Delegation Talks Education, Medicaid Expansion and Roads at Annual Chamber Breakfast
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
State policy, at least as it is practiced in Anderson County, revealed itself on Monday over bacon, eggs and coffee as a series of preoccupations: about where people live, how they age, what they drive, which roads they use, and, in one case, what government owes the unborn.
At the annual Anderson Area Chamber of Commerce Legislative Delegation Breakfast, attended by four of the seven members, lawmakers answered questions moderated by former S.C. Rep. Brian White about topics including Medicaid expansion, education and roads.
The complete video of the event is included below, but here is a summary of the priorities as spelled out by each legislative delegation in attendance.
S.C. Rep. Blake Sanders, Dist.9, cast his gaze first on the map. He said the next several months, for him, will be taken up with what sound like planning‑department words—concurrency, transferable development rights, an expanded conservation bank—but which amount to a fight over the shape of growth in the Upstate. Layered on top of that was a more down‑home concern: an income‑tax reduction aimed at young farmers, which he sees as a way to keep a new generation on the land even as prices and pressures mount. Those, he told the room, are the bills where his name will most often appear in the coming year.
Sanders said the year ahead will be defined less by headlines than by the slow, technical work of reshaping how the Upstate grows and who gets to keep a little more of what they earn. Concurrency, transferable development rights and an expanded conservation bank are, for him, not abstractions but the operating instructions for the next few months at the State House.
He said those land‑use debates will likely be the bills where his name keeps appearing, either as sponsor or as a dependable vote, and he paired them with a more populist plank: an income tax reduction aimed at young farmers trying to make a start in a state where land prices and input costs rarely cooperate. That cluster of issues, he suggested, will be the center of gravity for his legislative year.
Sanders also lingered on a quieter victory that, he seemed mildly surprised to find unmentioned by his Senate colleagues: a Homestead‑exemption bill that cleared the Senate the previous week and would lift the exemption on a primary residence to $150,000—“triple (the current amount),” as he stressed it. The measure, he said, is a “huge step in the right direction,” structured so that counties do not lose revenue because the state would step in to supplement what is cut. The House would pass it, he said with some certainty, and the governor would sign it. Another tax measure, a vote‑tax reduction still parked in the Senate, became an instant homework assignment for the audience: call Senators Mike Gambrell and Richard Cash that afternoon, he urged, and tell them to move it.
If Sanders spoke in the language of land‑use lawyers, S.C. Rep. Don Chapman, Dist. 8, came armed with the more familiar grievance of the property‑tax bill. One of the complaints he hears most often, he said, is about the tax burden on a primary residence, especially for people trying to age in place. His answer is a bill that would, over time, ease that burden as a homeowner gets older. Under his proposal, someone who has paid in for at least five years would see a 25‑percent reduction in property tax on a primary home at age 70, a 50‑percent reduction at 75, a deeper cut at 80, and then a complete elimination at 85. The point, as Chapman put it, is that a primary residence ought eventually to be something you can truly own, not just lease back from the government year after year.
Chapman, too, told counties not to panic. The plan contemplates a state refund mechanism to restore the revenue lost to local governments, an acknowledgment that relief for seniors cannot come at the expense of county services. Abolishing property tax outright in one stroke, he argued, would be impossible without “majorly” increasing sales taxes or something like them. A second bill on his list moves from the front porch to the driveway: for residents 65 and older, one primary vehicle per household would be exempt from taxation, a small but pointed nod to the reality that in much of Anderson County a car is not a luxury but a lifeline.
S.C. Sen. Mike Gambrell, Dist. 4, who represents a swath of the same territory from the other chamber, described his work life as a kind of legislative whiplash. They “change gears ten times a day” in Columbia, he said, offering as proof a recent week in which he had five bills queued up on the Senate calendar, each unrelated to the last. One set the prime rate for loans—a quiet but consequential adjustment. Another dealt with military chaplains. A third confronted a quirk of South Carolina’s lending laws: the state is still one of the few places where so‑called bridge loans, meant to help homeowners span the gap between selling one house and buying the next, are hard to obtain. His bill would open that spigot.
Then, amid all the fine print and financial instruments, came something more ceremonial: legislation to designate June 1 as Gold Shield Day, in honor of first responders killed in the line of duty. That was the one he called “special.” And yet, for all the bill numbers and calendar shuffling, Gambrell was quick to say that no one on the panel is an all‑knowing seer. Each lawmaker knows “a little bit about something,” with pockets of expertise scattered among them, but they depend heavily on the people in the room—and in the community—to fill in the gaps. If you see an item on the calendar that touches your world, he said, pick up the phone. Call. Tell them what it looks like from your side of the counter or classroom.
Columbia, he admitted, has a way of sealing people off. You do not set out to become insulated, but “you do,” he said; “it’s just human nature.” The corrective, in his view, is not another blue‑ribbon commission but an inbox that never quite empties. Email, he said, is the best thing that ever happened to his job, the channel that lets a constituent’s bafflement or anger about some far‑fetched‑sounding proposal land directly with him—or with Richard, or Don, or Blake—before the vote is taken.
S.C. Sen. Richard Cash, Dist. 3, began his turn with asphalt and orange barrels, but he did not stay there. He said he believes the roads are, in fact, improving, pointing to roughly seven billion dollars now in the Department of Transportation’s project pipeline as evidence that the state is finally working through a backlog it let grow “seriously behind.” Still, he acknowledged the disconnect between data and daily life: legislators can list resurfaced stretches by name, but if the pothole is in front of your house, it is hard to see anything but failure. Road funding, he reminded the audience, comes from different “pots,” including local bodies like the Anderson–Clemson Area Transportation Committee, where he was headed at noon to help decide which intersections and corridors around the metro area get attention next.
Then he turned to what he called his singular cause. Anyone who knows him, Cash said, understands that his number‑one issue is abortion, or more precisely, his opposition to it. Many people, he suggested, treated the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade as the closing chapter of the abortion debate, when in reality it only shifted the arena from Washington to the fifty state capitols. In Columbia, he cast himself as “probably the leading pro‑life advocate” in the South Carolina Senate, the one who can be counted on to sit on any subcommittee dealing with abortion legislation and, more often than not, to chair it.
Cash did not pretend the subject was easy or welcome. He called it “very controversial,” and noted that many people would rather not hear about it, think about it, or talk about it at all. But that discomfort, he argued, will not make the issue disappear. For those who believe, as he does, that human life is sacred—a gift from God—the first duty of government is to protect innocent life. That conviction, in his telling, keeps the debate very much alive at the State House, no matter how much some might wish otherwise.
S.C. Rep. Craig Gagnon, Dist. 11, had a work conflict and S.C. Rep. Thomas Beach, Dist. 10, had committed to attend Monday’s event but was prevented by illness. S.C. Rep. April Cromer and S.C. Rep. Lee Gilreath declined the invitation.
