Roads, Security, Top S.C. Rep. Don Chapman’s 2026 Priorities List
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In the first week of January, with the State House corridors still shaking off the dust of the holidays, S.C. Rep. Don Chapman, R-Anderson Dist. 8, is already speaking in the future tense. The Anderson County Republican, who still introduces himself as a 32‑year business owner before he talks about politics, has a workingman’s list of goals for 2026: fix how the state builds roads, sharpen how it builds careers, and make sure the machinery of government moves a little more like the private sector he came from.
Chapman’s year ahead begins in committee rooms most voters will never see: the South Carolina Workforce Development Committee and the South Carolina DOT Modernization Committee. His appointments to both, he notes, are less about seniority than about biography—he was asked to serve, he says, because three decades of running a business have taught him how systems stall, and how they can be made to move.
On workforce development, Chapman is still in what he calls the “orientation” stage, but his 2026 ambitions are already concrete. The network of workforce sites around the state, which help residents find jobs and training, now has to contend with something he recognizes from retail and office life alike: the rising possibility that an angry client becomes a security incident. The committee has begun implementing local law‑enforcement presence at the centers on workforce days, and Chapman frames that not as a concession to fear but as a prerequisite for keeping the doors open to people who want help.
The emphasis on security, for Chapman, is less a detour than a foundation for what he hopes 2026 will bring: a more confident, better‑protected workforce pipeline in which vulnerable people are not left alone at the front counter. In his interview with the Anderson Observer, he talks about the centers as places where frustration and expectation collide—where someone who feels shortchanged by the system might take it out on the nearest staffer—so the state, in his view, has a duty to protect both the employees and the public seeking a foothold in the labor market.
Behind the new security measures lies a broader goal of refining the way South Carolina steers people toward the training and education that match the jobs actually available. Chapman’s 2026 agenda on the committee is to use the next round of meetings not only to monitor safety but also to insist that workforce programs remain tied to real opportunities, a businesslike insistence that public dollars follow results rather than routine.
If workforce development is where Chapman is learning the ropes, the DOT Modernization Committee is where he sounds most at home. Over the past year, he crisscrossed the state for six public meetings—a listening tour that brought in mayors, council members, and citizens who have spent years staring at the same orange barrels. The assignment for 2026 is as sprawling as the highway map: write a bill, early in the new session, that turns that backlog of complaint and suggestion into law.
The phrase Chapman returns to is “cutting down the bureaucratic red tape.” In practice, that means shortening approval processes that can make road projects feel endless and, just as crucially, finding new revenue streams to pay for the work once those projects move. The bill he envisions would be a cumulative document, stitched together from the ideas aired in those statewide meetings and refined around a core principle that sounds more Main Street than marble hall: if the state promises a road, it should build it in something like real time.
One of Chapman’s more pointed 2026 goals comes from a corner of the transportation debate that did not exist a generation ago: electric vehicles. Under current law, South Carolina residents who drive EVs pay a flat fee if they register their car in the state, but out‑of‑state drivers who use South Carolina roads pay nothing toward the gas‑tax‑funded system they rely on.
Chapman’s proposal, which he hopes to see written into the DOT modernization bill this session, is to close that gap by capturing revenue from EVs more fairly, especially from drivers who cross state lines. It is, in its way, a small‑bore adjustment, the sort of tweak that can vanish into the statutory fine print, but he treats it as emblematic of the larger modernization project: a transportation system that recognizes how people actually travel, and a tax structure that does not let new technologies slip through old rules.
Chapman talks about the year ahead without flourish, in the clipped cadences of someone used to agendas and shop ledgers rather than stump speeches, and his priorities for 2026 sound less like slogans than like work orders. He wants workforce centers that are safe enough for tense conversations about jobs, a DOT that spends less time chasing its own paperwork, and a tax code that acknowledges the electric cars already gliding past the state’s gas pumps.
None of that is guaranteed to make headlines. The committee meetings he describes—second orientations, listening tours, bill‑drafting sessions in Columbia—are the slow, procedural heart of state government, easy to ignore until a road finally opens or a training center finally feels secure. For Chapman, the measure of 2026 will be whether those quiet rooms produce visible change on the ground: pavement laid faster, workers served more safely, and a state that, at least on its roads and in its job centers, begins to operate on something closer to business time.
