Pressure Washing in Sullivan's Island, SC

SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - The Charleston Water System has rejected a motion from Sullivan’s Island Town Council to pay a fraction of what the utility claims is owed for water service as a deadline looms that could turn off the taps for island residents.

During a special meeting Monday night, town council passed a motion proposing the payment of $227,361 it said would “satisfy in full” a disputed debt.

However, Charleston Water System CEO Mark Cline issued the following statement Tuesday in response to council’s motion:

Charleston Water System does not agree with the Town of Sullivan’s Island’s viewpoint or its recollection of the historical facts. We fully intend to discontinue the town’s water service July 20 unless their past due amount is fully paid and they have entered into a new contract that appropriately covers the costs of providing water service to their community. It’s not fair that our other customers have been subsidizing the Town’s service for years now, and that would continue under their terms.

Charleston Water System has argued that as of Sept. 28, 2021, Sullivan’s Island owes them $197,468 in billed, but unpaid, volumetric charges and $442,478 in billed but unpaid capital charges — a total of just under $640,000.

Charleston Water claims says the town changed how much they paid per 1,000 gallons in 2017, even after paying the same amount since the contract began in 1994, going from paying $1.22 per 1,000 gallons to 88 cents per 1,000 gallons.

Monday’s motion states that despite having a written contract with the Charleston Water System to provide water, the water utility attempted to raise rates.

“Years ago, Charleston Water System decided to raise our rates as if our signed contract did not exist,” the motion states. “The town disputed that rate increase and has continued to pay the undisputed amount owed in accordance with our long-standing, signed agreement and placed the disputed amounts in escrow pending a resolution of the dispute.”

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The motion claims Charleston Water wants the town to “ignore other terms of our signed agreement.”

“Based on the recent receipt in Febraury from Charleston Water System of the information required by the town’s nationally recognized rate consultant to calculate the amount of arrearage actually owed, the town now has the information required to satisfy the arrearage,” the motion states.

Charleston Water wrote in a January 2019 letter that “after more than 20 years, the town of Sullivan’s Island does not believe the contract requires them to pay any portion of Charleston Water’s capital expenses, a belief which has no support whatsoever of our board of commissioners or legal counsel.”

After getting a rate consultant, Charleston Water offered Sullivan’s to pay 89 cents per 1000 gallons. According to numerous letters, the island refused.

An opinion from the state Attorney General in 2019, states Sullivan’s Island does not have the authority to interpret contracts, but believes both of these parties must finish their initial term of 30 years and then they are able to terminate it if everyone is notified.

Sullivan’s Island says they disagree with this opinion and there are four unresolved topics between the two: capital charges, fire hydrants, the municipal wholesale rate as an excess demand charge and the rate formula.

Charleston Water says Sullivan’s Island has two choices: to pay all outstanding balances and they can continue to purchase water at the then-published municipal whole rate or find an alternate water source starting July 20 of this year.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - From West Ashley to Sullivan’s Island, businesses spent the day recuperating after heavy rains and strong winds caused them to temporarily lock their doors.

Many of the exterior windows at Hay Tire Pros, off Savannah Highway, shattered, and a large part of their ceiling collapsed on the inside.

Vice President Bill Sekula said that they have always expected severe storms to come through with being in Charleston, but that they have never had this much damage before.

“I guess it was like a microburst or something to that effect, but apparently it was raining harder than usual and then the windows started to buckle and snapped over. These windows on the side just kind of came apart and came out of the building,” Sekula said.

Sekula said glass from the windows was even in the back part of their building which is almost 30 yards away. They had to close the business for the day and return all of their customers’ vehicles. He said the incident happened during hours of operation as employees notified him at around 8 a.m.

The next-door business, Etto Leisure Cars, a golf cart dealer, also saw significant damage. Will Harton, chief executive officer, said that part of their awning was ripped off and hit their power box causing them to lose power.

“I said ‘Oh my goodness.’ You know, you live in Charleston long enough, you know a storm is going to happen. Usually, it’s a hurricane. It’s not a microburst like this, but we will be fine and we will move on from here,” Harton said.

He added that he’s glad that all of his employees are safe and that the building and golf carts can be fixed.

First Alert Chief Meteorologist Bill Walsh said the damage could have been from a potential microburst or straight-line wind, but the National Weather Service has not yet confirmed that.

The Co-Op Frosé and Eatery on Sullivan’s Island had around two feet of water inside their restaurant. Their staff members spent the day using buckets to help get rid of the water. They said they have had flooding in the past, but never anything over a foot, so this is the worst they’ve seen.

