By Delayna Earley
The Island News
Beaufort County Council officially confirmed the revisions to the St. Helena Island Cultural Protection Overlay (CPO) following its third and final reading during the County Council meeting in Beaufort on Monday, May 8, 2023.
St. Helena Island residents and supporters, most of whom were wearing stickers in support of the CPO, from around Northern Beaufort County cheered as Beaufort County Council passed clarifying revisions 9-2.
“These revisions are so important because they make it very clear what the people of St. Helena want,” said Councilman York Glover, of St. Helena Island. “It’s not about keeping development out, it’s about what these things represent. They don’t want to become another Hilton Head Island and lose their Gullah Geechee identity.”
The revisions to the CPO make it clear that there shall be no gated communities or golf courses built on St. Helena Island.
This third reading and vote came after two previous readings of the CPO by county council.
The decades-old ordinance was originally written in the late 1990s and was intended to uphold the wishes of the residents of St. Helena Island to keep their island mostly rural and to preserve the deeply rooted Gullah Geechee culture that exists there.
The revisions to the ordinance came after developer Elvio Tropeano purchased the Pineville property on St. Helena Island and proposed building an 18-hole golf course on the 450 acre property along with 65 homes.
The project also proposed preserving a historic area known as St. Helenaville, which is connected to Pine Island by a causeway.
Tropeano sought an exemption to the CPO to build the gated community or homes and 18-hole golf course, later changing his proposal to three 6-hole golf courses instead.
The revisions to the CPO have altered the language to close any potential loopholes that developers might try and exploit.
The two dissenting votes were from council members Paula Brown and Logan Cunningham.
Cunningham and fellow Councilman Tom Reitz both recommended to the St. Helena Island leaders who were present at the meeting, that they should meet with Tropeano and try to come to a mutually beneficial agreement to preserve the integrity of the island, but also allows him to develop his purchased property.
“I hope that there is some dialogue between the community and the property owner because the next step is a residential community on here, whether it’s a hundred homes, a hundred and fifty, you can agree or disagree, the county cannot stop that. Whether it’s him or he sells it off to another developer, even in this CPO it’s still allowed. We want to support the residents, but we want to make sure that the residents have all of the information at hand and I think we’ve done that over this time,” said Cunningham.
It prohibits gated communities but not gated driveways, and there are plenty of gated driveways, particularly on Hilton Head where the communities do not have gates, but the driveways, especially on some of the deeper and larger parcels, do have security gates. The CPO also does not affect existing gated communities, such as Dataw Island.
“We know it is going to change. Everybody on St. Helena knows that it will change, but it’s a gradual change that we can live with,” Councilman Glover said during the discussion before the vote. “That’s what we want.”
Delayna Earley spent six years as a videographer and photographer for The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette before leaving the Lowcountry in 2018. After freelancing in Myrtle Beach and Virginia, she joined The Island News when she moved back to Beaufort in 2022. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com
