2025 a Year of Progress, but Much Left to Be Done in Anderson County
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
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.
December brought new economic development news of investments totaling more than $2.6 billion dollars, with new jobs and increased tax base to support growth.
The $2.5 billion investment by Duke Energy on a new power production plant in the southern part of the county and $125 million investment to bring 125 new jobs to an existing business in the opposite corner of the county were not the only announcements.
More than 400 jobs were created in 2025 before those announcements. The Anderson County Department of Economic Development does not report statistics of new jobs and investment before approved at third reading by Anderson County Council, but these two are done deals, which brings total investment for the year to $2.8 billion.
Here are some highlights:
Eastern Engineered Wood Products will locate its first South Carolina operation in the county, committing to an $18.7 million investment creating 31 new jobs. The deal further cements the area’s emergence as a regional manufacturing hub.
In April, county council approved tax incentives for Alliance Blvd Venture LLC to support a $15.5 million investment in a new speculative industrial building at 170/172 Alliance Boulevard in Williamston, a shell facility designed to let manufacturers move in and start operations quickly. Officials said the project reflects continued confidence that industrial growth will extend into smaller municipalities like Williamston, not just along the county’s primary
In mid-November, Anderson County notched two economic wins despite ongoing infrastructure debates: Sargent Metal Fabricators announced a $9 million expansion that will create 20 new jobs, while Covan’s Properties LLC unveiled “Project Briarwood,” a $3 million investment to revitalize operations in downtown Honea Path—a key boost for the county’s southern reaches.
On December 3, Anderson County landed another manufacturing coup as Advanced Metalworks announced a $10.5 million expansion in Belton, set to create 69 new jobs and extending the county’s pattern of industrial growth into its smaller municipalities.
Other notable investments include TTI expansion ($20.7 million), a joint industrial project with Greenville County ($36.9 million) and the Long Road industrial site ($36 million).
Zoning and budgets
In a rare move in August, council responded to overwhelming concerns of citizens with property near a proposed $51.6 million plasma gasification plant in Anderson County that would have used extremely high temperatures to convert pharmaceutical waste into a synthetic fuel called syngas, vitrifying the remaining material into a glass-like slag that could be reused in construction. The project was projected to create 54 highly paid, science-focused jobs averaging about $53 an hour, with an estimated first-year economic impact of roughly $37 million, and advanced through initial county incentive readings before being dropped amid intense public outcry over environmental, health, and property-value concerns near the rural site.
Meanwhile in June, county council unanimously approved a $331.8 million budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year that adds staff, boosts pay, and lays bare the mounting costs of jail overcrowding. The plan funds 13 new officers for the county’s detention center, now under construction, and grants a 3 percent cost-of-living raise to all county employees. Budget documents also show the existing jail’s population has swelled to more than 500 inmates—more than double its 240-bed design capacity—driving monthly food costs up from $64,000 to $75,000.
More news
Other Anderson County news this year did not arrive as a single headline so much as a series of quiet reckonings: with festivals, events measured against crumbling bridges and exhausted shelters, with the long tail of addiction, and with what becomes of people when the available beds run out. It was a year in which policy meetings and obscure mill sites suddenly felt like the front lines of a small Southern county’s future.
Roads to somewhere
County council members had gathered for their January retreat, the kind of meeting that usually lives and dies on PowerPoints and working lunches. On the agenda was a familiar political specter: a “penny tax,” a proposed Capital Projects Sales Tax that voters had rejected at the ballot box in November 2024.
The tax’s new incarnation came with a structural tweak that suggested both contrition and resolve. Rather than sending voters a vague promise of better roads, the council appointed a six‑person commission, with representatives from the cities and municipalities, tasked with naming specific stretches of asphalt and concrete that would be fixed if residents agreed to the extra penny.
The stakes were literal and heavy. County staff spoke of a $340 million backlog in road and bridge work, a sum large enough to feel unreal until they added the detail that 57 bridges in Anderson County can no longer safely carry a fire truck or a school bus. Parents who might have rolled their eyes at another tax debate could picture a yellow bus rerouted, or a fire engine forced to take the long way around while a house burned. The question, then, was not whether people liked paying the one-cent tax, but which risk felt greater: the slow erosion of public infrastructure or the immediate bite of a sales tax.
Voters, perhaps somewhat influenced by a flock of misinformation spread in a roughly organized campaign which opposed the tax, overwhelmingly rejected the measure, sending county officials back to the drawing board to piece together a patchwork of funding to fill potholes and hopefully meet challenges of emergencies.
Planning and zoning
Council also strategically confronted the increasing challenge of suburban sprawl, taking a major step to reshape how and where growth happens, voted to spend $380,000 to hire Code Wright Planners to completely rewrite the county’s zoning and development ordinances, a two‑year effort aimed at replacing what officials called outdated and confusing rules with “plain English” regulations that can better manage the surge of new subdivisions and protect existing neighborhoods. The move, a direct outgrowth of contentious housing‑moratorium debates earlier in the year, was paired with immediate approval of new buffer yard standards that will force developers to leave more green space and visual barriers between fresh commercial or industrial projects and nearby homes.
