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AUG. 15,
2011 -- Between 2008 and 2040, the tri-county region is expected to add
more than 101,000 workers, nearly 91,000 households and approximately
219,000 additional people. As chairman of Dorchester County Council and
the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments, I know decisions
we make today will determine how this growth impacts our quality of life.
We must address this projected growth as a region rather than as a loose
collection of multiple municipalities and counties, which is why I support
the Council of Government's regional planning initiative called Our
Region Our Plan.
In 2008,
the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments Land Use Planning
Committee kicked off the Our Region Our Plan initiative with a daylong
regional "Visioning" forum. Four hundred citizens attended and
discussed planning approaches and solutions for our region's future. In
November 2010, community members attended workshops in each of the three
counties to give input on how the region should grow and conserve in the
future.
These goals
and objectives, gathered from public input over the past several years,
acknowledge the importance of the region's natural features and the protection
of these resources. They ask us to work at all levels of government with
key community and citizen stakeholders to use good planning to produce
a balance of future growth and development, conservation and transportation
improvements.
Tea party zealots ruining the American dream By ANDY BRACK, publisher AUG. 15, 2011 – The vitriol being spewed by the underinformed acolytes of the tea party is troubling for America's free future.
You see, these folks are mad (in more ways than one). And they'll tell anybody they know that they're mad. At what? It doesn't really seem to matter. They're just enraged. By channeling the tea parties of the Revolution, they shroud their rage and equate it with what was happening in our united states back in the 1770s. The problem is that the two times – then and now – are far from the same. “They're attempting to adopt the noble causes of the past to fit the craziness of the present,” one wag accurately told us this week. Some 240 years ago, colonists revolted because of “taxation without representation.” They had a list of grievances, outlined in the Declaration of Independence, that described why they were upset with the British Crown and felt the need to be independent. History shows that in South Carolina, the struggle with the British was not about taxes, but about whom would govern.
Just being mad at everything is destructive, not constructive. Being proud of voting no and opposing things for the sake of opposing them, as is the case with South Carolina's own lockstep GOP Gang of Six (its five GOP congressman and mentor, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint) – doesn't lead to solutions for the sputtering American economy. Ignoring compromise solutions and insisting on only one way is not what the framers of our Constitution did. They talked. They cajoled. They respected each other and worked together for the common good. But these tea party wingnuts will have none of that. On a 30-year diet that government is the enemy, they simply don't understand the notion of common good. Instead, it's their way or the highway. They desperately seek to be known as leaders, although their thoughtless political philosophy owes all to right-wing think tanks and nothing to their own minds. Their rhetoric is immature and irresponsible. Their goal? To whip up fear for the personal gain of power. Congressmen like South Carolina's Tim Scott, Joe Wilson, Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy and Mick Mulveney are hellbent on dividing South Carolinians and America by class. Instead of a Nixonian Southern Strategy to grab power based on racial divisions, tea partiers are misleading mainstream Americans into thinking they care about their needs. In truth, they're all about protecting their millionaire donors and serving as lackeys for big corporations, both of which avoid taxes like the plague. More than anything, these congressional robots sputter what they're told so they can be reelected to sputter some more. This tea party mess is nothing but a cynical movement to enflame and enrage, a selfish exercise that is fundamentally counter to the patriotic American ideals of justice, fairness and equality. Patrick Henry made this observation in his “give me liberty or give me death” speech in 1775: “It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of the wise man, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?” Let's not have America and her ideals fall prey to the beasts of the tea party. Her cowards hope most Americans will become dupes of their paper tiger politics and un-American policies. See through this veil of deceit because as a nation, we are fortunately, better than what they offer.
This installation makes Charleston the first city in South Carolina to install a green roof on a municipal building. A green roof is a configuration of plants, soil, and drainage layers that are placed on the roof of a building.
Engineered to support the weight of the 2' x 2' Green Roof Modules, the tubular steel roof structure is wrapped with perforated zinc allowing the building to vent and provide the interior space with natural daylight. The plants on the roof, a mixture of drought tolerant sedums, will absorb storm water, decrease storm water runoff and serve to reduce pollution and increase oxygen in the air. In addition to its environmental benefits, aesthetically, the green roof will blend with the park when viewed from above. "The innovative roof on this functional facility furthers our goal of increased sustainability in the city of Charleston," Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said. "It will reduce costs related to roof replacement, repair, maintenance, and resurfacing. The roof will also mitigate the 'heat island effect' as the plants absorb heat that would normally reflect back into the atmosphere. Each change we make will allow us to lessen the burden on our environment. " SCANA to hold jobs fair at Goodwill Community Service Center SCANA Corporation is looking for new talent in the Lowcountry. Goodwill will host a SCANA Corporation company information and recruitment session at its Community Service Center at 11 a.m. Thursday.
