Phillips said the combination of music, news, and real‑time weather alerts is meant to fill a void in local broadcasting and give Anderson County residents a station that reflects their own lives.  With 94.9 WALH now audible across more of the county and WSAC on the way, he hopes listeners will come to see Anderson’s only local FM station as both a daily habit and a vital part of the area’s safety network.

Owners Hamid and K.D. Mohsseni are retiring after more than 30 years as a community fixture which provided not only a blend of casual and upscale dining, but a familiar gathering place.

The Population Element of the Comprehensive Plan analyzes historic and current population and demographic trends and provides reasonable population projections to help formulate policy decisions through the lifespan of the Plan.

Anderson County Council kicked off the new year with an agenda focused squarely on growth and development Tuesday night, adopting an updated comprehensive plan and new communication measures designed to improve transparency between staff, council members, and the public.

Department of Motor Vehicles offices across the state began offering the commemorative plate last week as one of its two standard options, coinciding with this year’s 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

The tag replaced the decade-old, blue-and-white plate with the state’s motto, “While I breathe, I hope,” printed above a Palmetto tree. Those license plates will remain valid until their expiration date, according to the DMV.

If approved by the state Public Service Commission, residential customers who use 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month — considered the industry standard — would see another $20 tacked on to their current monthly bill, Dominion’s regulatory manager John Raftery told the SC Daily Gazette. That would take average bills from about $157 a month to just shy of $177, starting in July 2026.

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.