News Analysis: County’s Unique Zoning Method Needs Work

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

In the quiet corners of local government, there has long existed a fundamental separation of civic mechanics with the officials tasked with the often politically divisive challenge of upholding landowner rights while also considering the rights of the surrounding community and the long-term impact of such decisions.

Zoning is a language of physical permanence, dictated by tangible realities like sewer lines, floodplains, unbridled development and the established character of a neighborhood. Voting precincts, on the other hand, are mathematical abstractions, endlessly redrawn to satisfy the democratic imperative of "one person, one vote."

To conflate the two is to invite a very specific, structural kind of geographical madness. Yet, to observe this anomaly in action, one need only look to Anderson County, South Carolina, where a unique collision of political geometry and urban planning has a rich and complicated history and an unprecedented policy.

Since the advent of Home Rule, the county government has struggled with the challenge of zoning. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the overriding impulse of the county council was simply to prohibit it altogether. It was a highly deferential move, designed to placate the county’s large landowners who fiercely opposed any restrictions on the potential sale of their land.

It wasn’t until July of 1999 that the county council decided to tentatively wade into regulation. Rather than drafting a comprehensive master plan, they established an ordinance where zoning arrived precinct by precinct, like weather moving through a patchwork of neighborhoods.

The deeper idea behind this arrangement was almost architectural in its simplicity. A precinct, after all, was already a real electorate and a known community—a defined space where residents could organize, collect signatures, argue their case, and vote "yes" or "no". This bespoke system perfectly suited the delicate politics of Anderson County at the time, a place where land use could be a thorny subject and where top-down zoning might have been rejected outright as an unwelcome, heavy-handed intrusion.

By making the precinct the "unit of consent, not just the unit of administration," a local community could petition for zoning, shepherd it through the County Council and the Planning Commission and ultimately bring the matter directly to the voters most affected. Today, official materials still describe this unique mechanism as “referendum-based zoning by Voting Precinct”—a distinctly bureaucratic phrase harboring a deeply democratic impulse. The wheels of this system are still turning; just this year, the precincts of Neals Creek, Shirley Store, and Rock Springs agreed to put zoning to a public referendum.

It also makes Anderson the only county in the nation with such a potentially politicized method of zoning.

While the democratic impulse is undeniably noble, it fundamentally politicized the planning process. Imagine the plight of the local planner. A functional region requires a macro-level vision, but under this system, the planner's map is entirely subjugated to the political cartographer. Because precinct lines chase population numbers, they often do not reflect the actual character of the surrounding community. A boundary might slice indiscriminately through a bustling commercial artery or bisect a vacant parcel of land simply to balance a ledger of registered voters.

The absurdity deepens with the passing of time. Prudent development relies on predictability, but these political lines are inherently in flux, undergoing mandatory reevaluation every 10 years based on population shifts. When land-use rules are tethered to these moving targets, a resident could go to sleep in a strictly regulated residential zone and wake up to find those protections vaporized, simply because a new subdivision three miles away required the county to shift a line.

Furthermore, the "opt-in" nature of the beast leaves behind a regulatory Swiss cheese. A neighborhood might rally its voters and successfully zone itself to preserve its quiet character, while the precinct immediately across the street stubbornly chooses unrestricted liberty. The residents who voted for regulation are then left to watch, powerless, as an RV park or a heavy industrial plant sprouts on the unzoned land just yards from their front doors, defeating the fundamental purpose of zoning in the first place.

The precinct zoning is a system that attempts to hammer a geographic nail with a political screwdriver. It sacrifices regional cohesion in favor of hyper-local whim, leaving behind a disjointed, sprawling landscape where the only absolute certainty is that the rules will change as surely as the population does.

Anderson County’s hiring of the CodeWright Planners consultants to help develop a cohesive, easy-to-understand Land Use Development Ordinance (LUDO) and has been holding public meetings to answer questions and gather suggestions on how the process might be better.

CodeWright’s Chad Meadows said the unique situation of Anderson County presented a series of challenges, but none that cannot be overcome with patience and community buy in.

A draft of this plan could be available as early as November. Whether it will suggest discarding the precinct-by-precinct mode of zoning will be up to county council.

In the meantime, council seems to be taking steps to slow down unbridled growth with tweaks to the current land use planning and work of the Planning Commission, and last week approved a moratorium on any proposed data centers or upgrades to such facilities already in operation.

Meanwhile, looming in the background is the prospect of municipal annexation, which brings a different set of development rules and restrictions (or lack of restrictions). Some county council members have suggested the local S.C. Legislative Delegation take action to curb the enthusiasm of such annexation with legislation that requires both county and city/town to agree before any property can be annexed.

Until there is a new plan and even perhaps new state laws, certain areas of the county continue to watch forests and pastures disappear as developers clearcut and grade property for mass development.