The next time you get frustrated about the craziness of your local government in Charleston or Columbia or even Spartanburg or Florence, take a minute to thank God you don’t live in McBee, the tiny Chesterfield County town that seems to have put the DYS in dysfunction.
This is the town that has spent the past 15 years living in a Groundhog Day of a blood feud between warring politicians Glenn Odom and John Campolong, who have been the instigators and targets of lawsuits and criminal investigations about their actions as leaders of the town and, for Mr. Odom’s part, of Alligator Rural Water & Sewer. Observers joke, as The Post and Courier’s Thad Moore reports, that the feud must have its roots in a childhood-slight. That’s how intensely personal it is. And there seems to be no end in sight.
It’s a complicated and unsettled tale that we can’t do justice to here and that you really need to read if you haven’t already. And frankly, despite Mr. Moore’s exhaustive and masterful efforts to get to the bottom of the dispute — he examined thousands of pages of court records, town council minutes and documents from ethics, election and law enforcement agencies — it’s not clear to us whether anybody’s actions crossed any legal lines.
About all we can say for sure is that the mess deepens our discomfort with two matters that need some attention from the Legislature: the liberal use in South Carolina of the power of eminent domain and the lax oversight of local water and sewer systems.
We normally think of cities and counties using eminent domain to buy property from unwilling sellers. And while we support this authority, we believe local officials are obligated to use it only as a very last resort — which unfortunately doesn’t always happen. But in South Carolina, regulated utilities also hold this power that traditionally has been given only grudgingly to people whom we have the power to replace if they get out of control: elected officials.
Think Dominion Energy, for instance, which sometimes has to run its power lines where property owners might not want them so the utility can serve the greater good. Or your local water company, which might be run by your local government or might, as was the case in McBee at the time in question, be run by a former mayor who’s not happy with his successor’s campaign to put the town back in control of its water service.
As Mr. Moore reports, Mr. Campolong was elected mayor on the pledge of take back control of the water supply that the town had turned over to Alligator shortly before Mr. Odom’s election. Soon after the new mayor asked SLED and the attorney general to investigate Mr. Odom, Alligator said it planned to use eminent domain to build water lines through Mr. Campolong’s property. His only recourse was to spend his money taking the utility to court — which he did, eventually winning a verdict that drove the price for the condemnation so high that the water company chose to reroute its lines away from his property.
Now maybe the condemnation attempt was legitimate and unrelated to the mayor’s efforts. Or maybe, as the verdict suggests, it wasn’t. Which underscores our discomfort — even with the courts to run interference — with private businesses having the awesome power to force us to sell our property, at the price they set.
It’s one thing to give that power to a multistate electric utility, particularly now that the S.C. Public Service Commission has started to act a little like the regulator it’s supposed to be to serve as an alternative to the free-market competition that consumers can use to their advantage to make purchases other than water and electricity. But it’s quite another to give the power to water and sewer utilities, which tend not to be heavily regulated by the PSC and whose management tends to be local. And more personally involved in the community — for both good and ill.
Usually, our concerns about water and sewer systems involve water quality and pollution, neither of which appears to be a problem in this case. But those problems often stem from ethically questionable decisions, which are alleged to have driven McBee’s decision to have Mr. Odom’s water system take over the town’s water service.
So, the McBee saga reminds us of the work that still needs to be done by the PSC and the Department of Health and Environmental Control to protect consumer interests and public health against water and sewer companies that don’t always protect either. And the work the Legislature still needs to do to toughen the penalties for violating conflict-of-interest and other ethics requirements that apply to local as well as state government.
And it also highlights the need for lawmakers to consider putting some limits on the power of businesses to force us to sell our land, at the price they set — whether that means giving property owners an administrative route to object rather than having to go to court, requiring regulators to approve condemnations or even returning to the more conservative practice of granting only governments the power of eminent domain.
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