County to Consider Subdivision Moratorium, Comprehensive Plan
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. in the historic county courthouse, Anderson County Council will quietly consider a roadmap of what the next decade in county might look like, from anonymous crime tips to development moratoria and a once-in-a-generation rewrite of how the county grows.
At third reading, and with its own public hearing, council will consider Ordinance 2025-061, a technical-sounding measure to enlarge the joint industrial and business park Anderson shares with Greenville County—“2010 Park”—to fold in a small parcel off Pelham Road, known in the paperwork as Project Silver, the sort of cross-county incentive deal that signals both regional ambition and an ever-more-crowded I‑85 corridor.
Alongside it, an ordinance proposes a subtler shift in how information moves through the courthouse, requiring the planning department to notify council members whenever building permits or development applications land in their districts—and again if those applications are withdrawn or altered. For a county straining under growth, the change reads like an institutional admission that what once trickled now arrives in waves, and that elected officials are tired of learning about new subdivisions from bulldozers and angry neighbors.
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.
Other measures gesture at the familiar tensions of a growing county that still insists on thinking of itself as rural. One ordinance would rezone roughly thirty acres from commercial-rural to residential-agricultural in the Fork No. 2 precinct, a small act of resistance against corridor sprawl; another would approve hangar ground leases at Anderson Regional Airport, a reminder that economic development here comes not only on tires but on wings.
First readings, always more speculative, gave the agenda its sharpest edges. A long-tabled ordinance, lingers like a ghost: a proposed moratorium on large-scale residential developments of more than 25 units, evidence that at least some on council are flirting with the nuclear option in response to subdivision fatigue. Newer entries include an ordinance to increase minimum lot sizes for single and twin homes with public utilities in unzoned areas—another lever to slow density in the countryside—and yet another, an amendment to allow paternity leave for county employees, a small but telling concession to the domestic realities of the twenty-first-century courthouse workforce.
