The Holly Hill Town Council has taken the first step to purchase an almost 2-acre parcel on Pine Street for $74,000.
The council gave first-reading approval to the purchase during its monthly meeting on Monday, June 3.
The final vote is set for Monday, July 1, at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers in the Town Hall, 8423 Old State Road.
holly hill town hall illustration
The property will provide vehicular access to the site of a soon-to-be-built wastewater treatment plant.
“We got a company to survey it for us and the (owners) decided they would sell it to us for $37,000 an acre,” Mayor Billy Chavis said.
“But it’s not going to come out of the town’s general fund,” he added. “The money is going to come from the town’s escrow account, so it’s not going to cost us anything. Once again, this is putting on the backs of the developers is how we’re going to pay for it.”
Developers are lining up to build new residential subdivisions in Holly Hill, and the town is passing along the cost of building the new infrastructure that will be needed to accommodate the additional homes.
The town’s engineering firm recommended that the town purchase the property to avoid spending “somewhere in the ballpark of half a million dollars” to build a bridge over Home Branch, Chavis said.
During the public comment time, town resident Dianne Bergen noted that the town has “an official website where we should be able to go and get official information.”
But the town is using Facebook instead, she said.
“I’m not going to go on Facebook and listen to every Tom, Dick, and Harry give their opinions about things,” Bergen said. “I believe an official website is the way to go, because then you know the information you’re getting is accurate.”
Mayor Chavis said that Police Chief Josh Detter is the only town employee who is tasked with keeping the website up to date, in addition to his other duties.
Chavis said he’d like to talk with anyone who is willing to volunteer to keep the town’s website up to date.
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Bergen said she would “like to ask that you consider putting money in the budget” for that purpose.
There’s time to consider that request. Although many towns operate on a July-to-June fiscal year, Holly Hill’s fiscal year runs from October to September.
Chavis announced that 74 people have signed up for TextMyGov, which allows town officials and citizens with access to digital technology to exchange information rapidly. Chavis said information about TextMyGov was distributed with recent water bills.
Also in the public comment time, town resident Thurman Phillips Jr. asked if the town has identified specific neighborhoods where debris will be cleaned out of ditches this year.
Mayor Chavis replied: “We will outsource getting the debris taken up. We are actually looking at getting a track hoe coming in and we have enough money in our health and drainage account that we can go out and get an excavator like one that Orangeburg County has when they were cleaning the ditches for us, and getting the mulching head on top of it. That’s what we’re looking at doing now.”
He added that in 2022 the town cleaned out some ditches in the neighborhood of Collier, John Brown, Warren, Edwards, and Pelzer streets but encountered fences that limited the scope of work that could be done.
The mayor advised Phillips to “get a group together that wants to jump inside the ditch and wants to go in and hack away and drag it out. Call us and we’ll work with you.”
Chavis continued: “The last group I found to do it was a group out of Lancaster. They came out, they looked at it, and they said it was going to be a two-weekend project and (I) never heard back from them.”
No information was provided about the group and why its members were so interested in cleaning up Holly Hill’s ditches that they made a round-trip of approximately 268 miles, according to Google Maps, to look at the ditches and initially expressed their willingness to make two additional 268-mile round-trips to clean the ditches.
Also speaking during the public comment time were Valencia Golden and Montez P.V. Haynes. They are two of the candidates in the June 11 Democratic Party primary for the office of Orangeburg County coroner.
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