POSTAL PATRON LOCAL
APRIL 28–MAY 4, 2022
WWW.YOURISLANDNEWS.COM
PRESORTED PERMIT NO. 97 BEAUFORT, SC 29902
COVERING BEAUFORT COUNTY
County continues to wrestle with impact fees Tensions between County Council, municipalities simmer as school fees repealed; 3rd vote on broader resolution delayed
Victoria Smalls displays her Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo by Bob Sofaly.
Smalls surprised by award
By Tony Kukulich Before once again considering the controversial repeal of all county impact fees during Monday night’s Beaufort County Council meeting, the council disentangled school impact fees from the broader impact fee resolution, a move that gave them the flexibility to address the matters individually. It was a move that appeared to have paid off for the council. By a vote of 9 to 2, the council approved the repeal of school impact fees collected in unincorporated ar-
eas of the county south of the Broad River, and to refund each $9,534 fee collected since the fee was initiated approximately one year ago. “In 2020, the School District and County commissioned a school impact fee study,” said County Administrator Eric Greenway. “The county staff initially supported implementing that study council to adopt the school impact fee last summer when the Town of Hardeeville would consider annexing portions of the county. If the fees were in place and the annexations were successful, the
county would still be able to collect them. However, the annexations did not occur, the municipalities, including the Town of Bluffton, disagreed with the structure and the school board seemed not to take a position. For these reasons, the time has come now for the county to stop collecting the fee.” The Beaufort County School District was not represented at Monday’s meeting. While funding for the district’s capital expansion projects like new schools or school renovations are typically funded
by voter-approved bond initiatives, Candace Bruder, the district’s director of communications, said that the Board of Education originally voted unanimously to approve the school impact fee. “The district’s needs are real,” Bruder said. “The growth in southern Beaufort County is real. These challenges don’t go away just because the county decided to repeal these much needed impact fees. At the end of the day, these needs have
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President honors Beaufort resident for her commitment to volunteerism By Tony Kukulich Beaufort resident Victoria Smalls, preservationist and executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, built her career around serving the Gullah Geechee communities that line the coast from North Carolina to northern Florida, but she has never limited her efforts to the responsibilities of her paid roles. Smalls’ dedication to volunteering in and around those communities was recognized when she recently received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award – the highest award available as part of the President’s Volunteer Service Award (PVSA). The lifetime achievement designation denotes that Smalls completed more than 4,000 hours of volunteer service. “My parents always taught us that you have to be of service to mankind, ever since we were little,” Smalls said. “That’s something they instilled in all of us. It’s something that we do whether it was sharing produce we grew on our farm, or my father sharing seafood that he caught on the river with people that weren’t able or didn’t have means. Those are the examples we had from our parents.” It was during a March Fourth program hosted by Pat Conroy Literary Center last month that Smalls was presented with her award in a ceremony that was planned without her
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We’re here to be of service to one another. If we can’t do that then we’re missing something. We’re missing the opportunity to be better people, to build community. My personal mission for the past 20 years has been to be of service.”
Beaufort City Councilmen Phil Cromer, left, and Neil Lipsitz, center, help Larry Rowland, Professor Emeritus at USC Beaufort, unveil a historic marker commemorating the Great Fire of 1907 during a brief ceremony Wednesday morning at Bay and Carteret streets. The fire destroyed the two buildings in the background at the corner of Bay and Carteret. When they were rebuilt, fireproof materials were used, as well as “metallic shingles.” Cedar shingles of the day were instrumental in the spread of the fire. Photo by Bob Sofaly.
A hot spot a century later Beaufort memorializes devastating fire with marker
By Tony Kukulich
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new marker commemorating the Great Fire of 1907 was unveiled by the Beaufort County Historical Society (BCHS) in Stephen Elliot Park last week where it joined 66 other historic markers located throughout the county. The fire represents one of the defining moments in Beaufort’s long history. It got its start near the corner of Bay and Carteret streets — just across the street from where the new marker stands — and destroyed more than 40 structures before it was extinguished. “There was a lot of interest in that particular event and how much it impacted Beaufort,” said Leah Roche with the BCHS. “It’s been on the backburner for a while. Our researcher, Linda (Hoffman), put the pieces together in
a way that was accepted by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, which has to approve all of these markers.” After the BCHS’s research was approved by the state, the text for the marker was sent to a foundry in Marietta, Ohio, where the marker was cast at a cost of $2,170. Larry Rowland, distinguished professor emeritus of history for the University of South Carolina Beaufort and BCHS president, provided a brief history of the fire before marker’s unveiling. According to Rowland, the conflagration had its start with three boys sneaking cigarettes and trying to stay out of an icy wind blowing at 30 knots on a mid-January morning. “There was a warehouse down by the water where the park is now,” Rowland explained. “It was a cotton warehouse
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Candy stripers coming back to Beaufort Memorial.
USCB Center for the Arts to screen Who We Are, hold panel discussion.
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that was mostly empty. It was a wooden building made out of heart pine, very susceptible to fire. The boys started a little bonfire to keep warm. Well, that wasn’t a smart idea. Evidently, it caught the lint on fire and blew it into the walls of the heart pine building, and kaboom. Because the wind was so strong, the fire was like a blow torch.” The Stevens Building, which stood on the spot now occupied by Merrill Lynch, was the next to burn. It housed F.W. Scheper’s store and ship chandlery downstairs while upstairs was the Harmony Lodge of Freemasons, which lost all of its historical records. As the fire grew, it was pushed north on Carteret Street by the wind coming up from the south. “One building after another on
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