Blythewood Online 691

Category: News

  • McLean Resigns from Planning Commission

    Neil McLean

    Blythewood planning commissioner Neil McLean resigned his seat on the commission at the end of the Aug. 6 meeting.

    McLean said it was time to step down due to business opportunities and family commitments. Two years remained on his current four-year term. The position is appointed by the Town Council.

    In other business, town administrator John Perry told the commission that changes would need to be made in the town’s tree and landscape ordinance to reflect the
    Attorney General’s opinion that the town does not have jurisdiction over the clear cutting of trees in buffering areas along right-of-way areas.

    Perry said that in that instance, “We do not have the authority to enforce rules that are set forth in our town ordinance.”

    “If land is assessed by the County,” Perry said, “then it is governed by the forestry rules.”

    Perry discussed the need to look at  the town’s sign ordinance again in terms of window signage. Perry said that while some businesses want to put signs in their windows, the commission might want to look at balancing businesses’ desires for the signs with the architectural standards of the town. Perry also announced that the Town had contracted with Wayne Schuler at the Central Council of Governments (COG) to be the project manager for the updating of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan.

    Perry discussed the Town’s and SCDOT’s joint beautification project at the I-77 interchange.

    “We will be planting 100 live oak trees and other landscaping,” Perry said. He also said construction had begun on new decorative signal lights on the west side of I-77. The landscaping of the interchange is expected to be completed by December of this year.

  • Cancer Friends Support Group gives children a ‘Chance’

    Bonnie Myers of Cancer Friends Group presents check to Samantha Higgins of ‘Children’s Chance’

    The Breast Friends and Cancer Friends Support Group that meets once a month at the Good Samaritan Resource Center, held this month’s meeting Aug. 11 at the home of Bonnie and Tommy Myers in Winnsboro. It was to be a poolside party and many of us were looking forward to dangling our feet in the pool’s cool refreshing water. But as fate would have it, the skies opened up and it poured with rain.

    Myers, a cancer survivor herself, was the co-founder of this group with her friend Nancy Stone. It was organized back in April of 1999 with the purpose of giving support to cancer patients, providing a place where they can be with others who understand and to give hope and praise for the survivors. There was a dire need for such a group in Fairfield County as “the list of cancer patients continues to grow each year,” Myers said.

    A discussion was held on the Memory Quilt that the group will be making. They will first make a survivors quilt with images of cancer survivors on it. After the first quilt is finished, they will decide where best to display it and start a quilt for those who lost their battle with cancer. Money for the material will come from the sale of cookbooks and the bake sale held earlier this year.

    It was decided that money from the successful cookbook sale was to go to ‘Kids with Cancer.’ The books went on sale last year in time to be purchased as Christmas gifts. There are a few books left; if anyone is interested, contact Bonnie Myers at 635-5826. More than 300 books were sold and after a few donations, a check in the amount of $3,300 was presented on behalf of the cancer group to Samantha Higgins of Children’s Chance at the August meeting.

    Children’s Chance is a non-profit organization that was established in September of 1996 by two mothers of children with cancer. The organization takes children from birth to age 18 years. This organization assists South Carolina children with cancer and their families with non-medical needs by meeting their emotional, psychological and financial needs. They furnish help with rent, mortgage, utility bills, groceries, lost wages, school supplies and counseling. The facility is located in Columbia and is the only statewide organization that offers this type of help. These programs are provided with the help of oncology clinics located in Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina; Augusta, Ga.; Charlotte, N.C. and Greenville. Regardless of where the child is being treated, if he or she is a resident of South Carolina and is either on active treatment for cancer or less than one year of treatment, they are eligible for this program.

    The mission of Children’s Chance is to improve the quality of life of children dealing with the trauma of children’s cancer and to help the families remain intact and functional during their crisis. Monies for this organization come from grants, fund raisers and donations – it is not government funded. The check presented this day from the Breast Friends and Cancer Friends will be administered to children with cancer in Fairfield County. Higgins said that there are 150 to 200 new cases in South Carolina each year. The most common diagnosis for the children is leukemia, which can take two or three years of treatment. Another project for the cancer children considered by the group is the knitting or crocheting of hats for the cancer patients who have experienced hair loss.

    As he has in the past, Tommy Myers, Bonnie’s husband of 36 years, cooked hotdogs on the grill for the group. Also served were condiments and chili, coleslaw, potato chips and baked beans. And what would a luncheon be without desserts, which included pineapple cake, pecan pie, key lime pie and blueberry and banana cake.

    This group should be very proud of themselves for the amount of money they made toward such a worthy cause.

  • Copper Capers Chafe County Cops

    Copper bandits continue to terrorize Fairfield County in and around the town of Winnsboro, destroying air conditioning units at four more sites last week and making off with thousands of dollars in copper components.

