Rusty Burns Gives County Top Grade for 2025 Accomplishments

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Anderson County’s year felt like a slow-motion construction project—steel rising, asphalt hardening, and policy poured like fresh concrete—while the people inside it all tried to keep up with the noise.  The county’s longtime administrator, Rusty Burns, gave top marks to the county’s accomplishments for the year in his interview with the Anderson Observer, which highlights include a bigger jail, smoother roads, a steadier grid, and enough fireworks to briefly convince everyone that the future was already here.

Nothing captured the year’s mood more than the $80‑plus million detention center, a project that turned incarceration into an engineering story.  Burns described watching prefabricated cells arrive like oversized appliance boxes, lifted by forklift and slid into place, each one a complete room that simply had to be tied into utilities before becoming someone’s new address.  The pace has been brisk enough that the project is running roughly a month ahead of schedule, though Burns still warns the public not to confuse visible progress with imminent occupancy; a facility that size, he notes, takes time to test and staff, even with what he dryly calls “a waiting list” that is not getting any shorter.

The new jail, adjacent to the existing facility, is marketed as “state‑of‑the‑art,” a phrase that does not do much for defendants but reassures bond markets and nervous neighbors. County leaders frame the expansion as a response to an inexorable jail population rather than a choice, folding it into a broader narrative of growth and public safety, one which looks to future needs while relieving current overcrowding and outdated facilities.

Even beyond the jail, 2025 in Anderson has been a year of ground disturbance, where voters -rejected a referendum setting a one-percent tax to fund county’s road/bridges repair maintenance. Burns said the voters have spoken, and the council will seek more funding from the state, but it will not cover the estimated $35 million needed annually to restore the county’s roads infrastructure.

Hundreds of new jobs, both from expansion of existing businesses and new companies moving to the area were another highlight of the year. Burns said economic development is not just managing growth making the county a welcome place for businesses.

County officials still expect multiple economic development announcements before year’s end, and private developers continue to build, even as the county works on new development standardbreds and while several communities petition for zoning their own districts to control the future of their home areas.

Not all of 2025’s construction has been about expansion; some of it has been an attempt to keep the past from collapsing under its own weight.  Downtown, the county’s historic courthouse has been undergoing a roughly $7 million dollar renovation, a project Burns says is on track, the scaffolding around its classical façade and bright new copper roof  visible reminders that civic architecture requires maintenance to protect history.

The Anderson County Museum is spearheading efforts for the 200th anniversary celebrations across the county for 2026, including a parade downtown.

If the jail and the roads are the visible signs of growth, the more abstract infrastructure—zoning maps, kilowatts—may prove just as consequential.  Near Starr, a proposed 1,350‑megawatt energy plant has moved through public hearings, promising companies the kind of stable electricity that now ranks alongside cheap land and highway access on corporate wish lists.  The project would join expansions from utilities such as Santee Cooper in making Anderson more attractive to large employers who do not like surprises from the grid.

Amid all the spreadsheets and site plans, the county has also invested in a different sort of infrastructure: occasions for people to stand shoulder‑to‑shoulder and look in the same direction as part of the community.  Celebrate Anderson, the county’s annual end‑of‑summer gift to itself, leaned hard into spectacle this year, booking Kool & the Gang instead of a country act and drawing more than 11,000 for the free show and followed by the largest fireworks display in the Upstate. The success almost guarantees more musical variety at the civic center.

The festival functioned as both escape and proof of concept: a reminder that quality of life can be measured not just in lane miles but in shared noise and light.  It also underlined the county’s growing reliance on events—from country music festivals at leased venues to fishing championships at Green Pond Landing—as both economic drivers and experiments in crowd management.

What emerges from Burns’ running commentary is a county trying to thread a familiar Southern needle: grow fast enough to hold its children and attract its newcomers, but not so fast that the place becomes unrecognizable even to the people who built it.  In 2025, Anderson County’s story has been told in concrete pours and prefabricated cells, in zoning petitions and concert set lists—a year when nearly everything seemed to be under construction, including the idea of what it means to call this place home.