or a diploma, they’ll pre-qualify you to pay for school.”

Furthermore, she said, if you are the first person in your family to go to college, you may qualify for a federal program that pays for all or part of your tuition.

Another obstacle that Workman and the county are trying to help people overcome are minor infractions that may exist on their criminal record, preventing them from gaining employment – particularly with companies like the Shaw Group, which is currently at work at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Jenkinsville, preparing the site for the installation of two new reactors. The county is currently in talks with the Solicitor’s Office, the Pardon and Parole Board and the Department of Juvenile Justice to find ways to help people with minor and one-time infractions have their records expunged. The problem is, as Anderson pointed out, that process costs money, and we are talking about people who have no job. Anderson said the county is exploring a program that would allow the county to front the expunction costs, to be paid back to the county upon employment.

Transportation is another roadblock, Workman said, and Anderson said the county is considering utilizing its transit system to deliver people to work at Shaw, once that number of employed reaches a cost-benefit threshold. In the meantime, he said, they would have to put forth the same effort to educate and employ themselves as they do to get to the club on Saturdays and church on Sundays.

Workman said she has also gotten resistance from people unwilling to enter the workforce at low-end wages, something she said has to be overcome.

“People don’t want to come to work for $7.25 an hour,” she said. “They think they want to come in and make $10-$15 an hour, but they don’t understand that it’s a process. You have to build up to that. They’ve been sitting around the house making zero dollars for two years or more and not building anything.”

Shaw will be hiring 3,000 people in the coming years on an as-needed basis, Workman said, and Anderson said it was the county’s mission to get people ready for Shaw when those needs open up.

“There is opportunity here,” Anderson said, “and there is going to be more.”

But the opportunities available through Midlands Tech are not limited to the Shaw Group. For example, Anderson said, with 120 hours of course work, one could enter the EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) field at $27,000 a year, which, with overtime, goes over $30,000 a year. A little more training, and one becomes an EMT I, and the pay goes up. Two more years of school, and one becomes a Paramedic, a very high-demand profession.

Last week, Midlands Tech hosted an open house to let people know what kinds of educational opportunities were available there, and the careers that came with them. Workman said only three people showed up. Still, she is not discouraged and said she would keep knocking on doors until everyone in Fairfield County is moving toward employment.

Workman said if you’ve gone online and created an employment profile with Shaw, you’ll need to update it every 30 days, and Dec. 4 Shaw will open an office at Midlands Tech to recruit and assist people in creating their profiles. The offices will be open every Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“You have to be ready,” Anderson said. “Create your profile and update it every 30 days at www.Shawgrp.com.”

Workman can help guide you through the steps to further your education and connect you with employers and employment agencies. Contact her at 803-815-0037, ext. 105, or by email at Jworkman@fairfieldsc.com.

The Fairfield County Regional Water Authority took another step toward becoming a reality Nov. 14, as its organizational committee met in the offices of the Central Midlands Council of Governments (COG) in Columbia to hash out details of forming the water distribution group.

The participating entities – the Town of Winnsboro (represented by Mayor Roger Gaddy and Councilman Jackie Wilkes), Fairfield County (represented by Council Chairman David Ferguson and County Administrator Phil Hinely), the Town of Ridgeway (represented by Mayor Charlene Herring), Mid-County Water (represented by Board President Robert Davis and administrator Herb Rentz) and the Town of Blythewood (represented by Town Administrator John Perry) – were guided through the process by meeting facilitator Gregory Sprouse of the COG and attorney Margaret C. Pope of the Pope Zeigler law firm.

Sprouse said the long-term goals for the Authority would include implementing recommendations from the recently under way study by the Army Corps of Engineers, aimed at finding solutions to the county’s water supply for the future, while short-term, addressing immediate needs for domestic, economic development and commercial water.

Gaddy told the group that, in spite of moving Blythewood customers off of Winnsboro water and onto a Columbia line last summer, the Winnsboro reservoir has not recovered, presenting the group with an immediate challenge.

“We’ve all agreed there’s a problem,” Gaddy said. “Even with the connection to Columbia, our reservoir is at an historic low. It’s not coming back like we would have liked it to. We all realize there’s a significant need.”

Gaddy said S.C. Electric and Gas has agreed to allow Winnsboro to pull up to 1 million gallons a day out of Lake Monticello, and that the Water Authority was necessary in order to acquire the financing to put the infrastructure in place and introduce that water into the Winnsboro system. At the same time, Gaddy said, the Authority could look at other options for future supply based on the Corps of Engineers’ study.

Pope told the members that each entity must first pass a resolution, committing themselves to the Authority. Before they can put forth a resolution, Mid-County Water will have to convert their operation from a private to a public entity. After the public hearings and resolutions, the members will meet again to hammer out their bylaws.

“If everybody keeps their focus on their mission and where they’re going, they (water authorities) really do work well,” Pope said. “I’ve seen lots of communities do things that, by themselves, they just could not do.”

The biggest thing the collective effort would do for the group, Pope said, was provide easier access to capital.

“It’s much easier to borrow money,” she said, “if you have a diversity of membership, and a future growth projection. It also allows for economies of scale. Rather than everybody going out and doing their own little thing, it allows everybody to pull together. And usually you do it much less expensively.”

One question floated during the meeting was the potential for a rate increase for water customers, something Ferguson said was probably inevitable under any circumstance. Rentz, meanwhile, pointed out that his research of other water authorities indicated that, although rates go up, they do so at a slower rate than with smaller, individual water companies over time.

“More expensive water is better than no water at all,” Gaddy said.

The committee will meet again Jan. 23 at Midlands Tech in Winnsboro.

Repairs to four welds at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Jenkinsville are nearing completion, and the repairs at no time presented a threat to residents of Western Fairfield County, according to Rhonda O’Banion, public information director for SCANA. The welds were four of 66 welds to the reactor vessel head, a steel structure 6- to 8-inches thick that contains the fuel assemblies.

The weakened welds were discovered in the early stages of the plant’s current routine refueling outage, which began Oct. 12, O’Banion said, and were reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission along with a plan of action on Oct. 23. Maintenance crews were on standby at the beginning of the outage, O’Banion said, and ready to go to work in the event the need for any repairs was detected.

“We are currently in a refueling outage, which is done every 18 months,” O’Banion said, “during which time, we plan for maintenance. We do this preemptively. We schedule these reviews to look for things like this.”

O’Banion said the areas identified for repair were invisible to the naked eye and crews used robotic inspection techniques and ultrasonic testing to identify the weaknesses.

“This kind of maintenance is not uncommon over the life of a nuclear reactor,” O’Banion said, “and many other utilities have completed such repairs successfully.”

While O’Banion said there was no need at this time to consider replacing the reactor head, Tom Clements, a Columbia based environmental advocate who works with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) member group Nuclear Watch South, said he thinks that is exactly what they should do.

“Because of the age of the vessel, and because the whole vessel is subject to heat and radiation, they’re probably going to find more problems in the future,” Clements said, “so I think the NRC should order a new vessel head and replace it.”

But O’Banion said V.C. Summer is working within NRC guidelines and with NRC approval.

“But when there comes a time when we need to replace it, we will do so,” she added. “If the NRC was not in agreement, they would not have approved the work.”

Clements said he was glad to know the problems were detected, and that he was told by the NRC that V.C. Summer will be required to check these welds during every fueling outage.

“That’s a positive thing,” Clements said. “The problem is that the vessel that contains the nuclear material is old and more problems will likely arise. Hopefully, they will be found.”