Pelzer Mayor: Teamwork Key to Town’s Progress

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

In Pelzer, the job of mayor starts with the realization that the job description is something of a myth. The image of the small–town executive—decisive, all–knowing, ready with an answer at every turn—does not survive the first few months in office.

Chase Smithwick, Pelzer’s freshman mayor, found that out quickly.

“The mayor doesn’t have all the answers to every question,” said Smithwick, half amused, half chastened. The work, he has learned, is less about being the person with the solution than about being the person who knows whom to call.

The learning curve has been steep but not solitary. Smithwick talks about his “good team” with the relief of someone who discovered early that the real currency of local government is not authority but support. There are staff members and council members, but also informal allies and long–standing relationships that make it possible, most days, to find the missing information before the missing information becomes a crisis.

“We have a lot of good people that support us,” said Smithwick. “So finding those answers is a lot easier when you keep these good relationships—a headache at times, but it’s all worth it.”

The headaches are not abstract. For Pelzer, a town that once orbited a mill and now lives with the gravitational wobble of its absence, the central, recurring problem is money. Smithwick refers to it as “the age–old problem,” by which he means the long shadow of Act 388, South Carolina’s property–tax reform law, and Pelzer’s own lack of a traditional municipal tax base.

“Not having a tax in town is hurting us,” said Smithwick. The town does not levy its own property tax; instead, it survives on business license fees, franchise fees, a trickle of state funding through the Municipal Association, and the portion of accommodations taxes that make their way back to Pelzer.

These are not the sorts of revenues that produce sweeping ribbon–cuttings. They are the kinds that barely keep pace with inflation, infrastructure decay, and the slow accretion of needs: a sidewalk here, a drainage issue there, a building that should have been repaired 10 years ago.

Smithwick talks about having “a million projects in mind, a million things” he’d like to do in town—an inventory that includes everything from parks to ball fields to basic civic polish—but he has learned to frame his ambition in the language of sequence and restraint. “We have to do it strategically,” he said.

“We have a good bit right now. We just have to manage it very carefully and responsibly.”

In that “good bit” lies Pelzer’s dilemma and its quiet point of pride. The town is not bankrupt, nor is it flush. It exists in a narrow band of solvency that rewards caution and punishes exuberance. Smithwick’s response has been to look beyond the town limits for help, toward state–level funding that can be coaxed, argued, or joked into existence. “It’s kind of a running joke with Blake,” he says, referring to S.C. Rep. Blake Sanders, the longtime planning and design consultant from nearby West Pelzer. “I was already hitting him up for earmarks before I was even elected.”

The joke works because it is rooted in a serious calculation. State money, especially in the form of directed funding, is one of the few ways a town like Pelzer can convert a “million projects” into anything approaching reality. Smithwick has submitted what he describes as a “pretty hefty earmark” request to Pelzer’s legislative delegation, specifically aimed at Monkey Park and the town’s ball fields. On a spreadsheet, these are line items under “recreation.” In the mayor’s telling, they are instruments of demographic strategy.

“I want to encourage the young families that grew up here —the ones who came up playing in those parks or on those fields—to stay, or at least to come back,” said Smithwick.

The logic is almost stubborn in its simplicity: if you give families attractive, well–maintained public spaces—somewhere for their kids to run, for teams to gather under the lights, for weekends to feel like something other than time to be gotten through—they might choose Pelzer over the easier, more anonymous options farther up the highway. It is not a grand theory of economic development; it is a small, specific bet on the enduring power of a park.

Behind that bet is the recognition that Pelzer’s story is still in the middle of being rewritten. The town is no longer the company outpost it once was, defined by mill whistles and factory rhythms, but it is not yet fully something else. It exists, instead, in a liminal space: close enough to the larger currents of growth in Anderson and Greenville to feel their pull, yet small enough that a single earmark, or the absence of one, can alter the town’s trajectory.

As a part-time mayor, Smithwick’s days are spent navigating that in–between. There are meetings about budgets that will not stretch far enough, conversations with representatives who have many Pelzers to consider across their districts, and strategy sessions with staff about which problem to tackle first. There are also the more intimate rituals of small–town office: the resident who walks in with a complaint that is really a confession of worry, the business owner who wants to expand but is unsure about the town’s capacity to keep up with basic services.

Smithwick describes it more as a practice of sustained attention. The progress Pelzer can claim—measured in grants applied for, projects lined up, parks and fields identified as priorities—is incremental by design. Each small change is constrained by the reality of a budget shaped elsewhere, in Columbia, years ago, in the form of Act 388. Yet within those constraints, there is room for a particular kind of leadership: the kind that asks, again and again, what can be done with the “good bit” the town already has, and what might be possible if a few more dollars, and a few more allies, arrive at the right time.

In that sense, the progress in Pelzer is less a story of transformation than of accumulation. A better–kept Monkey Park, refurbished ball fields, a budget managed “very carefully and responsibly,” an earmark that finally comes through—each is a small, deliberate step away from the town’s precarious past and toward a future that is modest but chosen. And in the mayor’s office, a young elected official, still learning how many answers he doesn’t have, keeps making the calls that just might bring that future a little closer.