SCANA provides energy to people and business throughout South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. It is looking for people to fill positions in the Lowcountry including electricians, engineers, linemen and more. The information session will last approximately one hour and due to limited space, attendees are asked to pre-register no later than Wednesday. Attendees are encouraged to arrive for the session at least 15 minutes early. "We are excited to be able to provide this opportunity to the community," said Goodwill Vice President of Employment Services Peggy Smith. "Goodwill's mission is to help people in our community find work." To register, call 843-566-0072. The session will take place 11 a.m. - noon Thursday at the Goodwill Community Service Center at 2150 Eagle Dr. Suite 100, North Charleston. For more information about Goodwill's programs and services, visit www.palmettogoodwill.org. Honors students getting even smarter at College of Charleston The Honors College at the College of Charleston is welcoming its brightest class ever, chosen from a record number of applicants. More than 1,300 students applied for just 200 spots - an increase of more than 30 percent over last year.
"Due to the large volume of qualified applicants, we were able to be more selective," Dean John Newell says. "This means that our incoming students are bringing in stronger academic scores, a wide variety of backgrounds, and are representing more states and countries than in previous years. The growing pool of qualified applicants also enables us to select students who will be successful in the Honors College curriculum, as well as being leaders on campus and in the community." Roper St. Francis teams up with school district athletics With fall
sports conditioning programs underway and the start of the season coming
soon, Charleston County School District began its new Safe Play Sports
Medicine Program last week supported by Roper St. Francis Healthcare.
The nine
high schools participating in the program are: Baptist Hill; Burke; Garrett
Academy of Technology; Lincoln; Norman C. Toole Military Magnet; North
Charleston; St. John's; Wando and Stall. Trident Technical College is looking for adult mentors for a new grant program to promote literacy and college readiness for high school students.
Participating schools are R.B. Stall High School and Military Magnet High School in Charleston County and Berkeley High School and Goose Creek High School in Berkeley County. For more
information or to become a mentor, go
online or call 843-574-6790.
Booming rice production created a problem for colonial-era planters: how to efficiently process the large quantities of rice they were producing. Although attempts at mechanization dated back to the 1690s, planters remained largely dependent on slave labor and West African technology for this physically exhausting task.
One of the chief difficulties facing would-be innovators was the fact that rice required delicate handling. On the one hand, the hull had to be removed in order for rice to be digestible; on the other hand, rice could not simply be pounded indiscriminately since whole rice commanded much higher prices than broken rice did. These demands were met by a three-step milling process done by hand until the end of the eighteenth century. This method used West African mortar-and-pestle technology and the particular expertise of female slaves. First, grains were separated from stalks in the threshing process. The last two steps occurred in tandem. The second step, winnowing, separated the empty husks from the grain when the rice was shaken in a flat basket. The final step, pounding, involved using a mortar and pestle to remove hulls from rice and polish it. Milling by hand required substantial skill to prevent the grain from breaking. The milling process was also extremely labor-intensive. As late as 1794 the rice planter Peter Manigault told his overseer that "[i]f the Rice made at Goose-Creek is not yet beat out, I wd. wish to have it sold in the rough, to save Labour to the Negroes." Yet slaves were not spared labor after mechanization was introduced into the rice industry. Early eighteenth-century patents for rice-milling machinery focused on powering the pestle, or multiple pestles. A 1744 design featured a treadmill operated by slaves; other designs incorporated horse power. By the time of the Revolutionary War, millers were beginning to fully exploit waterpower to drive the mills. Planters focused on tidal estuaries, using irrigation systems already in place in order to control water flow as necessary. Jonathan Lucas and Jonathan Lucas Jr., established one of the first toll rice mills in South Carolina in 1801. Other planters followed suit in order to recoup their investments in machinery. By the middle of the nineteenth century, rice milling was well established in Charleston. Cannonborough Mills began operation in 1825 under the direction of Thomas Bennett. The mill included twenty-two pestles driven by steam and fourteen driven by the tides of the Ashley River. Jonathan Lucas III built an even larger mill, the West Point Mills, in 1839. The mill featured forty pestles and employed eighty-nine slaves in 1860. These Charleston mills as well as several mills in Georgetown helped establish South Carolina as the premier state for rice milling prior to the Civil War. As war approached, however, the industry went into decline. One of the Cannonsborough Mills and the West Point Mills both burned in 1860. Chisholm's Rice Mills in Charleston also burned in 1859. Although the proprietors rebuilt a larger operation that would have employed 150 laborers, the rice industry in South Carolina was not well-positioned to recover after the combined effects of the Civil War and an international shift in the supply sources of rice.