    On Aug. 3, deputies arrived at a church in the 5200 block of Newberry Road where two air conditioning units had been taken apart, causing $6,000 in damage. Copper worth $3,000 had been taken from the units. A third air conditioner, worth approximately $3,000, had been taken from the property entirely.

    Deputies were called to a business just off the northern end of the Highway 321 Bypass Aug. 4 where thieves had dismantled an air conditioning unit behind the building. Thieves had ripped the top off the unit, cut wires and stole copper worth $3,000.

    Two days later, on Aug. 6, administrators at Richard Winn Academy on Old Chester Road discovered six air conditioning units outside the school had been taken apart and copper worth $18,000 stolen. The thieves apparently accessed the property by cutting their way through a chain link fence.

    The thefts have now taken on epidemic proportions and the Sheriff’s Office said they have stepped up prevention measures. Still, the thefts present a difficult challenge to investigators. Because of the very nature of working with air conditioning units, the thieves are wearing gloves, and thus leaving no latent finger prints. The thefts also occur in areas that commonly receive a high amount of traffic, so foot prints and tire tracks are stamped out fairly quickly, if they ever existed at all. And the parts being stolen are impossible to trace. Once a copper coil comes out of an air conditioning unit, it is virtually identical to any other copper coil out of any other unit.

    And copper thefts are not just the Sheriff Office’s problem. The Winnsboro Department of Public Safety is also beginning to see hits within the town limits. Officers were called to the offices of Fairfield Mental Health Services at 1073 Highway 321 Bypass Aug. 6 where, some time over the weekend, someone had taken apart three air conditioning units, removing copper pieces worth $10,000.

    The Sheriff’s Office is asking the community to be on alert and report any suspicious activity, particularly near and around churches or other sites that stand unoccupied for several days out of the week.

    Anyone with information linked to these crimes is asked to call the Sheriff’s Office at 635-4141 or the Winnsboro Department of Public Safety at 635-4511.

  • Freed-Up Funds Flow into Chester

    Although the Fairfield County School Board voted 5-2 in a special called meeting last week to appeal a July 16 ruling by a Circuit Court judge in the Mitford case, one detail of that ruling remained unaddressed – whether or not to seek a court order to delay the delivery to Chester County Schools funds currently being held at the Fairfield County Treasurer’s Office, pending the outcome of the appeal.

    Tuesday night, the Board held their third special called meeting in as many weeks to address that issue, and after more than an hour in executive session, took no action.

    According to Judge J. Ernest Kinard’s ruling, the Treasurer was to release those funds – approximately $1.8 million accrued over the last three years – within 30 days of the July 16 court order. At the time the Board convened Tuesday night, the Board had literally hours before the funds were to be transferred. Any last-minute effort to delay those funds with a court order could have cost the District no less than $5,000, sources close to the School District reported. In the event the District wins the appeal, the funds will be returned with interest, the source said.

    After the meeting, Board Chairwoman Andrea Harrison declined to answer questions about how much the appeal was expected to cost the school district or if the Board would muster an eleventh-hour attempt to delay the delivery of funds to Chester County and how much any such attempt might cost. Instead, Harrison said, the District’s attorney, Armand Derfner, would make a statement on the Board’s behalf.

    However, reached by phone after the meeting, Derfner said he had no such statement.

    “I really think you should get it from them (the School Board),” Derfner said. “They’re really in control of the statement, so you would want to talk to them.”

    Follow-up phone calls to Harrison were not returned to The Voice at press time.

  • Wholesalers, Others Face Deadline for Proposed Water Authority

    It has been more than a month since the Mayor of Winnsboro laid down the law for wholesale customers of Winnsboro water, and so far only two distributors of that water have indicated an interest in partnering in a joint water authority. With a Sept. 30 deadline looming, other entities could be left out in the cold in terms of future water sales.

    According to documents included with the Town Manager’s report for the Aug. 7 meeting of Winnsboro Town Council, the Town had received positive responses from the Town of Ridgeway and Mid-County Water to joining the Town of Winnsboro in the Regional Water Supply Authority for Fairfield County. No response had been received from the Jenkinsville Water Company or Fairfield County. The Town had also received no response from the Mitford Water Company or the Town of Blythewood.

    Under the proposed plan, members will be expected to contribute $5,000 to a Charter Committee bank account to raise capital for incorporating costs. If at least $15,000 hasn’t been raised by the Sept. 30 deadline, the entire project goes up in smoke.

