Downtown, meanwhile, continues to be Iva’s most visible experiment in place-making. Taylor described the new library branch as an aesthetic and social success, saying it has drawn people to the square, helped animate the area, and made downtown feel more like the town’s front porch. He said the old dime store project and museum renovation are moving forward with an architect, with design work underway and construction possibly beginning this summer.

But the event is no longer just a once-a-year respite. As the organizers kept listening to the people who showed up at those tables, a different kind of worry floated to the surface: what happens to adults with special needs after the school buses stop coming? Over and over, families described the same predicament. Their adult children wanted to work, and often could work, but the jobs that existed—if they existed—were narrow, temporary, or segregated. “Despite their abilities, willingness, and potential, they are often left out of the workforce,” the organizers observed.

Teachers from certain other states could start working in South Carolina classrooms more quickly under a bill a House committee advanced Thursday. The bill, which passed out of the Education and Public Works Committee 14-4, would make South Carolina the 14th state to join a compact agreeing not to make teachers reapply for the certification they need before starting instruction.

For nearly half a century, Pendleton has marked the season with a festival that treats art as one of its defining expressions. This weekend, the 49th Historic Pendleton Spring Jubilee returns Saturday from 10 a.m.- 6 p.m., and Sunday from noon to-5 p.m., with the Village Green and surrounding downtown streets filling up with artisans, food vendors, and the easy bustle of a community that knows how to make an occasion of the weather warming up.

At the end of his fifth term, he likens himself to a latter-day Tom Brady or Peyton Manning—wiser, if not quite as spry, still figuring out “how to win games” for Anderson.

What first drew him to the YMCA, Osborne said, was the “Big C” Christian mission. He described himself as someone who tries to “wear my C on my sleeve,” and said he values both the faith foundation and the Y’s stated openness to everyone. The combination matters to him, as does another, more practical feature: the flexibility. He spoke appreciatively of the odd hours—night events, weekends, 5K races—that come with the job, then added that the schedule has also let him show up for his children’s school events and family obligations.

Election season is officially under way in Anderson County.

City of Anderson elections, which are nonpartisan, are April 7. With filing now closed for the June 9 primaries, races are set for state and local primary elections on June 9.

The income tax law is expected to give almost 43 percent of filers a break on their taxes filed in April 2027, cutting state revenues by nearly $309 million in its first year. The top income tax rate will continue to drop based on the state’s growth, until it eventually reaches zero at some point in the future.

What makes Anderson’s numbers especially interesting is not just the pace but the source. The county recorded a natural population change of minus 334 people, meaning there were more deaths than births, but migration added 2,884 residents. Ninety-five percent of those newcomers came from elsewhere in the United States, which suggests that Anderson’s growth is less about people arriving from far abroad than about people arriving from other parts of the country and deciding to stay.

The City of Anderson elections April 7 will feature two contested positions, mayor and City Council Seat 5. Early voting is already under way and continues through Friday, with 63 votes cast last week.

Today, we feature interviews with the city council candidates, concluding with Tonya Winbush.

The City of Anderson elections April 7 will feature two contested positions, mayor and City Council Seat 5. Early voting is already under way and continues through Friday, with 63 votes cast last week. Today, we feature interviews with the city council candidates, starting (alphabetically) with Darryl Thompson.

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.