Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Horry County Council will hold a workshop on its proposed new strip club law Tuesday June 25, 2013 in council chambers beginning at 4 p.m.
The meat of the agenda is advertised as an explanation of pending federal litigation and proposed Horry County ordinances.
The federal litigation is the stimulus for changing the current county ordinances governing strip clubs, which are woefully inadequate and expected to be struck down with the current litigation.
Momentum for a new strip club ordinance being considered by Horry County Council is slowing as some council members are realizing there are better ways to spend tax dollars than defending bad laws in court.
This is not to say that Horry does not need a new ordinance governing the licensing and operations of strip clubs. It does. The current ordinance is expected to be struck down as unconstitutional in federal court as part of a lawsuit the county currently finds itself having to defend.
But, the realization that replacing one bad ordinance with another will only bring ever spiraling attorney’s fees is beginning to dawn on some council members.
Once again yielding to its ‘grow big government instincts,’ Horry County government is preparing to launch an attack on strip clubs with an apparent goal of shutting the clubs down throughout the county.
The initiative is not coming from county council even though several members are now attempting to wrap themselves in a morals protection flag. This is a county government staff driven initiative as a panic reaction to a current suit in federal court.
The current county ordinance governing adult entertainment businesses is expected to be struck down as unconstitutional in federal court in the near future.
Faced with the possibility of a 3.5 mill tax increase, for those living in the unincorporated areas of Horry County, residents descended on county council chambers last night to beg for an almost double tax increase than was initially proposed.
Speaker after speaker came to the microphone, during public input on the county’s budget deliberations, to beg for higher taxes, higher even than the politicians were considering.
When the issue was settled, council voted 7-5 to raise taxes by 6 mills in the unincorporated areas of the county to fund improvements in fire services, mostly in the rural western part of the county.
It now looks virtually certain that the new fiscal year, beginning July 1, 2013, will include increased taxes on the unincorporated areas of Horry County.
County council is expected to raise taxes by 3.5 mills in the unincorporated areas to fund new fire equipment and to fill some currently vacant positions.
The increase will amount to approximately $14 per $100,000 valuation on owner occupied homes, which will provide approximately $3.5 million in new revenue.
If these upgrades are not made to county fire service, council members say the county’s ISO rating will increase, especially in the rural areas, causing homeowners to pay higher fire insurance premiums.
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.
An unofficial committee of three local counties passed two resolutions Wednesday calling for new ownership for the Carolina Southern Railroad while acknowledging the railroad is essential for Horry and Marion counties in South Carolina and Columbus County, NC.
Grandly calling itself the “‘Interstate Railroad Committee of North and South Carolina’, this group of public officials representing several communities and three counties across two states, with no legal basis, has finally come out of the closet with its true purpose.
That purpose is to wrest ownership of the railroad from Ken Pippin and his family.
Since when, in America, is it the purpose of one government or a group of governments to decide who should own a private business?
A bill that would make flow control illegal in South Carolina currently rests in the S.C. Senate Rules Committee awaiting a majority vote to put it on the calendar for full Senate vote.
Flow control is the term that means establishing monopoly control over the flow of the solid waste stream in an area, in this case a county.
It is illegal for private companies to establish flow control over a waste stream, but, currently, not for county government to do so. Horry County currently has a flow control ordinance in place that makes its Horry County Solid Waste Authority the monopoly arbiter over county waste.
Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was in Myrtle Beach earlier this week to push an initiative for oil and gas drilling off the coast of South Carolina.
Gingrich spoke at a forum of oil and gas industry representatives who want Congress to allow exploratory drilling and development of possible offshore oil and gas resources.
One of the issues at the forefront of talks about oil and gas drilling off the U.S. coast is the number of high paying jobs such economic activity will bring to the area.
If those types of jobs would become available, it would certainly help the Horry County area which consistently ranks dead last in average worker income among the 335 largest counties in the nation.
The irony here is that wage levels in Horry County have been consistently depressed because of the tourism industry. It’s just over 50 years ago that Horry County business leaders met with then Sen. Strom Thurmond to stop plans for extending I-20 to the coast. They worried an interstate would bring industrial development that would rob them of low wage workers in the hotels, restaurants and tobacco fields in the county.
When Horry County Council begins in-depth considerations of next year’s budget later this week, the question of how much accommodations tax revenue goes to the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce will be a major point of discussion.
While the accommodations tax concept is to help meet the costs of expanded services required by the introduction of millions of visitors to an area, the state law allowing accommodations tax collections requires 30 percent of the revenue generated to be spent on tourism marketing. This provision was one of the trade-offs put in the law to get the buy-in of the tourism lobby.
For a number of years, that 30 percent, approximately $2.3 million from the unincorporated areas of the county, has gone to the Chamber in a block to spend on its marketing efforts.
Speak Up…