    “If we haven’t raised that money by the September deadline, then the Town will probably have to look at phasing distributors off the system,” said John Fantry, special counsel to the Town of Winnsboro. “It is a ‘pay to play’ system. If Winnsboro is the only one putting up any money to do this, if other people aren’t committed, then we’re going to have to take care of ourselves, and that means cutting people off of wholesale water.”

    Although the checks have not been written just yet, with Mid-County and Ridgeway willing to join with Winnsboro, it appears that the money to move forward will be there. But that doesn’t necessarily mean wholesale water will continue to flow to entities choosing not to participate.

    “They risk losing water from the Authority,” Fantry said, “whether the Authority has excess to sell or not.”

    If the Authority were formed today, Winnsboro, Mid-County and Ridgeway, with the assistance of Santee Cooper and the Central Midlands Council of Governments, would establish a Charter Committee, made up of two voting members from each participating entity. The Authority would design the system infrastructure required to meet the needs of each of its members and issue bonds to help pay for that infrastructure. The Charter Committee would then sell retail water to the individual members.

    Currently, the Jenkinsville Water Company (JWC) purchases approximately 50 percent of its water from Mid-County, which in turn buys water from Winnsboro; but Gregrey Ginyard, president of the JWC Board of Trustees, said his company is not interested in joining the authority.

    “At this time, we don’t feel like that would be beneficial for us,” Ginyard said, and added he was not overly concerned about the possibility of being cut off from Winnsboro water.

    “We’re working on other water sources,” Ginyard said. “We’re looking at putting in more wells and we’re applying for grants for a treatment plant so we can pull water out of the river. At this point in time, we can’t see turning the Jenkinsville Water Company over to someone else.”

    The Mitford Water Company said they would like to have joined in the project, but were locked into a contract with Chester County for the next 30 years or more. Mitford Water serves approximately 900 customers in Fairfield County.

    John Perry, Town Administrator for the Town of Blythewood, said he has not yet received any direction from Town Council on which way Blythewood will go on the water authority.

    Fairfield County, which has for months been waiting on a water tap from the Town of Winnsboro to supply water to a new industrial park, has also not committed to the proposed water authority. A special called meeting was to be held Wednesday night for Council to discuss the matter.

    “What we’ve got to figure out is where we fit in,” David Ferguson, Chairman of Fairfield County Council, said. “What is our niche? Do we need to be involved or not?”

  • Winnsboro Selects Web Vendor

    Winnsboro Town Council voted unanimously at their Aug. 7 meeting to turn over the creation and maintenance of a new town Web site to Splash Omnimedia of Lexington.

    “Splash will be our best vendor,” Connie Shackleford, Grants Administrator, said. “They’re not the lowest bid, but they will work with us, and their ‘back end’ (of their Web site) is easier to work with.”

    Shackleford added that Splash was eager to add a municipality to their client list and would likely use the Winnsboro site as a showpiece to attract future towns and governments.

    Winnsboro will shell out $12,850 for the site, plus a yearly maintenance fee of $1,428.

    Other companies competing for the contract were Red-Dog Marketing, VC3 and Civis Plus. Red-Dog submitted a bid of $9,000, plus a yearly maintenance fee of $3,600. Red-Dog’s proposed site was limited to 35 pages, and video streaming would have been $1,200 extra. VC3 offered a price of $13,320, plus an annual fee of $1,116. Mobile applications and social media networking would have been $1,000 extra, each. Civis Plus submitted an offer of $17,644, plus an annual fee of $7,881 with a 36-month contract.

    Council also voted to pony up $500 for paint and supplies to paint the Town’s flower pots lining Congress Street, and offered to send a street sweeper to clear the parking lot of a new restaurant opening in the old Captain’s Galley location just outside the Town limits.

    Public Safety officer William Gonzales told Council that a pair of lightning strikes at the station had severely damaged the department’s computer and communications networks. While insurance is covering a great deal of replacement costs, Gonzales said the Town should brace themselves to pay anywhere between $10,000 and $15,000 out of pocket.

    Councilman Bill Haslett reported that the County had begun enforcing their new building and zoning codes and that he has seen numerous red stickers all over town (indicating a violation).

    “I don’t always agree with everything the County does,” Haslett said, “but I agree with this. It has made a difference, and I hope the Town will have the guts to go forward and clean up our town and follow suit with what the County is doing. When you ride through our town, there’s a lot of it that’s in pretty bad shape.”

    Haslett said he has collected more than 30 photographs of some of the town’s worst eyesores, which he said he will present to Town Council at their next meeting (Aug. 21) in an effort to goad them into action.

  • County OKs LongCreek Development plan

    The Richland County Development Review Team (DRT) approved an application by LongCreek Associates, LLC, Aug. 9 to develop 332 housing units (including high-density cluster homes and duplexes) on 100.7 acres within LongCreek Plantation subdivision. The project is called The Villages at LongCreek.