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Five reasons to visit new photo site
Of course, being featured in Charleston Currents creates a tremendous amount of notoriety, and we knew we wouldn't be keeping Michael down on the farm for long, now that he'd seen Par-ee. This past week, he launched his new At Street Level Photography business. Here are five good reasons you should visit kaynardphotography.webs.com:
If you have a Facebook
account, share this site with others. It takes more than a village to
make a photography business successful. The photos shown in the web store
and gallery are limited by the size constraints of the site. Other new
photos are available on flickr.com. If you would like to view other photos
on flickr.com and cannot find the link, contact
Kaynard. "Television
has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other."
Business Before Hours: 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., Aug. 18, ITT Technical Institute. The Charleston Metro Chamber presents Business Before Hours to allow businesses to work on relationship building while being exposed to a variety of industries and professionals. Cost: Chamber members $20 non-members $40 includes breakfast. Register online. Port Briefing and Tour: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Aug. 18. The Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce hosts an update from Port leadership at the Chamber then a bus tour of the new terminal and by boat, waterside views of all the Port terminals. Cost: $75 for Chamber members $150 for non-members. Register online. Summerville Third
Thursday: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Aug. 18, historic downtown. Come
celebrate the end of summer in Summerville as the stores and restaurants
feature great meals and good deals. There will be live music on in several
venues, the Art Walk on Short Central, fun new entertainment to try called
Bopping Heads and entertainment by a local dance studio. More info: by
email or (843) 821-7260. Louie’s Kids
Benefit Dinner: 6:30 p.m., Aug 18, Circa 1886, 149 Wentworth
St. Joining Chef Marc Collins of Circa 1886 will be Chef Bob Waggoner
of U Cook With Bob, and Chef Scott Crawford of the Umstead Hotel and Spa.
Cost is $75 per person, $50 of which goes directly to Louie’s Kids
and is tax deductible. To make a reservation, call 843-853-7828 or online.
Art Exhibit Opening Reception: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Aug. 19, The Wells Gallery at the Sanctuary on Kiawah Island. Opening of Rothwell/Reinert, a new show of works inspired by the scenery of the Lowcountry. The artists, Junko Ono Rothwell and Rick Reinert, both inspired by nature and sunlight, have created numerous new works that will be on display in the gallery Aug. 19 to Sept. 2. Both artists will attend the Opening Reception on the evening of Aug. 19.
(NEW)
Couponing
101: 10 a.m., Aug. 20, Mount Pleasant Regional Library. How
can you spend less while getting more of the items your family needs?
Join couponing expert Kay McFadden at this free workshop to learn how
and when to use coupons, where to get your coupons, how to organize your
coupons, stockpiling, and local stores' coupon policies. To register,
call 843-849-6161 and ask for the reference desk. Auditions for Youth Plays: 1:30 p.m., Aug. 21 and 22, and 5:30 p.m. Aug. 22, South of Broadway Theatre Company (a non-profit organization),?1080 E. Montague Ave.,North Charleston. Ages 13-18: Power Play, remounting last year's popular production, with additional school performances in discussion. Ages 9-13: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a creepy musical experience. Power Play performance dates: Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 20 at 3 p.m. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow performance dates: Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., Nov. 13 at 3 p.m. CALENDAR: ONGOING AND SOON Family Fun Weekends:
Saturdays and Sundays in August. South Carolina residents who want to
enjoy a "staycation" can take advantage of reduced admissions
at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. Weekend admission to the gardens and
a nature train ride will be $40 for each vehicle carrying up to five passengers.
Free snow cones and popcorn will be served at the Peacock Café.
For more information, call 571-1266. Facebook Seminar: 9 a.m. to noon, Aug. 23, Charleston Digital Corridor Flagship, 475 E. Bay St. (corner of East Bay and Calhoun streets). Step Ahead offers two seminars sharing tips for successfully using Facebook to promote and grow your business. Part 1 will focus on the basics of setting up a Facebook page, behind-the-scenes functions, posting strategy, photos, videos and tagging. The second will explain how to customize your page, strategies for generating results, Facebook apps and Insights (analytics). Each seminar is $65 or register for both and save $10 ($120 for both). For more information or to register, visit here or email here.
