The scaffolding on the front of the historic Anderson County Courthouse is scheduled to be removed on Monday. The clearing of the road and parking area behind the courthouse is scheduled to be open by the end of the day April 3, ushering in welcome relief to the detour that has been in place for more than a year.

Rusty Burns’ latest conversation with The Anderson Observer begins, as these things often do, with the advent of jobs. In Anderson County, jobs arrive like weather fronts—unseen until suddenly they’re on top of you, bringing a high-pressure system of press releases, tax incentives, and hiring fairs.

The learning curve has been steep but not solitary. Smithwick talks about his “good team” with the relief of someone who discovered early that the real currency of local government is not authority but support. There are staff members and council members, but also informal allies and long–standing relationships that make it possible, most days, to find the missing information before the missing information becomes a crisis.

The local event is scheduled from 2-4 p.m. and organized by Indivisible Clemson Area with 50501 South Carolina, who bill the day as a nonviolent gathering against the Trump administration and what organizers describe as corruption, cruelty and abuses of power. The the rally organizers ask participants to meet near the Mechanic Street side of the square, with signs, flags, music and a brief march through downtown Pendleton.

The legislation, dubbed the “Helping Alleviate Lawful Obstruction (HALO) Act,” threatens jail time to anyone getting in the way of on-duty officers, firefighters, paramedics or hospital workers after being told to get back.

The need for more power, Duke and its peers say, comes from familiar American story lines: more people arriving, more factories and distribution centers blinking on, more subdivisions named after the trees they replaced. Environmental and ratepayer advocates, scanning the same demand curves, see instead the outline of another character—energy-hungry data centers, many devoted to artificial intelligence, those unseen neighbors whose appetites for electrons have begun to rival the old textile mills. The argument over who is really driving the buildout—families or algorithms—has become a minor regional sport, less visible than college football but consequential for anyone who pays a power bill.

On April 30, the story of that experiment in civic formation is converging on a single night with a vivid dress code. “Let’s Paint the Town Red,” a reunion and celebration at Bleckley Station. The instructions are simple enough—wear red, bring your stories, be prepared to see the past walk in wearing name tags—but the stakes are quietly ambitious. The evening is meant to look backward and forward at once: honoring four decades of projects and relationships while underwriting something as unadorned, and as radical, as a front door and a set of keys for people who do not have either.

The numbers, in the language of economic development, are reassuringly blunt: about 560,000 square feet of additional floorspace and a projection of as many as 800 full-time and contracted skilled jobs, an infusion of electricians, engineers, testers, and project managers into a labor market still learning to speak fluently about artificial intelligence and high‑performance computing. The project, combined with existing operations in the area, nudges Vertiv’s regional presence past the one‑million‑square‑foot mark, a scale that suggests less an outpost than a campus devoted to the infrastructure behind the cloud.

Anderson Five, he says, has a way of spotting people who might have more to give. The district nudged him toward graduate study, then toward administration. Someone told him, plainly, that he had “the personality and the knack for it,” and he responded the way he says he always has: by walking through the next open door.

Voters can register or update their information online at scvotes.gov, provided they have a South Carolina driver’s license or DMV ID card; online registrations must be completed by April 2 before midnight.  Paper forms are also available for download at the site and may be returned to the county voter registration and elections office by email or fax by midnight on April 2, or by mail if postmarked by that date.

“Patience.”

That’s the one-word summary from Pendleton Mayor Sarah Stokowski of the most important lesson she’s learned in her first few months in office.

By noon hundreds of families were on hand to allow the kids to get up close and personal with a variety of big trucks and heavy equipment, including the new Anderson County Library Bookmobile, fire trucks, law enforcement vehicles, construction equipment, agricultural machinery, as well as meet the men and women who build, protect, and serve the City of Anderson and Anderson County.

Anderson City Council will tackle five new items of business at Monday’s regular 6 p.m. meeting in council chambers downtown, including a pair of contracts for the city detention center and three land use items.

On that Saturday, Main Street in Honea Path will be overrun by what Atkins has resurrected and reimagined as “The Dancing Goats Folkfest,” a new spring festival that is also, in a way, a ghost brought home. The name comes from an earlier art show in Ellijay, Georgia, begun by a friend of his named Mona, where Atkins once showed his work. That festival withered under the quiet pressures that undo most volunteer-run institutions—too few hands, too much else to do. Standing together at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, Mona told him, almost offhandedly, that he ought to start Dancing Goats up again.

“Well, sure, I might as well,” he remembers saying with a grin. “Let’s do it.”

The competition takes over downtown Belton, turning a short run of brick buildings into something like a temporary state fair compressed into a few blocks. It draws cooks from all over the country—Texas, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida—people who, for at least one weekend, accept that Belton, South Carolina, is the center of the chili universe.

The answer Anderson County settled on is R.E.A.A.C.T., a deceptively simple piece of software layered on top of a new records platform called Ingenuity. On a computer screen, it appears as a small, almost unassuming box on the face of the county’s online land‑records system.

In an attempt to get out of the starting gate legislation that would allow South Carolinians to bet on horse racing through a phone app, proponents are promising to hold the gambling to Palmetto State races only.

And those who want to make a wager must be present at the race to do so.

The Senate Finance Committee voted 12-6 Tuesday to advance the bipartisan proposal

The $5.8 million renovations, funded largely by the city’s hospitality tax, include walking trails, vast landscaping (50,000 plants, including 9,500 daffodils), environmentally friendly islands in the pond for the ducks/geese, a covered bridge architectural structure to improve visuals, additional areas for picnic tables and grassy play areas. The city also worked with the South Carolina Department of Transportation to turn Hiawatha Drive into a cul-de-sac, to increase safety in the area as well.

Anderson County Council approved on Tuesday measures to protect the integrity of the Planning Commission, limits on townhouse developments and for tax incentives for a growing local company and a new company.

Council seats 1, 5 and 7, now have opposition. In District 1, Councilman Chris Sullivan, elected in 2024, drew a challenger in Kelly Koonce. In District 5, the county council chairman, Tommy Dunn—on the board since 2008 and something of a fixed feature in the room—will face Josh Mann. District 7, long represented by Cindy Wilson, first elected in 2000, will share the ballot with Collin Alexander, who has chosen the year of her quarter‑century mark in office to ask voters whether they’re ready for a change. No candidate has yet to file for the Dist. 4 seat which will be vacated by Council Vice Chairman Brett Sanders at the end of the year.