Revenue estimates updated in November provided the Legislature nearly $2.5 billion in additional money to spend in the fiscal year starting July 1. That breaks down to $1.7 billion in unspent reserves and above-expectation tax collections so far this year — meant for one-time expenses — and $734 million from continued economic growth available for ongoing expenses, according to the state Board of Economic Advisors.

The agenda’s most forward-looking item, though, sit at second reading: Part I of the 2026 Comprehensive Plan, timed to the county’s 2026 bicentennial and written in the wonkish cadences of planners who have spent a year counting rooftops and traffic counts. The plan, covering population, housing, land use, community facilities, and a priority investment element, is framed as both birthday toast and warning label—acknowledging that Anderson, now over 220,000 residents strong and pressed by spillover from Greenville, must decide, quickly, whether it wants to be a diffuse exurban blur or something more deliberately arranged.

This year will mark a remarkable milestone as Anderson County celebrates its 200th birthday, with the Anderson County Museum rightly at the helm of the commemorations. A downtown parade, a new book chronicling the county’s story, and special programs will unfold under its watchful eye, a fitting role for what has been called the finest museum in the state

In a county where every pothole, rezoning, and rumor can metastasize in a Facebook thread by lunchtime, the paper has chosen to tell a different kind of story: one that begins with the assumption that most of the people in charge are actually trying to do the right thing.

Local journalism does not disappear all at once. It disappears when the last reporter decides it isn’t worth sitting through another three‑hour meeting, when the last advertiser decides to spend that budget somewhere else, when the last reader assumes someone else is paying attention. In Anderson County, that hasn’t happened yet. The Anderson Observer is still watching. If you want it to keep watching—for the next election, the next controversial rezoning, the next kid from down the street who does something extraordinary—now is the time to help.

Taken together, the results paint a picture of an electorate that is willing to swap out leaders in some corners of the county while keeping steady hands in others, skeptical of broad new taxes but open to targeted land‑use rules that promise more control over what gets built where. In a year defined by debates over roads, rooftops and who benefits from Anderson County’s rapid growth, November’s ballots offered one of the clearest statements yet of how local voters want to shape the next chapter.

Anderson County’s arts community in 2025 did not announce itself with the fanfare of a single gala or a marquee import but gathered force through the quiet accumulation of spotlights and strung lights, juried scrutiny and midnight rehearsals—a year in which small stages in Pelzer and Federal Street theaters hosted Motown heat waves and Hufflepuff redemption arcs, drawing crowds who might otherwise have streamed Netflix into the humid Upstate night.

Through it all ran the steady hum of planning: a new twenty-year comprehensive plan’s first reading in March, annexations, a sales-tax push for roads, Main Street’s long-awaited repave after utility digs, and AnMed’s Windsor Place medical complex, which stirred murmurs of a health system’s outsized footprint amid national accolades. Mayor Terence Roberts framed 2025 as the year projects became amenities, hospitality taxes hitting $5 million to fuel it all. In a city threading growth’s needle—enough to hold its workers, its walkers, its weekend revelers—Anderson’s story felt less like headlines than the incremental accrual of a place finally breathing easier.

The move comes at the end of a holiday week in which the season’s usual background hum of respiratory illness became, within hospital walls, uncomfortably loud. Before Christmas, AnMed was treating an average of five inpatients with confirmed influenza on any given day; by Dec. 30, that number had climbed to twenty‑five, a fivefold increase compressed into less than a fortnight. The health system had held off on restrictions while neighboring hospitals in the region moved earlier in the week to close their doors more firmly, but the new tally forced a change of posture.

As 2025 comes to an end, we are reminded that while the year offered much to celebrate, it was also one which reminded Anderson County there is much yet to be done.

Council voted unanimously to approve Ordinance 2025-057, a sweeping revision of land development standards that reads less like a zoning code and more like a peace treaty with the local flora. The new law introduces a prohibition on "Lot Mass Grading," forcing developers to abandon the practice of clearing more than 15 lots at a time to create flat homesites. From now on, builders must engage in "site fingerprinting," a forensic-sounding requirement that mandates roads and structures conform to the land’s natural contours rather than beating the earth into submission.

Anderson County’s biggest summer concert unfolded over two sweltering days in late July, as the Rock the Country music festival returned on July 25–26, drawing headliners Kid Rock, Nickelback, Hank Williams Jr., and Tracy Lawrence to a field packed with roughly 25,000 fans. Officials hailed the event—its final stop of the tour—as a roaring economic engine, generating more than $17 million in local impact from tickets, lodging, food, and spillover spending that rippled through hotels, restaurants, and shops.

But the law is also expected to increase the number of uninsured Americans, mostly Medicaid beneficiaries, by an estimated 10 million people. Health care analysts predict hospitals and other providers will raise prices to cover the double whammy of lost Medicaid revenue and the cost of caring for an influx of newly uninsured patients.

Hospital officials said the move comes during higher-than-normal flu activity in South Carolina and Tennessee and amid an ongoing measles outbreak centered in the Upstate region. As of Dec. 23, the S.C. Department of Public Health reported 159 measles cases tied to the Upstate outbreak, underscoring concerns about vulnerable hospital patients.

As part of an initiative to get students off their phones, the agency is asking legislators for money to buy curriculum explaining the negative effects of screen time. The education department would partner with ScreenStrong, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that sells books and courses educating children and their parents about how screens can hinder learning and other parts of their lives.

The question of why all this happens—why the county needs a tree, why downtown needs a rink, why Rose Valley needs synchronized reindeer—is answered, in part, by the older story about God showing up as a baby in a dark world. The rest of the answer is more local and less doctrinal.

And yet, each December, the column resurfaces, undeterred by its detractors and improbably fresh for a piece written before radio.  Part of its endurance lies in its refusal to argue about the wrong thing; Church declines to litigate the logistics of rooftop access and reindeer velocity, and instead posits Santa as an index of how seriously adults are willing to take a child’s capacity for wonder.  In a culture that tends to confuse sophistication with disenchantment, the editorial offers a compact defense of believing in things that cannot be itemized in a ledger or photographed with a phone.

The backpacks, sturdier than the bargain-bin versions, will be distributed not only at Hope Missions but also through The Salvation Army of Anderson, South Main Chapel & Mercy Center, Asher House and other partner agencies in the city.

Sanders arrived in the South Carolina House already fluent in the dialect of local government, having spent four years on town council and eight as mayor in West Pelzer, but the General Assembly presented a different kind of education.  One of the first things he did, along with 18 other freshmen, was go through orientation that asked them, for a moment, to forget party labels and caucus lines and simply learn each other’s families and biographies. 

Two days before Christmas, with rain clouds stalled over the Piedmont, Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns sat in his office and tried to explain what a 2.5 billion dollar power plant actually means to a county that still prides itself on the heritage of mill hills and Friday-night football.