By Gordon Fritz
On August 22, County Council’s Public Facilities Committee sprang a surprise: it wants to widen the Sea Island Parkway to four lanes, from the Woods Memorial Bridge to Walmart.
Entirely ignoring what’s laid out in the Lady’s Island Plan, the idea is a bad one: four lanes along this Parkway will make Lady’s Island start to look and feel like Bluffton or Mt. Pleasant.
Not long after the Committee’s meeting, my inbox blew up with email after email blasting the proposal. If I had to place messages in categories, they would be:
1. the Council doesn’t give a **** about Lady’s Island!
2. Lady’s Island is being destroyed!
Or 3. Why don’t people do something about this!
The emails all had one thing in common: they were ANGRY. And boy, were they!
I am a founding member of the Sea Island Coalition, and what I have learned over the past five years speaking out on behalf of Lady’s Island is that anger is not a strategy. The County Council is not going to listen to us just because we’re upset, or because we are loud. But it will listen to us if a) we give them good reasons to make or change a decision, and importantly b) if there are enough of us doing that.
County Councilman York Glover, who represents most of Lady’s Island south of the Sea Island Parkway, voiced an obvious truth during the Council’s discussion last week: “Business’ don’t vote, people do.” Glover voted for the widening anyway, and perhaps it was because not enough of us showed up to suggest he vote otherwise.
Lady’s Islanders (yes, I believe there is such a thing) are remarkably outspoken, but we lack some tenacity. Emails are great, but we need to send them to County Council, too. And we need to show up at public meetings on issues affecting our Island. The Sea Island Coalition does a great job of letting us know when something is happening “downtown,” but we need to act on them and show up. Numbers matter.
So here’s what you can do:
1. Make sure you’re on the Sea Island Coalition’s list. Go to seaislandcoalition.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and send your email address.
2. Go to beaufortcountysc.gov/council and email each of our Council Councilors about why they need to pay more attention to Lady’s Island (they’re not, by the way).
3. Pay attention to Coalition e-mails asking you to show up at a particular Council meeting – and then show up.
And 4. Ask your friends and neighbors to do exactly the same thing. Numbers matter.
If we care about Lady’s Island, and what it provides us as a safe, comfortable place to live, we must get involved. Stay involved. And get others to be involved.
If we don’t get engaged here, and Lady’s Island turns into another Bluffton or Mt. Pleasant, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Gordon Fritz, a Lady’s Island resident since 1972, is or has been a biologist, a marine scientist, a real estate broker, a developer of Marsh Hawk Plantation, a teacher, an artist, and a founding member of the Sea Island Coalition.
