Greg Wilson/The Anderson Observer
Rusty Burns has a recurring phrase for the way Anderson County ought to operate: “hand in glove.” Colleges and employers. County government and small towns. A detention center and a treatment program. The phrase turns up often enough in his account of county business to suggest something more than a verbal habit. For Burns, the county administrator, the important work frequently happens where one institution ends and another begins.
A factory needs workers, but it also needs someone to train them, a place to begin operating before construction is finished, and roads that can accommodate what comes next. A town needs help with a grant application, or a building inspection, or a public-works problem beyond the reach of its own equipment. A person leaving jail needs somewhere to go besides back.
“It’s a chain,” Burns said, discussing the county’s new detention center and the services intended to connect with it. “It’s just not, here’s a jail.”
In a wide-ranging interview with The Anderson Observer, Burns offered an account of a county preparing to open that jail, remake an amphitheater, repair roads, rehabilitate houses, recruit businesses, and finish celebrating two hundred years of its own existence. His enthusiasm was expansive. So was his list of unfinished work.
Asked about the relationship between education and economic development, Burns began with proximity: Clemson University nearby, Anderson University in the county, and Tri-County Technical College serving the region.
“We’re just in the golden triangle of educational opportunities,” he said.
Clemson’s engineering programs, in his view, are an obvious advantage. Anderson University’s newer engineering offerings have added another source of talent and Burns said a majority of the university’s first engineering graduates are staying in the area and going to work for Vertiv—a particularly useful outcome for a county interested not merely in educating people but in giving them a reason to remain.
He also pointed to the career-training programs serving the county’s school districts and their relationships with higher education. Together, he argued, these institutions form something more consequential than a collection of campuses.
That relationship becomes concrete when an employer considers locating in Anderson County. At the county’s industrial recruitment meetings, Burns said, a Tri-County Tech representative is almost always present.
“They’re sitting in the room when they’re helping us sell Anderson County.”
The college can discuss specialized employee training, Burns said, including training available to companies at no cost. Instead of asking an employer to fit an existing course catalogue, the conversation can begin with what the employer needs.
The county also offers what Burns calls a “soft landing” space, where a company can begin operating while its permanent building is under construction. A business incubator and space used by Tri-County Tech support the same effort: reducing the interval between deciding to come to Anderson and actually getting to work.
Burns credited successive Tri-County leaders—Don Garrison, Ronnie Booth, and Galen DeHay—with sustaining that practical orientation.
“They are quality educators,” he said, “who have a deep passion for what they do.”
The distinction between a town/city responsibility and a county responsibility can be important on an organizational chart and less useful when something has broken.
Burns said the county performs building inspections for most of its municipalities, assists with law enforcement and grant applications, and sometimes supplies public works help when a town’s own department cannot manage a particular problem.
In Pelzer, for example, county-owned property is part of the effort to help the town accomplish its goals. In Belton, the county worked on an arrangement bringing municipal policing into the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office while retaining a Belton identity.
A shared wastewater project involving Anderson County, Pendleton, and Clemson offered another example. Rather than maintain three separate treatment plants, Burns said, the governments could share a facility and its responsibilities.
He sees both a fiscal argument and an environmental one.
“People always, and a lot of times, forget—you put a sewer in the ground, and this is good for industry,” he said. “Here’s one thing it does, the most important thing it does: it puts clean water back in Lake Hartwell.”
The lake, he noted, is also one of the county’s major tourism assets. Protecting it is not separate from economic development.
Burns recalled an older industrial landscape in which the color of a river could announce the dye being used upstream. It was an unsentimental reminder that growth, left to itself, is not necessarily improvement.
Cooperation among governments does not mean the absence of disagreement.
“Sometimes we have different points of view,” he said. “But that’s to be expected.”
At the Civic Center, the major amphitheater renovation is proceeding on schedule to accommodate 10 planned concerts, Burns said. The performers will remain unannounced for now.
“Not anytime soon,” he said when asked when the lineup would be released. “We’ve got to get further along.”
He credited the organizers behind Rock the Country with contributing millions of dollars toward the amphitheater and said AnMed has also provided substantial financial support. Those contributions, he said, reduce the cost borne by taxpayers.
Elsewhere on the grounds, the county plans to redo the walking trail around Chris Taylor Park, with help Burns credited to S.C. Sen. Richard Cash. Accessibility is part of the work.
“All that needs to be brought up to ADA standards,” Burns said. “It wasn’t built that way.”
The improvements are being undertaken in stages.
There is less uncertainty about whether people will use the recreational facilities. Burns said the disc-golf course draws players throughout the day. Pickleball courts are heavily used, too—enough that resurfacing has become another item on the county’s funding list. Courts are open at Dolly Cooper Park, and the county has helped towns establish others.