“This morning, we lifted everything off the floor because we were expecting rain and heavy floods, but we didn’t know it was going to get this bad. So, as we were lifting things off the floor, it started coming in through the back door. Next thing you know there is water all over the place and we started getting buckets and mops and throwing water out. We’ve been throwing water out for the past three and a half hours,” employee Havannah Malan said.

She said that they have had to get their floors redone three times, and she expects the business will have to get them redone a fourth time after Saturday’s flood.

The businesses said they hope to repair the damages quickly, so they can return to normal operation as soon as possible.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

The five-bedroom, 3.5-bath, 7,344-square-foot residence at 1702 Ion Ave. was originally built as the Base Commandant’s Quarters and is one of the most elaborate surviving structures at Fort Moultrie, according to Charleston real estate company The Cassina Group.

The home became the residence of Gen. George C. Marshall, chief of staff during WWII who was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help the Army prepare for war and coordinate allied operations overseas.

Jimmy Dye, founding partner and broker in charge, represented the sellers, said the home has a “rich history and timeless elegance.”

Though not quite the island’s priciest transaction — that remains with the $10.1 million sale of 2411 Atlantic Ave. in March 2023 — the deal punctuates not only the growing interest in Sullivan’s but in high-value homes, Dye said.

The home went under contract within seven days, enhanced by its unique features of tin-printed ceilings, a renovated kitchen, private pool, multiple fireplaces and large wraparound porches.

The buyer was not identified. The sellers were Charles Stockdale and Caroline Stockdale, who had owned the home since 2015, according to public land records.

New neighbors

A North Charleston shopping center is getting a boost with two new tenants.

Spinx plans to add a new training office at 5101 Ashley Phosphate Road, within the Festival Centre retail complex.

iHeart CBD is planning to open a shop in the same center. With plenty of retail spaces currently up for grabs, Festival Centre is home to other tenants such as CVS, AutoZone, Pizza Hut and two banks.

Closing time

A controversial large-scale residential development in Dorchester County is moving forward.

Buller River Development, Land and Investment, based out of Fort Mill, said it has purchased the property for its planned 1,600-acre Yerby Road project in Summerville.

The transaction is one of the largest residential land purchases in the Charleston region in 15 years, the company said.

Plans include potentially adding more than 1,700 new homes to the area, which residents have pushed back on for years because of environmental concerns.

Public land records show the Bullard has acquired numerous parcels from multiple sellers this year for $29 million under the name BRD Land & Investment. The county approved the development agreement in December.

Nexton offices

Construction has started on a new office complex in Summerville.

The first building is underway at Atelier Downtown Nexton, a 7.5-acre office development on Brighton Park Boulevard off U.S. Highway 17A. Planned by an affiliate of New Jersey-based Sharbell Development, the project will include multiple two-story buildings up to 18,000 square feet.

Hill Construction has started work on the first structure with the second expected to break ground in April. Simultaneously, Hill is in the final stages of construction for a 114,000-square-foot mixed-use/multifamily project in Downtown Nexton for Sharbell. The five-story building includes four floors for apartment living and a 24,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space.

On the block

A vacation rental home is on the market in downtown Charleston’s French Quarter neighborhood.

Built in 1871, the Charleston Chestnut Mansion at East Bay and Guignard streets is ready to change hands for $8.25 million. The 8,700 square-foot-property renovated in 2021 has four suites approved for vacation rentals, according to Ryan Carmody and Charles Carmody of the real estate firm CBRE.

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SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. (WCBD) – The future of water service on Sullivan’s Island remains uncertain amid a contractual dispute between the town and Charleston Water System.

“The island has the ability to generate taxes and they need to figure it out because what they did in 2017 was, they just quit paying,” said Sullivan’s Island resident, Dave Spurgin.

A 30-year water supply contract between CWS and the Town of Sullivan’s Island went into effect on July 19, 1994.

Based on letters provided by CWS, there has been a disagreement over the rates since 2017. The water system claims the town owes them $1,078,000 as of last month.

“Years ago, Charleston Water System decided to raise our rates as if our signed contract did not exist. The town disputed that rate increase and has continued to pay the undisputed amount owed in accordance with our longstanding signed agreement,” said Sullivan’s Island Town Councilman Justin Novak on Monday night during a special council meeting.

The statement was part of a longer motion read aloud before council voted to pay $227,361 to satisfy the disputed portion of the amount owed. Island leaders said the amount was calculated by a nationally recognized rate consultant.

CWS CEO Mark Cline released the following statement to News 2 on Tuesday.

