Boyd defends how city’s handling its problems, projects
Darlington Mayor Curtis Boyd. FILE PHOTO
By Bobby Bryant, Editor
editor@newsandpress.net
For half an hour last week, Darlington Mayor Curtis Boyd stood before an audience at a City Council meeting and made a spirited defense of Darlington and how the city is handling its problems and its projects.
“A lot of times, when you’re sitting in town, you don’t really see all the big picture of Darlington,” Boyd said during City Council’s Feb. 8 meeting. “You see what’s on Facebook, how they talk about us and stuff like that. … We’re all working together to make Darlington the best it can be.”
“What I’m asking everyone to do is to help,” he said. “Clean up some of your own yards. … Help these (city workers). Clean your yards up. Clean your streets up. Jump up and help your neighbor. … We’re in this together. We live here together.”
“We’ve got to get (off) Facebook and quit criticizing and talking crap about our town,” Boyd said. (He might have been referring to a YouTube video describing Darlington as the worst place in South Carolina to relocate to – a video that has gotten considerable Facebook attention and supposedly has gotten more than 200,000 views on YouTube.)
“We live in a beautiful, beautiful city,” Boyd continued. “I can walk anywhere in this town – anywhere in this 4 square miles – without a gun, without a knife, and know that I’ll be able to walk back home. If you don’t think that, walk with me. I’ll take you anywhere in town.”
“Is it perfectly safe?” Boyd said. “No. Everywhere’s not perfectly safe. I tell people if you want to see a perfectly safe town, go to Vintage Place (the upscale Florence County subdivision where several law-enforcement officers were ambushed by a sniper in 2018). Where a man pulled a gun out. … (He) lived in a million-dollar neighborhood … (and) pulled a gun out and shot my friend (Officer Terrence Carraway) dead. Was that a safe place?”
Darlington is moving in the right direction, Boyd said. Among his points:
— The memorial park to slain law-enforcement officers. “A lot of people question, ‘Well, why is it taking so long?’ … Everything takes a lot of time.” The park may be completed as soon as July, he said.
— The sports complex off Harry Byrd Highway. “A lot of people think we’re never going to get it done,” Boyd said. “I promise you, everybody on this council here has diligently worked as hard as we can to make sure it’s getting done. … Hopefully, within another year, we’ll get dirt moving, get kids out there playing, make our town a beautiful space for a sports complex.”
— The new $14 million judicial center being built “in the middle of our town.”
— The city’s $825,000 streetscape project, most of which will be funded by a federal grant.
— And the city’s long-troubled water and sewer division has been set aright by a 40 percent water/sewer rate hike reluctantly approved by City Council in 2020, Boyd said. (“I raised the water bills,” Boyd joked. “If you want to fire anybody, don’t fire (the council).”)
Boyd produced charts showing that the city’s water/sewer and stormwater services division had been losing big amounts of money since fiscal 2016. That year, losses reached $321,000. The next fiscal year, $418,000. For fiscal 2018, $640,000. For fiscal 2019, $444,000. And for fiscal 2020, the year City Council voted to raise rates 40 percent, losses reached $784,000.
In fiscal 2021, after the rate hike became effective, water/sewer/stormwater losses had fallen to a manageable $29,000, Boyd’s chart showed. Even with the rate hike, Boyd said, Darlington’s water/wastewater rates are comparable to Hartsville’s and Florence’s.
The hike rescued a water system that was “flat broke,” Boyd said. The troubles had gotten to the point, Boyd said, that then-City Manager Howard Garland talked about selling the city’s water operations to another city or company. That, Boyd said, would guarantee hikes that the city would have no control over.
Last week’s City Council session drew an unusually big number of residents, and because of the city’s COVID-19 social-distancing rules, a number could not get seats in the council chamber. Resident Jannie Lathan, one of several people who spoke before council, said she’d never seen that happen before.
“This is the first time … that I’ve come to a City Council meeting and citizens could not come in and participate,” Lathan said. “At the beginning of the pandemic, when we had no vaccines, we held our City Council meetings in a gym, a huge space, so that all the citizens who wanted to attend a City Council meeting could attend.”
She estimated that only 23 residents could get seating in the council’s chambers last week because of the city’s COVID rules, and she said dozens more were left in the hallway. (However, the meeting was live-streamed on the Internet.)
“This is America,” Lathan said. “This is not a dictatorship.”