Tuesday, November 5, 2024
The Horry County Infrastructure and Regulation Committee voted unanimously Thursday to remove construction and demolition waste from regulation under the county’s solid waste flow control ordinance.
The amended ordinance will now go to full council with a recommendation for approval. It will take three readings from council to make the amendment law.
The committee vote is a victory for small business and a reigning in of large, monopolistic government regulation of private business.
The Horry County Council Infrastructure and Regulation Committee will consider an amendment to the county’s solid waste flow control ordinance at its meeting Thursday.
According to a source familiar with the change, the amendment will remove the requirement for construction and demolition debris to be disposed at the Horry County Solid Waste Authority landfill on Highway 90.
If the amendment is favorably reported out of committee to full council, which is expected, a three reading ordinance amendment will have to pass county council to make the change official.
This year’s legislative session is down to the last four days and members of the General Assembly are again making sure nothing meaningful will come out of this session.
The Senate killed any chance for ethics reform with a vote that refused to move the ethics reform bill up in the waiting queue. So legislators will maintain ethics investigations in house, actually that means there won’t be any investigations, and we will again not know what their private sources of income are.
Earlier, a bill to expand the Freedom of Information Act was buried in the House where it was recommitted to the Judiciary Committee after getting a favorable vote out earlier. We wouldn’t want the members of the General Assembly to have to divulge their e-mails and other correspondence to the general public. Better they remain secret.
Those of you who have had the pleasure of going through basic training in the military can probably remember, as I do, the comic relief invariably provided by ‘our other left’ while learning how to drill.
Inevitably one or two members of a company will forget that you step out on your left foot and will be out of step while a drill instructor is running alongside yelling ‘NO, your other left idiot, your other left’, or something to that effect.
Some people just seem to be born with two left feet.
We are having a similar problem in South Carolina with local and state government. We seem to be suffering from two left wings.
The urge to establish a government monopoly in sectors of the economy seems to be getting irresistible for local governments in South Carolina.
Currently this trend is being seen in county flow control ordinances that force municipalities and private waste haulers to dispose of their collected garbage and other solid waste at landfills owned or designated by county government.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because it supports inefficiently run government landfills and costs taxpayers money.
The debate on whether the Horry County Solid Waste Authority should be allowed to continue a flow control monopoly over garbage generated in the county will move to the S.C. Senate Medical Affairs Committee March 21st.
Legislation called the ‘Business Freedom to Choose Act’ has already passed the S.C. House in this new legislative session. It is now up to the Senate to see if it will join the House in making a government established monopoly illegal.
The SWA will have Executive Director Danny Knight and Government Affairs Director Mike Bessant in attendance at the committee meeting to speak for maintaining the monopoly.
A Senate bill to eliminate flow control of the garbage stream throughout the state moved one step closer to approval last week when it passed out of the Senate Medical Committee by a vote of 10-3.
A similar bill having already passed the SC House, the only thing standing between a garbage war in the courts between Horry County and the State of South Carolina is passage of the bill by the full Senate and Governor Nikki Haley’s signature.
Horry County currently is the only county in the state to mandate flow control of its waste stream by county ordinance 02-09. The ordinance requires that all waste generated in the county must be disposed at the Horry County Solid Waste Authority landfill on Hwy 90, giving the SWA monopoly control over the county’s waste.
Speak Up…