Freshman Lawmaker Sees Growth, Progress in Anderson County, Statwide
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In Columbia, where the State House dome rises above a city that hums half with government routine and half with college-town improvisation, first-year Representative Blake Sanders talks about his new life as if he were still standing on a small-town sidewalk. District 9, which he likes to point out includes “the better half” of Anderson, stretches from the world’s largest flea market in one direction and then fifteen minutes in another, a long, linear slice of the county that contains four municipalities, two towns without property taxes, and a tangle of roads that everyone agrees are in need of work.
“My knowledge pool is very shallow and long,” said Sanders, not as a confession but as a working theory of the modern legislator.
Sanders arrived in the South Carolina House already fluent in the dialect of local government, having spent four years on town council and eight as mayor in West Pelzer, but the General Assembly presented a different kind of education. One of the first things he did, along with 18 other freshmen, was go through orientation that asked them, for a moment, to forget party labels and caucus lines and simply learn each other’s families and biographies.
That group soon elected a freshman chair, Representative Luke Rankin of Laurens County, who now serves as their emissary to the Speaker’s office, a kind of internal ambassador for a small cohort trying to find its footing in a chamber that files more than 2,500 bills in a year and sends only a fraction of them onward.
In this environment, Sanders admits, there were days that felt like “drinking through a fire hose,” with freshmen standing in the back of the chamber, whispering to one another, trying to keep up with debate that seemed to move at the speed of parliamentary shorthand. He talks easily about dropping bills into ChatGPT to get quick summaries, using the tool not as a replacement for reading but as a way to triage the torrent, to figure out which notes are right and which are wrong before the roll is called.
If the learning curve in Columbia has been steep, Sanders insists that the steepest part is not subject matter but scope. As a former mayor and a practicing landscape architect, he came in with a sense of what his “deep end” might be, and he and House leadership quickly steered him toward committees where that depth would matter. He sits on the 3M Committee—Medical, Military and Municipal Affairs—and, within it, on the Municipal Affairs subcommittee, where he can translate the language of town halls and council agendas into statewide policy.
On the Legislative Oversight and Government Efficiency Committee, he serves on the natural resources subcommittee, which spent the past year reviewing South Carolina’s Conservation Bank and its effort to help Governor Henry McMaster meet a goal of preserving ten million acres. For Sanders, whose professional life is rooted in landscape architecture, the Conservation Bank is not an abstraction but an instrument for “smart growth,” a way to decide which properties to preserve so that growth can be guided rather than simply endured. He talks about the state’s forty-nine parks as if they were a string of pearls—“some of the greatest in the country”—and about conservation as a way to shape the map before developers and traffic patterns do it for you.
Back home, the questions he hears most often in grocery-store aisles and at church doors are less philosophical. “Growth” is the first word out of most mouths, followed quickly by “roads,” with annexation hovering somewhere in between like a legal riddle in which no one is entirely satisfied. District 9’s municipalities—Anderson, Williamston, Pelzer, West Pelzer—are expanding and overlapping, while the roads that connect them bear the wear of years of new subdivisions and commuter traffic.
Sanders speaks in the granular language of funding mechanisms: impact fees that currently must be spent within three years; a bill he supports that would extend that clock to eight; another that would, for the first time, allow those fees to be used to resurface existing travel lanes rather than just build new turn lanes. He is quick to note, however, that impact fees are “not a player” in his own district or Anderson County—there is no money sitting in some untapped account, no magic pot that can replace the failed penny sales tax that once promised hundreds of millions for roads.
By his rough math, to raise a similar amount as the proposed referendum through impact fees alone would require a charge of around twenty-five thousand dollars per household over fifteen years, a figure that underscores the distance between political slogans and fiscal reality.
In Columbia, he keeps one eye on the Modernization Committee, where fellow Anderson County delegation member Representative Don Chapman has joined statewide conversations about how to update the Department of Transportation and send more money back to county C-Fund committees. The numbers are sobering: Anderson County alone needs three to four hundred million dollars just to repave existing roads, a sum Sanders hopes will be chipped away by recurring and surplus funds in the state budget, ideally sent directly back to local governments that already have prioritized lists in hand.
Annexation, meanwhile, remains a “delicate subject,” especially for those who believe in home rule. Sanders talks about draft legislation that would allow property to be annexed into a city but keep its current land use—agricultural land would come in as agriculture, for example, and only later be rezoned by the city—an attempt to slow the whiplash of farmland turning overnight into dense subdivisions. He points to Berkeley County’s decision to preserve roughly half its land and to Laurens County’s practice of overlaying water, sewer, and fiber maps to predict where growth will go, models he thinks could help guide planning commissions in Anderson County and beyond.
If District 9 is, as Sanders suggests with a smile, “is the best districts in the state,” it is also one of the most structurally idiosyncratic. It is among the few House districts that contain four municipalities, and it includes Pelzer, one of only two towns in Anderson County—Starr is the other—that levy no property tax at all. Because of the long shadow of Act 388, towns with zero millage cannot raise a percentage of nothing; in a formula that allows only growth plus CPI, zero multiplied by anything is still zero.
