Budget, Bicentennial, Events Top County News in Early June
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Rusty Burns has been Anderson County Administrator long enough to know that being a part of governing a place and tending to it are not quite the same thing, and that the second task is often harder than the first.
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.
The recent dedication of a historic marker at the corner of Main and Whitner Streets — acknowledging that Anderson's Main Street was once known as the General's Road, the primary north-south thoroughfare of the Pendleton District and the literal path along which the county seat was located in 1826 — offers one of the most visible moves to mark the county's bicentennial year as both commemoration and mild reproach. Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns noted that the local historian Louise Vandiver had lamented, in her 1928 history of Anderson County, that the town traded a distinctive name for one that could belong anywhere. "Everybody's got a main street," Burns said, who agrees with the sentiment. Asked directly whether there was any dream of restoring the name, at least to the downtown corridor, Burns was unambiguous: "If it was up to me, it would be."
A new history of Anderson County is being assembled by Anderson County Museum Director Beverly Childs and her staff as part of the bicentennial to serve as the update that Vandiver's book — admired, hard to read, and available on Kindle only as photographs of its pages — has needed for a century.
Part of the county’s heritage is the continued importance of agriculture to the economics and culture of the area. Last month the county council established an Agricultural Advisory Board, joining a growing number of South Carolina counties that have concluded the obvious: that farming communities should have a formal voice in the decisions that govern farming communities. Anderson County is still a very large farming operation. It consistently ranks in the state's top five in cattle, horses, pigs, goats, and most things that graze or root. The new board gives farmers and rural residents a structured channel for input to county council — a development Burns expects will matter most when conversations turn to zoning, density, and what kinds of development belong next to what kinds of land.
As some generational farm land is sold to developers, demand for precinct-level zoning continues to grow, with more requests in the pipeline. The process, once a precinct commits to it, takes roughly five months if everyone moves efficiently. Burns said that council is disinclined to override a zoning designation that residents have voted for — which means, in practice, that zoning gives communities genuine and durable protection against incompatible development. "If they say they want it to be residential, then it'll be residential," he said.
Development interest along Interstate 85 remains intense, including at Exit 14, where sewer infrastructure recently came fully online, and at Exit 11, which Burns said is not yet the focus but will be. The county's sewer capacity, by current projections, is sufficient through 2040 — a planning horizon that Burns seemed to find both reassuring and slightly precarious, given the pace at which Anderson is growing. Recent changes to lot-size requirements for septic systems are already showing up in development plans as a density-reduction measure, the effects of which Burns said are beginning to become visible at the planning and development office.
Then there’s the lower mill property in Pelzer — a former textile site along the Saluda — which remains in cleanup and preparation, with developer interest attributed in part to its proximity to both the river and the Greenville market. Burns was careful to note that nothing will happen there without the Town of Pelzer as a full partner. "Hand in glove," he said.
Along the Saluda River at Piedmont Park, the county's new passive recreation area, was formally dedicated in May, and it will receive its first real test this Saturday when the Saluda River Rally — a kayaking event that begins at Dolly Cooper Park that draws enthusiasts from 14 states— makes the new park part of the event for the first time. Proceeds from the rally benefit the county's special populations department, which serves residents with physical and intellectual disabilities. Burns noted that participants need not bring their own kayaks, that equipment will be provided, and that the entire journey will be chaperoned — "maybe not by trained personnel," he said, "but by people who kayak," which is a distinction he appeared to consider meaningful.
Dolly Cooper Park, the upstream starting point, has also received visible upgrades this season, funded in part through the generosity of state appropriations. Burns was effusive in crediting S.C. Sen. Richard Cash and S.C. Sen. Mike Gambrell for securing the Piedmont Park funding and equally pointed out that every county park — Wellington Park at the airport, the splash pad, all of them — are popular.
"This is what people want," he said. "This is what they request." The county funds park development not from general tax revenue but from grants and accommodations tax collections — a tax on hotel stays that redirects visitor spending toward the amenities that make the county worth visiting.
This is worth noting since the county is facing challenges with the upcoming year’s budget.
The fiscal year 2026-2027 budget, which Burns said is an open book, pending the state's own budget resolution in Columbia, where redistricting disputes delayed the conference committee that must reconcile House and Senate versions before any numbers become final. Among the items the county is watching: a generator for the Anderson Civic Center, which serves as the regional emergency evacuation hub for Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties. The current generator is inadequate. A replacement carries a $1 million price tag and appears to be alive state directed funding. Burns described it as something the county desperately needs and cannot do without.
The single largest budget pressure is personnel required for the new detention center, which Burns expects to open by Thanksgiving. State authorities have determined that at least 27 additional detention officers are required before the facility can operate. Tours for the public are planned before opening. A group of pastors has already inquired about providing ministry inside the jail; Burns told them the facility was specifically designed with spaces for outside organizations to serve the incarcerated population, and that the answer would be yes as soon as the doors open.
The county currently directs 60 percent of its total budget to public safety — sheriff, code enforcement, paramedic services, all of it — which Burns described not as a political choice but as the county's fundamental obligation.
"Health, safety, and welfare," he said. "That's what the county is supposed to do."
The budget also is looking for ways to fund the county’s 1,550 miles of county roads. Greenwood County, its smaller but comparable neighbor to the south, maintains 228. The scale of the problem is encoded in that comparison. Burns enumerated the approaches the county is pursuing: increasing the share of fee-in-lieu money dedicated to roads, use of the anticipated increase in C-fund allocations from the state, and completing a federally funded study of the county's most dangerous road segments — a study that, once finished, unlocks a separate category of federal funding.
"We're hoping we will at least make a dent," Burns said.
He welcomed the state legislature's apparent interest in consolidating road authority under SCDOT, with one exception: a provision that would have transferred certain roads back to county ownership, which the county "violently protested" and which was subsequently removed from the bill. The county has enough roads.
In addition to roads, the amphitheater stage at the Anderson Civic Center is under construction and running slightly ahead of schedule. Burns said completion of the work must be ready by June of 2027 for an event calendar that is already generating interest from performers. The redesign addresses a fundamental problem with the current seating configuration: at its former full capacity, even a large crowd looked sparse. The new layout will scale to the audience, which means a sold-out show will look like a sold-out show, a distinction that matters considerably to the performers being asked to play it.
Celebrate Anderson, the county's signature summer event, will be reconfigured this year because of the amphitheater work. The county is collaborating more closely than usual with the Cancer Association of Anderson's event, combining the two gatherings into what Burns described as "one big, happy family." He also hinted — with the studied vagueness of someone who has been burned by an announcement made too soon — at something planned for the event that has never been done in Anderson County, that people will "ooh and ah" at, and that he is not yet prepared to confirm. He said the county may know soon. He said this twice, which suggests he is as impatient as anyone to say it out loud.
Burns discussed these, and other issues in this update with The Anderson Observer.