Hurricane & Earthquake Expo: 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Aug. 24, at SCRA MUSC Innovation Center, 645 Meeting St. The Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce hosts a Hurricane and Earthquake Awareness Expo. Get resources on how to prepare for and protect your business from natural and man-made disasters. Also speakers on how Charleston prepares for a disaster, how to protect your employees and more. Cost: $55 Chamber Members, $95 Non-Members. Register online. Grape Stomping Festival: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Aug. 27, Irvin~House Vineyards, 6775 Bears Bluff Road on Wadmalaw Island. Join in the yearly harvest and stomping of the grapes at Charleston's only winery, Irvin~House Vineyards. Bring lawn chairs or a blanket to picnic on the expansive lawn, but no coolers. The highlight of the Grape Stomping Festival is the Lucy Look-A-Like Contest. For more information, visit www.charlestonwine.com. Admission is $10 per car. Wine and Beer Festival: 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Sept. 4, on the Green at Freshfields Village on Johns Island. The 5th Annual Lowcountry Wine and Beer Festival will benefit the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic, Inc. Guests will enjoy an array of wines and beers, Lowcountry cuisine, a silent auction, and live jazz music will be provided by the Cobblestone Quartet. Tickets are $35 in advance, and $40 at the gate. Junior tickets (age 10 to 20) are $20, and children under 10 are free. Tickets may be purchased at Hyams Garden and Accent Store, Paul's Hairstyling, Forsberg's Wine and Spirits, the Johns Island UPS Store, Schoen Ace Hardware, Indigo Books, Freshfields Village Guest Services, Seabrook Island Real Estate and Kiawah Island Town Hall. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER
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11/14: Hills:
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BOSTICK: 11/14: Battle
of Port Royal ANDY BRACK 11/14:
Election
reflections MARSHA GUERARD 9/1:
Bill
Regan, more ANN
THRASH: 11/14:
Franklin's
turkey PETER
LUCASH: 8/25: 2
tech companies move here GREG
GARVAN: 10/17: Contrarian
nuke voice LIST ARCHIVES 11/14:
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Read
the Declaration
The
architect was Benjamin S. Whitener of Cummings & McCrady, Inc. Architects.
Michael Whitfield and Mike McKenna of Green Roof Outfitters supplied the
green roof modules. Benjamin Whitener, Michael Whitfield, and Mike McKenna
volunteered their time to help city staff install the green roof. Students
from the American College of the Building Arts constructed the block and
brick walls of the building as well as the large sliding door made of
cypress.
The
session will provide information to interested job candidates on career
opportunities currently available at SCANA Corporation. SCANA representatives
will also answer questions about the company and the SCANA work environment.
The
average SAT score of the Honors College Class of 2015 also increased by
18 points over the previous class (from 1340 to 1358) and five students
made perfect scores on at least one section. More than 20 students made
a perfect score on at least one section of the ACT, including 17 who recorded
a perfect score in the reading section.
"We
had a void and we asked Roper St. Francis to help. This fall's sports
season is the first time CCSD has been able to provide a dedicated medical
resource for student athletes," Dave Spurlock, the school district's
athletic director, said. "This program allows us to ensure the safety
of our students while they are on the field, and helps us care for their
injuries off."
Using
adult mentors from the community as an essential component to student
success, the mentor program will allow the students a chance to read books
and material of their choice, along with a mentor, without the pressures
of a classroom assignment. Every two weeks, each mentor and student pair
will read a book for pleasure. At the end of the two-week period, the
mentor will meet with the student for one hour to discuss the book in
a casual setting.
About
a year ago, we "met" roving photographer Michael Kaynard of
Charleston. As with many modern meet-ups, this took place online. Michael
shared one of his photographs from downtown Charleston with us, and we
knew immediately that this guy had a unique point of view -- after all,
he'd turned his camera and shot the picture straight up, looking at the
amazing detail work at the roofline of a downtown building so many of
us walk by without so much as a passing glance. We've taken great pleasure
since then in sharing many of his photos with you. (Above right, "Palmetto
Shadow.") 
Book
Signing: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Aug. 19, Blue Bicycle Books, 420
King St. Author Maurita Corcoran will sign her book, A House Interrupted,
a can't-put-it-down read about a wife's devastating discovery that her
physician husband had been living a double life. Recently, Maurita and
her husband appeared on national television on The Dr. Drew Show, where
they discussed their successful efforts to rebuilding their lives together.
(NEW)
Femivore: 6 p.m., Aug. 23, Ashley Hall, 172 Rutledge
Ave. The evening will feature food from area female chefs, wine, champagne,
snoballs and music, as well as presentations on the local food movement.
Tickets, $30, are 