To address that frozen status, Sanders supports what is known as the zero-millage bill, filed by Senator Mike Gambrell and backed by the Municipal Association, which would allow towns such as Pelzer to establish a property tax if—and only if—residents approve it in a referendum. To him, the bill is less about taxation than about self-determination: a way for communities to decide whether they want to fund their own police protection, parks, or road paving rather than depend on the county or state. He agreed with an old adage that sounds as if it could have come from a Depression-era council meeting: “Zero dollars for services to gets you zero services.”
Sanders’s instinct is to lower taxes where he can, particularly for farmers and small businesses. He notes that a Ford F-150 is taxed at six percent while a Ford F-250, the kind of truck used on farms and in contracting, is taxed at 10.5 percent—the same “magic number” that shapes discussions of South Carolina’s highest-in-the-nation industrial property tax and fuels the widespread use of fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreements. He has supported a bill that would combine the separate taxes on boat hulls and motors and reduce their rate from ten and a half to six percent, a change that, over three years, would trim Anderson County’s general fund revenue by about four hundred thousand dollars and that he has discussed at length with the county treasurer.
On corporate tax policy, Sanders is candid about the limits of his expertise and the extent of his caution. He has not drafted the sweeping proposal that some local officials dream about—reducing the industrial assessment ratio from 10.5 percent to something closer to the four percent that might render fee-in-lieu agreements unnecessary—but he acknowledges that such conversations may be happening somewhere under the State House dome. His personal relationship to fee-in-lieu is less ideological than biographical: his own landscape architecture firm exists, he says, in part because Arthrex, a medical device company that came to Anderson under such an arrangement, hired his wife after a decade at home, giving their family the financial stability that allowed him to start his business.
“I’m always looking for ways to cut red tape and get those taxes down,” he says, but he talks about it in concentric circles: first the small-business owner and farmer with the heavier truck; then the boat owner taxed twice; then, further out, the veteran or senior citizen who might someday see property taxes eased or state park fees waived. The vision is less a single grand bargain than a series of adjustments: create more opportunity for small employers, generate more jobs, then find ways to reduce the burden on those who served, those aging in place, those trying to hold onto their homes.
On paper, the most recent session will be remembered for a handful of headline-ready bills, including a statewide “hands-free” law that bans holding a phone while driving and a “felony by fentanyl” statute that treats dealers whose product kills someone as murderers. Sanders sees both as less about punishment than about education. The hands-free law took effect September 1, with a grace period that has not yet prevented him from watching drivers hold their phones in front of their faces on his morning commute. The fentanyl law, signed by the governor, will require its own campaign to make clear that, in a state where opioid overdoses have become routine, the legal stakes for selling a lethal dose have changed.
For every law that makes the evening news, there are hours of quiet oversight: multi-hour off-session hearings with the Department of Employment and Workforce, the Conservation Bank, and other agencies that come before the Legislative Oversight Committee. Sanders describes the off-season as anything but idle—another reason he resists the idea that service in the House is a part-time job, even if the salary suggests otherwise.
Back in Anderson County, Sanders’s role extends beyond the green carpet of the House chamber to the work of the legislative delegation, a body made up of every House and Senate member whose districts touch the county. Twice a year, in June and December, that group meets to appoint members to a lattice of boards—mental health and disabilities, water districts like Big Creek and Hammond, the county fire system, the Anderson County Board of Education, the Career and Technology Center board for Districts 1 and 2, and the County Transportation Committee, which oversees about five million dollars in annual gas-tax paving funds.
It is granular, unglamorous work, and Sanders talks about it as an extension of what he learned from the late Senator Billy O’Dell and current legislators such as Senator Gambrell and Representative Anne Thayer: that constituent service should be an elected official’s “greatest trait.” His cell number is public; he encourages constituents to text if they cannot reach him by phone; he routes complaints about VA benefits, death certificates, or insurance coverage to liaisons in the relevant state agencies, sometimes acting as little more than a persistent intermediary.
For this, he is paid $10,400 a year, in a lump sum that is taxed and from which health insurance premiums are deducted. If he needs a place to stay in Columbia during the session, it comes out of that same sum. Sanders expresses no appetite for raising legislative pay to a level that would make the job a full-time career; he prefers that it remain a form of public service, something one chooses knowing the financial constraints in advance.
Sanders likes to joke that the only formal qualifications for office are residency and a pulse, but he advocates, in his own way, for something like an informal curriculum. He imagines a “Government 101” course for newly elected officials and a more deliberate path that might take a person from county council to the state, or from the state to Congress, in stages that build understanding rather than skip it. His own path—council member, mayor, representative—has impressed upon him the fact that he represents all 42,000 people in District 9, not just the 1,800 who turned out for his runoff.
District 9 itself is a kind of diagram of modern South Carolina: a growing downtown in Anderson, three smaller and vibrant towns—Pelzer, West Pelzer, Williamston—that once eyed each other warily and now share resources more easily, and stretches of rural land where annexation lines and utility maps will quietly determine what the next decade looks like.
Above it all is Sanders’s conviction that South Carolina can lead on economic development, growth strategies, and infrastructure if, as he puts it, “we work together,” a phrase that sounds less like rhetoric when spoken by someone who spends his days moving between a dome in Columbia and front porches in Pelzer, trying to keep a very long, very shallow pool from spilling over.