“Charleston Water System does not agree with the Town of Sullivan’s Island’s viewpoint or its recollection of the historical facts. We fully intend to discontinue the Town’s water service July 20 unless their past due amount is fully paid and they have entered into a new contract that appropriately covers the costs of providing water service to their community. It’s not fair that our other customers have been subsidizing the Town’s service for years now, and that would continue under their terms.”

Spurgin, who has lived on Sullivan’s Island for nearly 30 years, said he is not concerned about the potential water shut-off.

“No, because we’re going to need our water. They’re not going to shut the water off. The town’s going to have to figure out, the town council is going to have to figure out how to come up with the money,” Spurgin told News 2.

Sullivan’s Island Mayor Pat O’Neil released the following statement.

“Apparently CWS is having very-late-onset buyer’s remorse about a legally binding contract they willingly entered into almost 30 years ago. When we entered into this agreement in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, the Island was at one of its most vulnerable points in its centuries-long history. Nonetheless we have abided by the language of this contract. It’s hard to accept that CWS (or anyone else) is “subsidizing” SI when we paid almost $2 million (in 1994 dollars) to support the infrastructure that allowed them to sell water to us and to our neighbors on the Isle of Palms, and when in 2020 we gave them an easement through our public park and playground so there would be additional capacity to sell water to our neighbors in Mount Pleasant.”

In fact, it goes all the way back to one of the first settlers of South Carolina, for whom a nearby beloved island and popular beach town is named.

Florence O'Sullivan, who was an Irishman of the 1600s working for the British crown, is a notable fellow for quite a few reasons, at least from what we know of him via few surviving documents and an 1897 text called The Shaftesbury Papers that looks back on the founding of South Carolina as a proprietary colony.

Sullivan's Island is named after him, assumingly because he manned a cannon in the area where Fort Moultrie now sits that was directed at any approaching enemy ships during the earliest days of the colony. He was one of the first nonindigenous people to survey and settle in the Lowcountry, docking at Charles Towne Landing in 1670. But he actually never owned land on Sullivan's Island.

Local Charleston County Public Library historian and the voice behind the Charleston Time Machine podcast, Dr. Nic Butler, has done some extensive research on O'Sullivan, prompted by his own Irish heritage and a fascination for learning about South Carolina's past.

Sullivan's Islanders, also hungry for knowledge of their home's origins, have turned to Butler to shine a light on this enigmatic figure of local (and beyond) historical significance.

An Irishman under the British crown?

The colonization of a land already inhabited by Native Americans, who were then decimated by Europeans through war and disease, is part of Charleston's (and the United States') complicated history. But by looking at this past, Butler and other historians can better paint a true picture of how our state, and nation, came to be and how it has informed our modern-day society and culture.

When O'Sullivan comes into play, there are some interesting politics involved that speak to one particular point of tension: the Irish and British. The fact he was an Irishman working for the British crown is a fascinating and rare occasion of the times, Butler told The Post and Courier.

It is perhaps because of his status as an Irishman that he is portrayed so negatively by his peers in the documentation we do have.

"He was depicted as this weird guy… a very one-dimensional bad character," said Butler. "He was appointed surveyor general, deemed completely incompetent, and historians write him off, that he was an idiot, and an Irish idiot on top of that."

"Some of that may be true, but many South Carolina historians are looking at South Carolina from a very English perspective, and that makes sense because this was an English colony. But most Americans are not aware of the really intricate, subtle and meaningful distinctions between Ireland and England at that moment."

Ireland was a part of the British Isles and treated repressively by England. Not only were there religious differences (English Protestants very openly despised and subdued Irish Catholics — and that goes way back to the English Reformation in the 1500s), but there was a general mistrust due to English slave traders capturing Irish people and shipping them away to work in the British Empire being established at the time alongside enslaved Africans.

Indentured servants also worked for the British, receiving passage to these new lands and some payment in return; O'Sullivan helped the British recruit some such servants when he contracted with the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina to establish where we now live.

Getting into and out of a mess

Butler suggested that O'Sullivan was possibly born between 1630 and 1640 in Barbados or born in County Cork in Ireland and quickly moved to Barbados, perhaps ousted during the Irish Confederate Wars of 1640 and British Reconquest of Ireland, 1649-53.

He likely had poor Irish parents and spoke the native Gaeilge language, Butler said, and plausibly had no choice other than to use the British crown to advance his own life with the possibility of property and prosperity, despite its maltreatment of the Irish people.

"He was probably too poor to cling to the luxuries of principles," said Butler. "O’Sullivan likely held his tongue, took the king’s shilling to fight under the English flag and pushed against adversity to escape a bad situation."

