New West Pelzer Mayor Ready to Add to His Community Service
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a cold January Tuesday when most of Anderson County was talking about forecasts of a coming winter storm, West Pelzer was going to the polls to choose a new mayor in a town of a few hundred people and almost no empty storefronts left to fill.
Rick Sanders, elected Tuesday, is unsure how long it will take to grow accustomed to his new title.
“That might take a while,” said Sanders, laughing a little at the strangeness of it. He and his wife have lived in or just outside West Pelzer for years, watching the town rise from a long, low slump into a place where vacant buildings are now a scarcity, not a defining feature.
“We’re just excited about what’s in store,” he said. “Being called mayor—not a bad thing.”
The route to that title was not the typical ladder of small‑town politics. Sanders spent 37 years at Michelin before retiring, taking a year off, as he puts it, to catch up on the “honey‑do list” and test what it felt like not to clock in anywhere. Then, when West Pelzer was “really trying to get off the ground,” he and his wife bought an empty building on Main and turned it into Westie’s Antiques and Vintage, which opened in 2017. Two years later, they added the Lincoln Tap Room, a family‑friendly place that has become part bar, part civic clubhouse, hosting twice‑a‑year vintage markets and an annual oyster roast that raised more than $5,000 for The LOT Project in Anderson, plus roughly $4,000 worth of Christmas gifts for people who otherwise would have had none.
“We’re constantly doing things out of the Lincoln,” said Sanders, describing it less as a business than as a kind of living room for the community.
Sanders’s path into elected office is wound tightly around his family. West Pelzer’s former mayor, S.C. Rep. Blake Sanders, is his son—a reversal of the usual generational script that people in town like to point out. During Blake’s last term, residents urged Rick to run, but, he says, “I really just had too many irons in the fire.”
Only after time and circumstance aligned did he decide to run for council, and then, almost immediately, for mayor, when that seat opened. In the span of two months, he found himself elected twice, first as a council member and then as the town’s chief elected official, a compressed political education in a place where almost everyone already knows his name.
What he wants to do with the job, at least in the near term, is less a sweeping program and more a patient inventory.
“First of all, I’d like to get my bearings of what the businesses in our area think, what their needs are,” said Sanders, describing the next couple of years as a time to listen as much as to legislate. West Pelzer’s commercial constraints are unusually concrete: there are “just not a lot of vacant buildings,” and for months people have been calling to ask whether there is land available for new ventures.
For now, the answer is mostly no. Growth is happening in other ways, particularly in housing; new homes are going up on Dendy Street, adding residents faster than the town can add storefronts. The challenge, as Sanders sees it, is to “figure out how to play off that”—to make sure the people moving in find more than police protection, that they find reasons to attach themselves to the place.
In the short term, he is preoccupied with something that rarely shows up in economic‑development plans: whether residents know who their council members are, what they look like, what they do for them.
Over the next six months, he wants “our people to get to know who is on the team here,” a phrase that reveals how he imagines local government—as a group of recognizable human beings rather than a faceless institution. Town council meetings, he notes, often draw only five to seven people, a pattern familiar to mayors well beyond the Tri‑City area of West Pelzer, Pelzer, and Williamston.
“If you figure out how to fix that, let me know,” other mayors have told him. His long‑term goal is to have residents show up not only “for complaints” but “for the good things,” to see the council chamber as a forum rather than a last resort.
Sanders insists he is not a “town politics” person so much as a community person, and his regional biography backs that up. He grew up in Williamston, off Tyson Drive, roaming streets with friends, some of whom are now in office themselves. The Tri‑City cluster is less an abstraction than an extended neighborhood for him; he speaks easily of Pelzer’s new mayor, Chase Smithwick, and of Williamston’s long‑time mayor, Rocky Burgess.
“Chase and I go way back. Rocky and I go way back. I mean, I was raised in Williamston,” said Sanders. That history, he thinks, can be turned into something formal: linked events, staggered calendars, and cross‑town support so that “when somebody has a big event, the other two towns are actually helping support that.”
The same instinct extends to the county and beyond. After decades at Michelin, Sanders has a network of relationships in Anderson County government and with the legislative delegation in Columbia, connections he speaks of with understated confidence.
He wants to meet with county council and the county administrator, convinced that there are projects in West Pelzer that could dovetail with county priorities. Grants are part of that picture too. “If you don’t seek those, it’s like we’re not interested,” he said. He would rather apply for multiple grants and be turned down than never ask. The point, for him, is to signal that the town is paying attention, that it is willing to do the paperwork and the waiting that grant‑funded improvements require.
The needs he has already identified are both familiar and specific. Residents, he says, would “probably say, hey, I wish we had more police protection.” The town’s own resources do not allow for robust twenty‑four‑seven coverage; Anderson County deputies, whom he frequently sees pulling over cars on Main Street, fill in the gaps. Still, Sanders wants to understand “what kind of coverage we have,” how to increase both presence and visibility, and how to make sure residents know who their officers are. Policing, in his mind, is not purely a numbers question but a matter of relationships.
The first 45 days of his term, he has decided, will be an internal listening tour. He wants to sit down with each council member, starting with Tom Scarfo, the longest‑serving member, who has worked under two previous mayors. He wants long conversations with Police Chief Zach Owen about obstacles, needs, and long‑term goals, including “how we can get to the next officer or the next coverage.”
He wants time with Paula Payton, the town administrator, to go line by line through a budget he believes is sound but not yet fully understood, looking for where “we have some money we can use” and how the town can be “proactive” in supporting both West Pelzer Elementary—“right here” in town limits—and local businesses. It is, he says, about “getting my hands around what’s going on day to day and being able to take from that and see what we need to do.”
To draw residents into that work, Sanders imagines food and proximity more than formal invitations. He talks about a “Neighbor’s Night Out,” a free smoked‑barbecue day where people can meet council members, town staff, and police officers in a setting that feels more like a cookout than a hearing.
“I think that’s so important,” he said, “to link those residents with a face.” On the 2026 calendar, he hints, there are “a lot of good things” either planned or in the planning. This is how he tends to frame governance: as a series of events and encounters that make the abstract idea of “town” feel personal.
Asked what he wants people to know about him; he starts not with his résumé but with his faith and family. He and his family attend Grace Church in Anderson. His wife, children, and grandchildren, he says, are “the most important things” to him. After that comes “networking”—the pleasure of knowing people, connecting them, hearing what they think should happen next. He jokes that he needs to get back to golf and fishing, but in the next breath he describes himself as a hands-on person who always has a project. Retirement, for him, was never going to be a long rest.
“I’ll be 65 in May,” he said, “but hey, I still got some life in me.”
In a town where the mayor’s office is steps away from his businesses, Sanders’s accessibility is literal. “If I’m not in the office, I’m just next door,” he said. His phone number is readily available, and he talks about an open‑door policy less as a campaign slogan than as a natural extension of his days behind the bar or the antique counter. If a resident or business owner needs to meet, “just call me,” he said. “I’ll come down here, gladly meet.” In a small municipality, where government can seem distant even when it is physically close, his promise is simple: the mayor will not be hard to find.