    The approval did not require a public hearing or a vote by County Council, but  was based on the DRT’s determination as to whether the project complied with Richland County’s Code of Ordinances.

    After much opposition last winter from the residents of LongCreek Plantation, the same developer withdrew its application for PDD zoning for the project. That proposal would have permitted the development of 425 new housing units on about 140 acres.

    The developer recently sought approval to develop the project under Richland County’s Green Code standards. The new proposal contains no multifamily or commercial uses.

    Many of the residents of LongCreek Plantation opposed DRT’s decision to approve the new plan, citing the misapplication of the County’s Green Code ordinance to this project.

  • Columbia Water Flows into Blythewood

    In spite of a few last-minute snags and delays, water is now flowing into Blythewood from the City of Columbia. The tap was officially turned on Aug. 6, giving Blythewood Customers of Winnsboro Water access to 400,000 gallons per day from Columbia.

    A pressure switch failure Aug. 2 and a control panel failure Aug. 3, both on the pumping system, pushed the start date back several days. Both issues were resolved by Aug. 6.

    The influx of Columbia water into Blythewood will save the Town of Winnsboro more than a quarter-million gallons per day, but water restrictions are still in effect for customers in Fairfield County. John Fantry, special counsel to the Town of Winnsboro, said the Town’s reservoir was still low and it could take up to 30 days for the Town to gauge what impact the diversion of Blythewood water has had on Winnsboro’s supply.

    At that time, the Town will consider revising or lifting mandatory water restrictions, and will also reconsider Fairfield County’s request for a water tap at a new industrial park, as well as a request from Fairfield Central High School to water their athletic fields. Winnsboro will also then consider a request from the Town of Blythewood for two new water taps for watering plants near exit 27.

  • Ridgeway Offers Lease on Old Town Hall Property

    Ridgeway Town Council conceded at their Aug. 9 meeting that they would have to reach into the Town’s savings account to cover the cost of repairing more than a dozen windows on the Old Town Hall building which recently housed YesterYears restaurant. Mayor Charlene Herring said it would cost nearly $2,700 to have the windows repaired, and that would not include any painting that would need to be done.

    Renovations to the Old Town Hall are pressing, since Council voted to offer a lease on the building to a new restaurant. As the lease remains unsigned, Ridgeway is keeping a lid on the name of the potential new business. Ridgeway is also quiet about who will manage the property for the town in the future. Council is seeking an agreement with a property management firm to handle the Old Town Hall, but has not, as of press time, finalized a contract.

    Council also took a peek at the latest drawing and bid proposal for a set of six new welcome signs, but took no action on a final decision to approve the signs.

    Herring said that the Pig on the Ridge Committee had agreed to pay for the new signs, but changes to the design have made the price from Sign-A-Rama in Irmo creep up somewhat. The most recent changes include a smaller sign underneath the Ridgeway sign, indicating the Pig on the Ridge and Arts on the Ridge festivals. The new total for the sandblasted wood signs has grown to $10,409.59, including tax.

    The decision on the signs, as well as on new garbage cans, which the Pig on the Ridge Committee had also offered to pay for (ranging from $299 to $385 each), was left in the hands of the Committee for their consideration.

    In preparation for the upcoming Big Grab 25-mile yard sale, being held Sept. 7-8 between Blythewood and Winnsboro, Council agreed to waive their standard $5 yard sale/garage sale fee. No decision was made on whether or not the Town would donate to the event.

    And finally, Council appointed Croom Hunter as their next Zoning Administrator, effective next month.

  • Winnsboro Scouts host ‘Extravaganza’

    Winnsboro’s Boy Scout Troop 49 is hosting a merit badge extravaganza Aug. 25-26. These unique classes are made possible by the support of our community. Camping will be available on the grounds of the S.C. Railroad Museum, so come spend the weekend.

    Registration is now open on meritbadge.info.

    If you haven’t previously used this site, you will need to set up an account, then you can register your scouts for classes. Note: If your Scout participated last year, an account has already been set up for you (use your e-mail address and “Troop49” as the password). Please also register for “Campsite” if you plan to camp at the SC Railroad Museum and for “food” if you would like to purchase a pizza lunch for Saturday.

    Note that a CPR class is being offered, which is open to both scouts and adults; more information regarding additional opportunities for adults will be provided as details are worked out.

    If you have any difficulty registering, or if you have any questions, please e-mail Laura Bost at ljbost@msn.com. Class sizes are limited, so we encourage you to register early to ensure your Scout gets his first choice. There are currently 23 different items listed as options for the merit badge. Some activities will take place at Richard Winn, VC Summer and some at the Railroad Museum, including overnight camping for the scouts.