The first records of him are in 1666 in Barbados, when he was a captain of an infantry unit seeking to recapture the English portion of St. Kitts from the French. He was shipwrecked during a hurricane and had to battle with French soldiers in the jungle for survival; he was then captured and spent nearly an entire year as a prisoner of war.

Somehow he paid a ransom for his release and was transported to England; in 1668, he was unemployed, penniless and in danger of being imprisoned for debt in London.

He submitted a petition to King Charles II asking for financial assistance, citing his imprisonment as a sacrifice for the crown; it was granted, along with a small catch that he must return to Barbados.

Then the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina appeared as a beacon of hope, recruiting for a new settlement in the wilderness of what would be known as Carolina. In the position of surveyor general, O'Sullivan would receive free passage and promise of land ownership in the new territory.

Charleston Scene

Settling Carolina

This is where the bad talk about O'Sullivan enters from his peers, as he begins surveying in the new settlement.

“O’Sullivan doth act very strangely and was a very dissentious troublesome young man in all particulars," one source shared.

Another complained that O’Sullivan “doth by his absurd language abuse the governor, counsel and country and by his rash and based dealings he hath caused everyone in the country almost to be his enemy.”

This "absurd language" might have been him speaking in the native Irish tongue, countered Butler. And perhaps he didn't get along with anyone because he wanted to scout out his land and then be left alone, finally escaping the British dominion that had almost entirely consumed his life and career.

Columbia

A few years later, O'Sullivan was replaced as survey general and commissioned as a captain in the nascent militia, where he likely made raids against neighboring Native tribes.

It was 1680 before he officially was granted parcels of land totaling 2,460 acres. The largest tract stretched from the northwest of Shem Creek to the southeast of McCants Drive and Rifle Range Road to Haddrell's Point northward to the vicinity of Venning Road. Another spanned Charleston Harbor to Home Farm Road in Mount Pleasant. And the smallest covered some of the Old Village.

Surprisingly, unlike his peers of the time, O'Sullivan sold most of this land to neighbors while others were expanding their territories.

“Florence O’Sullivan’s downsizing in the 1680s provides yet another example of his divergence from the contemporary norms," said Butler. "Perhaps he scorned the use of enslaved labor and cultivated far less acreage than his more affluent neighbors.”

While there is no record of a wife, O'Sullivan did have a daughter, Catherine, and withdrew to a more private life East of the Cooper, while likely manning a cannon as lookout on Sullivan's Island.

Irish resiliency

"While he might’ve just been a cantankerous, belligerent man, we can at least entertain the possibility that he was something far more interesting and sympathetic: a refugee from a broken country, a poor migrant searching for a home," said Butler. "Rather than seeking riches and possessions in the Carolina colony, perhaps he simply wanted to be left alone, free to express his own beliefs and opinions in the language of his ancestors."

This idea of Irish resiliency is one that Butler paints through O'Sullivan in an episode of his podcast on the subject.

Perhaps by considering O’Sullivan as a stoic Irishman struggling within an Anglo-centric framework, we might lift the veil shrouding his enigmatic story, he offered.

Joseph P. Kelly, director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, notes that while O'Sullivan's story is a lesser-known one, there have been many Irish people since in the Lowcountry who have made a significant impact on society.

Take Simon Felix Gallagher, the first Irish Catholic professor at the College of Charleston, and one of the first we might associate with our modern definition of who the Irish are, said Kelly, like those behind the St. Patrick's Day parade.

The list goes on, but two organizations in particular stand out.

Today, we can look to the Hibernian Society as a melding of the Catholic and Protestant Irish. At its beginnings in 1801, it was truly a symbol for freedom of religion, a promise that had been made in the New World but not truly upheld.

Opinion

That, of course, changed with the separation of church and state in 1776, and the Hibernian Society sought to bring together Irish culture in its diverse forms that had since developed from the early days of the Carolinas.

The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an entirely Catholic organization that had a presence in Charleston in the 1860s, sought to rebel against years of prejudice against Irish Catholics, fighting stereotyping and discrimination.

Both are still going strong today in Charleston, as local Irish culture lives on in its many forms. Perhaps we have O'Sullivan to thank for a small piece of that, a figure who defied norms, ruffled some feathers along the way and had a whole island named after him that he didn't even own.

There's something to think about next time you're walking the beach at Sullivan's Island. You might end up at Dunleavy's Pub for a Guinness and Reuben after.

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Reach Kalyn Oyer at 843-371-4469. Follow her on Twitter @sound_wavves.