COASTAL OBSERVER

The towns of Pawleys Island and Andrews will compete to place a representative on the commission that will pick the projects for a capital projects sales tax referendum next year.

“We’re serving up a nominee who may or may not be on the committee,” Pawleys Island Mayor Brian Henry said last week after Town Council selected Mark Hawn as its representative. Hawn serves on the town Planning Commission.

If he makes the cut, Hawn will be the town’s first representative on the sales tax commission.

Georgetown County Council initiated the process last month to put a 1-cent capital projects sales tax on the ballot in November 2024. State law requires the creation of a six-member committee to solicit projects and decide which ones to place before voters.

Three of those members are appointed by the county. The resolution adopted by the council proposed that Georgetown, Andrews and Pawleys Island each have one representative. But the county later discovered that the state law also sets out the formula that must be used to select the municipal representatives.

Based on population, Georgetown gets two. Andrews, population 2,275 in the last census, and Pawleys Island, population 130, aren’t eligible for any seats on the commission.

In that case, under state law, the two Georgetown members must select the third municipal representative from outside their own municipality.

“That sounds familiar,” said Reed Tiller, who will represent Georgetown along with Harris Chewning.

Tiller said he wasn’t aware of the referendum until he was recruited to represent the city on the commission. The need to fill the third municipal seat was an added twist.

“The fairest way to fill that spot would be to look at their qualifications,” he said.

Andrews Mayor Frank McClary said his town planned to select a nominee this week.

“It’s extremely important. I hope they will consider the fact that it’s the second largest municipality in the county,” he said. “I’m not discounting the town of Pawleys Island.”

Voters passed a capital projects sales tax in 2014 that was in effect from 2015 through 2019. It raised $41 million.

A commission was formed in 2020 to draft another sales tax referendum. The process was stopped after the list of projects submitted for consideration reached $429 million.

The town of Pawleys Island didn’t have a representitive on the commission for either of those efforts, nor for a 2012 referendum that was rejected by voters.

The makeup of the commission is important, County Council members said, because it has to come up with a mix of projects that are necessary, have broad appeal to voters and fit a budget of about $10 million a year in revenue over six years.

The council named Gary Cooper, owner of Palmetto Infusion; Ashley Nelson, senior director of the Bunnelle Foundation; and Robert Crenshaw, who is retired from the state’s readySC job training program. Cooper and Nelson, who also serves on the county Planning Commission, live in the Pawleys Island area. Crenshaw lives in the northwestern part of the county.

The council also received five other applications. Members voted by paper ballot on their top three choices before last week’s council meeting. They then voted to confirm the three commission members.

The county was unable to provide the ballots of the council members this week because they were locked in the office of the council clerk, who was on vacation.

Council Member Bob Anderson said he was a little surprised by the process used to short-list the finalists. But he also said he didn’t solicit nominees for the commission because he doesn’t support the tax proposal.

Coupled with the capital projects sales tax will be a 1-cent local option sales tax that will reduce property taxes in the county and leave an estimated $2.2 million that can be used to operate and maintain facilities built with the capital projects tax.

Anderson said he favors a transportation sales tax that could be used to build a bypass around Georgetown – and by extension Waccamaw Neck – and a green space sales tax.

Council Member Stella Mercado said she didn’t recruit any nominees, but was happy with the result.

“It’s good to have two from the Waccamaw Neck,” she said. “I think it’s important to have people who hopefully have vision for the county that are also conservative.”

Although she didn’t know Crenshaw, she knew of him, and said she thinks they can balance the financial and political sides of the referendum.

Council Member Clint Elliott said he got some calls from colleagues lobbying for their nominees. He said he based his decision on who will be able to keep the project list in check.

He did look for a nominee himself, but his top prospect wasn’t able to devote the time, Elliott said.

“We didn’t need a bunch of people on there saying, ‘Pave my road,’” he said. “This isn’t your Sears Roebuck Christmas wish list. We need to be conservative.”

Extending water and sewer service to western parts of the county is likely to feature into the project list, he said. In addition to serving existing residents, it is expected to help shift growth pressure from the Waccamaw Neck.

Among the prospective commissioners not picked by County Council was Dan Stacy, who chaired the commission for the 2012 vote. He said he was asked to apply by the county administrator, Angela Christian.

“I just remember we fought about swimming pools,” he said. “Nobody wanted to talk about the operational costs.”

Pools didn’t make the cut.

Stacy said the debate will be the same for the new commission. “Building it is easy, operating it is the hard part,” he said.

The commission is expected to meet next month to organize and fill the vacant seat.

Although the town of Pawleys Island doesn’t have a large population, it does generate sales tax through its vacation rentals, Henry said. Giving the island a seat on the commission would also acknowledge the fact that the county expects over half of the propsed sales taxes to be paid by visitors.

“Waccamaw Neck needs to have fair representation,” he said.

The Andrews mayor felt the same way about his part of the county.

“All of those people come to Andrews to shop and go to school,” McClary said.

He hopes that his town’s lawsuit challenging the county’s spending of the 2014 sales tax revenue won’t be a factor in the decision. The case is still pending.