Legislation for Oconeeans to get worked up over!

Two staff members of the South Carolina Association of Counties visited Oconee County to preview the legislation that’ll go before the South Carolina General Assembly in 2014. And they spent most of their time at the Oconee Alliance meeting talking about “flow control”—specifically House bill 3290 which they see as a threat to home rule. It’s a bill that Association of Counties attorney Josh Rhodes worries could make South Carolina a dumping ground for out of state garbage. He gave the example of Lee County where, when driving to the beach, you can see a mountain of New York trash placed there by a private waste company. “And now the citizens (there) just lost a very important part of a lawsuit suing them over nuisance complaints and trespass because they can’t go outside because it stinks so bad…,” Rhodes told the Oconee Alliance. Oconee County currently runs a commercial and demolition landfill on the Wells Highway, but it contracts with a private company to truck its household waste out of the state, to Homer, Georgia. The South Carolina bill that the Association of Counties believes would impair local governments from expanding existing landfills and building new ones passed the House of Representatives and has moved to the Senate. As late as last year, today’s speakers quote Oconee-Pickens Senator Thomas Alexander as saying he planned to vote for the bill.