County Passes 2026-2027 Budget
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
By the time Anderson County Council convened Monday night for a special-called meeting, the county’s budget for fiscal year 2026-2027 budget met with unanimous vote, following months of work and tradeoffs.
Six months ago, Councilman Chris Sullivan said it had looked like “a complete mess,” with the new detention center coming online and the staffing needs rising with it, and a possible deficit hanging over the whole thing. But with a July 1 deadline to pass a budget, the county council found a way to meet the demands of services for citizens without raising taxes.
The county managed to fund a two percent raise for non-sheriff employees, fully fund health insurance at a cost of $1.1 million, and add 27 positions at the detention center, while keeping the tax burden at the current level in the “bare-boned” budget.
The jail, unsurprisingly, remains the budget’s most expensive and most unavoidable fact. Sullivan said the detention center is an $88 million project, one the county did not exactly choose so much as inherit from reality and the law. The new facility is a pod-based, technologically advanced operation, far removed from the antiquated architecture of prison movies, and it comes with the sort of staffing and operational costs that make “necessary evil” sound almost bureaucratic.
The county hopes to offset some of that financial burden by housing federal prisoners and using other space for juveniles, but the jail remains what it has always been: the thing everyone pays for because everyone must.
More than 66 percent of the budget is devoted to public safety, 73 percent if you include EMS in the mix.
Part of the county’s financial insulation from tax increases comes from fee-in-lieu agreements, which cover a significant portion of the budget and help offset detention-center costs. Those arrangements, often discussed in tones of suspicion by people who do not have to balance a county ledger, were presented Monday as one of the quiet mechanisms that make the rest of the county’s obligations possible. Sullivan also said the county hopes to create a roads fund in the coming years so that road and bridge work can be financed more deliberately, and perhaps less episodically, than is often the case in growing counties.
The budget session was also a glimpse into the county’s broader economic ambitions. Sullivan detailed three projects that together suggested Anderson is still trying to do what counties have always had to do: keep the old obligations manageable while courting the next wave of employment.
Project Flat Rock would bring a $28 million capital investment, 63 jobs, an average wage of $39.60 plus benefits, and an estimated 30-year community impact of $177 million. Project Health, an existing District 4 business, would add $31 million in capital investment and about $9.2 million in 30-year community impact. The largest of the three, Project Next, would bring at least 125 new jobs, an average wage of $27 plus benefits, and a projected 30-year community impact exceeding $8.49 billion.
The figures were a glimpse at the county’s preferred future: industry, payroll, tax base, and the infrastructure that can turn all three into something durable. The county’s economic development staff produced the numbers, Sullivan said, and the implication was plain enough. Growth is not just coming; it is being counted, measured, and priced into the county’s long-term plans.
The meeting also touched on a different kind of growth problem. Council voted to impose a moratorium on data centers through the end of the year, after becoming tired of the calls and conversations generated by concerns of citizens and rumors. The county decided to keep the ordinance definition broad enough to avoid accidentally sweeping in unrelated businesses, but clear enough to stop a rush of applications before three new council members take office in January. In a county trying to prepare for roads, jails, and industrial expansion, the pause on data centers felt like a local government trying to slow one kind of future before it arrives fully formed.
The meeting ended with praise for the county’s Carolina Day events, which were celebrated Sunday with roughly 150 attendees and a kind of hands-on Revolutionary War pageant in Carolina Wren Park that included quill-and-ink demonstrations in Anderson and more than 50 at a second patriotic event at Piedmont Riverfront Park.
Council now waits for the South Carolina General Assembly to pass the state’s budget, which could provide directed funding for a number of projects across the county