In October, Council also voted in favor of a moratorium on new housing developments exceeding four houses, with a few caveats. That moratorium expires in January.
In late December, 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.
Christmastime showcased an almost totally refurbished historic courthouse, with gleaming copper roof and repaired brick, roof and other structural work to the 128-year-old seat of county government. Preparations for removing the final scaffolding on the front are set for January, but Christmas decorations helped ease the look during the holidays.
Growing pains
In a region where growth is often advertised in rooftops and retail, Anderson’s most consequential decisions in 2025 unfolded instead in the quiet bureaucracies of counting, rezoning, and reallocating. The county’s story was not of sudden transformation but of incremental, contested moves toward a different civic arithmetic, one in which the measure of prosperity might be whether the bridges can carry the buses and whether there are, finally, enough beds for everyone who needs one.
On a cold night in late January of 2025, volunteers with clipboards fanned out across Anderson County to count the people who had no front door to go home to. The annual Point‑in‑Time census, bureaucratic in name but intimate in practice, found 365 homeless individuals—nearly a quarter more than the year before, an uptick that could not be waved away as a statistical blip.
The number that haunted officials, though, was not 365 but 128: the approximate count of all manner of shelter beds available in the county, many of them seasonal or weather‑dependent, the civic equivalent of a couch that disappears when the forecast turns mild. In Greenville, an hour up the road, there were more than a thousand beds—a different scale of response, and a different message about who, exactly, was expected to sleep indoors.
Hope Missions and other ministries, which had long patched the gaps with limited facilities and short‑term fixes, began speaking in a new register—less about charity than about infrastructure, as if beds and cots belonged in the same category as bridges and sewer lines. The PIT count gave them numbers they could carry into council chambers: not anecdotes about a man under an overpass, but a spreadsheet showing that the county’s safety net had more holes than rope.
Hope Village and the afterlife of a mill
If the PIT count measured the present, the old Riverside/Toxaway mill site embodied the past. Once an industrial engine, it had long since become a Superfund scar—one of those places locals point to while driving, half in warning, half in resignation.
On January 21, after years of environmental cleanup and legal choreography, the county council voted to update zoning and other allowances to let the land be used for residential purposes. The decision cleared the way for an experiment with a deceptively gentle name: Hope Village, a clustered tiny‑home community designed as transitional housing for people who might otherwise be sleeping in cars, under bridges, or in the county’s overbooked shelters.
The idea of addressing homelessness with a village of small, carefully arranged houses had the slightly utopian sheen of a design‑school thesis, but in Anderson it was rooted in math rather than abstraction: 365 people, 128 beds, and a yawning gap in between. The former mill site—cleansed, rezoned, and reimagined—became a test of whether the county could repurpose industrial ruin into social infrastructure, turning the residue of one economic era into a lifeline for those stranded by the next.
The lingering crisis of addiction
At the same January 21 meeting, the council turned to a different kind of ledger: money arriving from the statewide opioid settlement, a long‑delayed reckoning with the pharmaceutical and distribution chains that had helped turn prescription bottles into small, legal grenades.
The funds themselves, while welcome, were finite and freighted with expectations. Every dollar spent on treatment or prevention would be a dollar not spent on law enforcement or public education; every program approved would imply that some other possible response—more beds, more counselors, more naloxone—could wait. In a county where homelessness, addiction, and fragile infrastructure already intersected, the settlement money felt less like a windfall than like an exam: could Anderson, given a modest pot of resources and a long list of harms, craft a response that would matter beyond a budget cycle?
Officials framed the allocations as part of a broader strategy to address addiction’s upstream and downstream effects, from overdoses to family instability. Yet the tension was impossible to miss. The same community that struggled to house its most vulnerable residents was now being asked to build, with limited funds, the scaffolding of treatment and recovery—a system that, if it worked, might one day reduce the need for both shelters and tiny‑home villages.
Funding of the drug court, which helps those with crimes related to their substance additions, offers a clean slate for those willing to work through the exacting program. Graduates have made it clear what a life-changing opportunity the court provides.
By year’s end the parade of isolated events formed chapters in a single, unfinished narrative. The PIT count, how to fund roads and bridges, the Hope Village zoning vote, and the distribution of opioid‑settlement funds all gestured toward a county trying to decide what kind of place it wanted to be—for people without beds, for children on school buses, for families living in the long shadow of addiction.
A county taking stock
While celebrating another year of success in economic development, there is little time for a victory lap, and county officials are not taking one.
Work is under way to find sources of funding for the crumbling roads and bridges, the new county detention center is set to open in the year ahead, while those charged with bringing in new jobs and investment continue their quest to provide quality jobs for the population of the county which now stretches well beyond 220,000.
