Playground Upgrades, Events Highlight Summer in Iva

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Tim Taylor, the town manager of Iva, said the recently approved budget looks much like last budgets, with no real windfall in sight, but also without the kind of strain that comes when growth outruns the machinery built to support it.

That relative stability has allowed the town to do a few things it has wanted to do for some time. The most visible of them will be a new playground at the Civic Center, funded in part with money from a South Carolina Parks And Recreation Development Fund grant the town secured in December and matched through this year’s budget. The existing play area has clearly been used hard and is well loved, and the new version will include rubberized mulch, repairs to the current equipment, and an added structure to make the space larger and more useful for children to use into the late summer and fall.

The budget also includes a two percent cost-of-living increase for town employees. In a small town revenues and expenses often remain in rough equilibrium, but that balance depends on constant attention to unavoidable costs like water purchases and sewer treatment.

Recreation remains one of Iva’s more reliable forms of civic life. The youth sports program is already looking ahead to fall, and the town has secured the Dixie Youth Baseball tournament for next year, a point of local pride that suggests the program’s role is about more than ballfields and schedules. It is also one of the community’s institutions of continuity, run by coaches and leaders who keep a steady stream of children involved in something larger than themselves.

Downtown, the old dime store is finally moving toward renovation. Taylor said town committees have met with the architect, adjusted the plans, and are preparing to begin the work once contracts are awarded. The building will house the museum, where the town’s historical collection will be moved from storage, though the town hopes to retain part of the structure for storage of event materials and decorations. The exterior will get a new look, with landscaping, paint, and awnings, so that the building can be both a repository of memory and a visible sign that the town is still willing to invest in itself.

Another sign of that investment is a new sushi and Japanese restaurant, Daizu Hibachi Express, opening downtown in the old Mexican restaurant space beside the library. The owners already operate a location in Liberty, and Taylor said the new restaurant is expected to open in mid-August and will reportedly be open seven days a week, from 11 a.m.-10 p.m., and its new façade is being designed to complement the library and the rest of the block rather than interrupt it.

Summer itself has become something of an event schedule. Iva is in the middle of its Thursday Summer Night Concert Series, and the town combined a recent Friday-night market, which began as a farmers market and grew into a larger vendor gathering, with a community yard sale weekend that drew a strong crowd. On Sunday, the town will hold its Fourth of July fireworks celebration, which Iva traditionally stages on the Sunday before the holiday so residents can attend other towns’ events as well.

The celebration will include food vendors, inflatables, a concert by the Combo Kings, and fireworks launched from the school district parking lot, as the town has done in previous years. Taylor said that arrangement works better than trying to launch from other sites that made the display hard to see, or worse, unsafe. It is the sort of practical adjustment that towns make when they are trying to make celebration look effortless, even though it is anything but.

Taylor said the modest momentum suits Iva. The town knows what it is — a place with fishermen passing through, a self-described gateway to the freshwater coast, and a summer calendar built for families, visitors, and people with boats in tow. Taylor said there may yet be a day of water slides and inflatables before school starts again.

For now, though, the town seems content to keep balancing its books, adding a playground, repairing an old building, and making room for the next crowd on a Thursday night.