The summer calendar already promises more chances for community gathering. A planned “Splashing in the Park” event has been folded into an August back-to-school bash, which Smithwick said will focus on collecting hygiene products for middle- and high-school students. He argued that these items are often overlooked in school supply drives, even though they are among the most needed. In early July, Pelzer will also host a novelty with a competitive streak: the first annual Pelzer vs. West Pelzer adult softball game, set for July 3 at Bill Hopkins Field, followed by the town’s Fourth of July celebration on July 4. Food trucks, fireworks-friendly fanfare, free hot dogs, bounce houses and music from Sammy Horn and the Slamming Sammies are all part of the plan.

Miller arrived in 2013 and found a community with deep civic pride, unusually strong volunteer energy, and a small-town loyalty that still feels intact even as Pendleton has expanded. He credited staff, councils, and residents for helping steer the town into better financial shape, with investment accounts that may help buffer future tax pressure.

If early voting is any indication, Anderson County can expect a better-than-average turnout Tuesday for the statewide primaries. Nearly six percent of the county’s registered voters, 9,521, cast early ballots this year. Polls are open tomorrow 7 a.m.-7 p.m. See your sample ballot here.

Running for office and serving in the General Assembly of South Carolina is not for the financially faint of heart. Campaigning is expensive for a time-consuming job that pays an annual base salary of $10,400. (Though total compensation is roughly $22,400 annually, if you add the $12,000 district expense allowance paid out at $1,000 per month).

The decline in print newspapers gave rise to local online newspapers, which, not encumbered by the cost of paper, ink and delivery, could focus resources on local news.

A benefit for Area 14-Anderson County Special Olympics athletes, this year’s Rally featured, for the first time, a 9-mile paddle from Dolly Cooper Park to the newly opened Piedmont Riverfront Park.

Council is expected to formally adopt a $94.2 million budget that keeps the millage rate at 109 mills, includes a 3.0 percent cost-of-living adjustment for full-time and permanent part-time employees, and preserves the city’s practice of using outside financing for some capital work. A companion budget provision would also raise the sanitation fee to $10.50 per cart per month starting July 1, with a further increase to $15.50 the following year.

“I’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even strangers encouraging me to run for public office, but now is simply not the right time for me to be considered for Lieutenant Governor,” McMaster Jr., son of Gov. Henry McMaster, posted on social media Friday.

Belton is finishing out spring as a season of maintenance: the roads are getting attention, the budget is close to finished, and the town’s public life is expanding in a number of ways.

The most immediately visible project is also the most fundamental: Main Street is about to be repaved. The crosswalk work that must precede it is nearing completion — more than 30 crosswalks across the city, more than most people knew existed, now being rebuilt in concrete after years of historic brick. The brick had its day, Roberts said, but added that concrete is smoother, more durable, and considerably more forgiving for anyone navigating a crosswalk in wet weather or with a stroller or a cane.

Once a location clears the data threshold and lands on the RSA list, Taylor's office dispatches a team for a field review/field audit — two days of walking the corridor during peak hours, watching traffic move, counting pedestrians and cyclists, and observing the friction points that aggregate crash statistics can suggest but never fully explain.

The bigger news is the demolition of what remains of the old Chiquola Mill. Workers have been tearing down the surviving walls, hauling off debris, and managing, at considerable effort, the hazardous material the building left behind. Smith said nearly everything in it contains asbestos: the obvious materials, the less obvious materials, even the old brick, which must be handled as hazardous waste and hauled off accordingly. The mill pond has been filled and graded flat. The walls are coming down. Smith estimates another 120 days to completion.

As the county celebrates its 200th birthday, with pomp and flourish, decisions being made today will chart the course for the centuries ahead. Record population growth creates challenges for safe roads, providing services such as public safety and maintaining those things which contribute to quality of life continue to create challenges, as county council puts together the budget for the new fiscal year as it waits for the General Assembly to finalize its own budget in Columbia.

Anderson County Council will consider zoning changes for Center Rock, a code enforcement partnership, a federal sports fish grant, the upcoming fiscal year 2026-27 budget, and a potentially controversial library board appointment that Vice Chairman Brett Sanders will bring forward on behalf of District 4 as part of Tuesday’s meeting at 6:30 p.m. in the historic courthouse.

"Every day you should remember our veterans," said Pelzer Mayor Chase Smithwick, "and every day you should remember those that died for our country. Having it a week later kind of carries that message out: we need to memorialize our veterans every day."

The Pelzer Auditorium was among those institutions. It was, from the beginning, several things at once: a high school auditorium for Pelzer School, a venue for the traveling vaudeville shows that came through on the train and unloaded directly onto Levee Street, and a civic hall that the Pelzer Manufacturing Company built in the conviction that its workers deserved somewhere to go.

The marker commemorates the General's Road, and its story is Anderson's story — which is to say it is the story of how a dirt path through the South Carolina Piedmont became a county seat, and how a county seat became a city, and how, somewhere in that transformation, the original name got left behind like a trunk in an attic no one thought to open.

Anderson County, which has watched development pressure arrive from the north and east with the steady intensity of a growing storm, decided last year that this was no longer acceptable. In April 2025, county council approved a $380,000 contract with CodeWright Planners, LLC, a firm with an unusual specialty: working with the county on reasonable standards and making those planning and zoning codes readable.

According to the latest soundings by the Winthrop Poll—a survey of 1,434 residents conducted by Winthrop University’s Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research—the mood of the electorate is decidedly overcast. Most of the state’s residents view the current economy with a jaundiced eye, and fully half report that their financial footing has slipped compared to where they stood a year ago.

The job had a title — assistant superintendent for communications and community relations — but the actual work, was something closer to institutional connective tissue: the person who knew the sheriff and the city council member and the state legislator and the nonprofit director, and who understood, from long practice, that those relationships were not incidental to the work of running a school district. They were the work.