Burns was already contemplating demand for another paddle sport. The discussion prompted the suggestion that local orthopedists might make suitable sponsors.
“I think they will,” he said, smiling.
Burns said the new detention center remained on track to open right after Thanksgiving. He emphasized safer working conditions for detention officers, more room, and space for services the county wants to make available inside.
“They deserve to have a safe working environment,” he said of the officers.
The larger facility should also allow more psychological services and provide room for outside groups to mentor or otherwise work with people in custody.
Burns said those improvements alongside the county’s drug court, mental health court, veterans’ court, and access to residential substance-use treatment. The goal is to make those services work together rather than exist as isolated responses to the same recurring problems.
“The whole point is not to just be a revolving door,” said Burns.
He said the county can connect people leaving detention with residential drug treatment at no cost to them. That connection matters to his conception of the facility with confinement as one part of the system, but not its final measure of success.
There is also an operating-budget consideration. Burns said the county had learned it might be able to house more federal prisoners than previously anticipated. Payments for holding those prisoners could offset detention-center expenses. He described that as a possibility, not a completed arrangement.
Roads remain the subject that reliably survives every change of season.
Burns said the Anderson County Transportation Committee would have $10 million available this year. The committee determines which road projects receive its funding.
The county has also changed some of its fee agreements to Fee In Lieu of money specifically for roads. Under the arrangements he described, 25 percent would be dedicated to road work. The amount generated will depend on the size and number of the agreements.
That is additional money, not a declaration that the problem has been solved.
“Roads in Anderson County need a whole lot more money,” Burns said, adding that the same is true across South Carolina.
Blighted structures present another challenge to the infrastructure question.
Burns said the county had recently demolished deteriorated houses in Honea Path and continues to rehabilitate housing. Its performance administering the work, he said, had brought an opportunity to receive additional funding that other counties were not using.
His explanation was less about ingenuity than bookkeeping.
“If you take that grant money and use it for what it’s supposed to be,” he said, account for every penny, and do the work correctly, agencies become more comfortable providing more.
The county is monitored, he added, which he welcomes.
Removing a badly deteriorated house can also make a familiar parcel useful again, while helping revitalize a neighborhood. A replacement house may be built where water, sewer, a road, and sometimes a sidewalk already exist. Burns said he sees that happening in Anderson, particularly along the streets commonly known as the alphabet streets.
Burns expects multiple economic-development announcements before the end of the year. He said the county has not noticed a slowdown in companies interested in locating a factory or business there.
He also sees shipping costs as one reason companies consider producing goods in the United States. Cheap manufacturing elsewhere, he argued, becomes less compelling when the product must then be transported here.
But the conversation about recruitment soon became a conversation about someone preparing to leave.
Burris Nelson, the county’s longtime economic-development director, is retiring before year’s end. Burns said they have worked together for 35 years, beginning when Burns was economic-development director and Nelson was his deputy.
“I used to say I was the best that there was,” Burns said. “That may not have been true, but I could lie to myself.”
Then came his assessment of Nelson.
“He’s the best that’s ever been.”
Burns credited Nelson with work behind companies and jobs spread throughout the county. Much of that work, he suggested, disappears into its own successful outcome. Someone goes to a job, earns a paycheck, and has little reason to investigate the negotiations that helped bring the employer there.
“There are a whole lot of people working in places that they have no idea how they got there,” he said.
Nelson’s contribution also includes mentoring other economic developers. Burns said the office had helped train professionals who went on to work elsewhere in South Carolina.
As for the more unusual efforts the two men made to recruit companies, Burns declined to supply the full catalogue.
“That will be the book later.”
For now, the county has another book to promote: a new history published as part of its bicentennial observance.
Burns praised the launch at the county museum and said copies are available there. The contributors volunteered their work. He welcomed the prospect of a new reference volume alongside Louise Vandiver’s familiar history.
The county is also taking responsibility again for the Veterans Day parade set for Nov. 8. Burns credited the museum’s Director Beverly Childs with organizing the bicentennial parade and helping with the veterans’ observance.
The holidays are also not far away, with the Christmas tree on the square having an unofficial lighting Nov. 20 for Thanksgiving week, complete with music from the courthouse clock tower, and the change of seasonal decorations in Burns’s window.
Santa, he said, goes up the day before Thanksgiving. The jack-o’-lantern comes down Monday.
After a conversation encompassing engineering graduates, wastewater, incarceration, industrial recruitment, and deteriorating houses, this was a comparatively manageable timetable.
The larger projects depend on money, construction, other governments, and people who must agree to do their part.
The arrival of the holidays, at least, is settled.
