By Delayna Earley
The Island News
The Island News presented the two candidates in the special election for Mayor of the City of Beaufort – Phil Cromer and Mike Sutton – with the same six questions. Along with a brief background on each, here’s how each candidate responded:
PHIL CROMER
From: Charleston, S.C.
Education: Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from University of South Carolina, Master’s in Public Administration from College of Charleston, Associate Degree in Risk Management from the Insurance Institute of America
Job: Retired
Age: 73 years old
Political Career: 8 years on Beaufort City Council
Been in Beaufort: Phil Cromer is not originally from here but has lived here for quite some time. Cromer has experience in local government as he worked as town manager in Ridgeland and in Port Royal. He retired from City Council in Winter 2022.
1. Why do you want to be mayor of Beaufort and why do you think you’re the best person for the job? Why should people vote for you?
Well, the reason I want to be mayor is that I care about the future of our community. I think Beaufort is a special place and I want to see it remain special for future generations. I always felt that citizens should give back to their community in some capacity, and for me I ran for City Council and was fortunate to have been elected and served two terms. You know, having recently retired and with the mayor’s resignation, it kind of forced me to kind of say, “OK I need to get back in here, maybe steady the ship a little bit and try to lower the temperature,” because at the time it was you know a little bit of division going on in the community. You know we need to diversify our economy and at the same time we need to make sure that we preserve our sense of place. The concern I have about the overall area’s rapid growth and how that might negatively impact our city, so I wanted to get in to make sure that we don’t allow that to happen. We need to have growth, obviously, we need to grow our tax base, but at the same time we need to preserve what’s special about Beaufort. That’s what makes Beaufort, Beaufort. That’s what makes people come here, visitors and newcomers, so that’s why I got into the race.
2. There has been a lot of discussion regarding preservation vs. development in Beaufort, but particularly in the historic district. How do you balance preservation with progress?
Well, it is a balancing act, there’s no doubt about it, but I think to me with preservation you have to preserve what you obviously need to preserve. What’s special about Beaufort, those are the things you want to protect. We’ve got the same these buildings, we need to make sure we have a viable National Landmark District, and I have to give a lot of credit to HBF (Historic Beaufort Foundation) because without them we wouldn’t have the Verdier House and then the start of trying to save all these old buildings, which is what’s attracting people to Beaufort. It’s part of who we are, but I want to make sure we do what we can to preserve our history, our culture, our environment, because growth affects the environment and our quality of life. I was recently asked about tourism and one of the things I mentioned was that you can have too many tourists. Just look at Charleston. If we have too many, what happens is you kind of degrade the quality of life. All you have to do is look at the traffic, that’s the first indicator that you’ve got some issues with the quality of life, and we’re kind of landlocked which even exacerbates the problem even more. We’ve got rivers all around us, the only way we get around this place is by bridge. It’s a balancing act, we have to do infill and we have to do redevelopment. We need to concentrate most of our development into our urban core in suburban areas and for the landmark districts, that’s where a lot of these kinds of pressures have come. We have to do it in appropriate manner, and the way I’m looking at it, if we’re going to need to do infill it needs to be appropriate, it needs to fit in with the fabric of the surrounding area.
3. Do you believe that the projects that have been initiated in downtown Beaufort have any chance of being stopped?
If I was a betting man I would say no, and the reason I say that is that they have already gone before a couple of judges already and they ruled in favor of the city and Dick Stewart on that. I don’t know that this appeals court thing will change anything, I would be surprised if it happened.
4. Reimagine Ribaut – Do you agree with the direction it’s going? Yes or no and why?
No, it’s sort of popped out of nowhere. I remember someone said that you have the city was involved and all that, well I was off council at that time, so I didn’t know how much input the city had on that, but it seems like this is a project looking for funding. It came out of the blue and I don’t know if it originated with the county. I think they were trying to do a sales job and they call them charrettes, I call them charades because really and get your and the public support for something, but everyone came out and opposed this thing. I didn’t know many who really like the idea of two-laning Ribaut Road, it is usually the same people who live along there. I was looking at it from a public safety standpoint, and if you’re mayor you have to look at things like that – number one is public safety. So if you got a medical emergency, navigating two main roads with bumper traffic and you’ve got to make your way through roundabouts just to get to the hospital – if that person had a cardiac arrest and died on the way there because of delays that’s not a good thing. So, I would say no because of public safety issues. I’m opposed to the two lanes. I am in favor of putting the power lines underground, widening the sidewalks and if they come back with a plan that’s actually really just a beautification of Ribaut Road, I think that would be good.
5. In a matter of about eight years, the price of rent on a 1,000 square foot home or apartment has doubled. There is obviously an affordable housing crisis in Beaufort. Is this something we can fix?
We can make small steps in that direction, and I think the city’s already taken some of that. You know number one we’re partnering the Regional Housing Trust fund with Beaufort County, Jasper County and all municipalities within that. The just got off the ground in January of this year, so it will be a while before we see any good out of that. But in the past, when I was on council, we gave two pieces of property that city owned one to Habitat on Mossy Oaks Road where they built two homes, and then we gave the land on the corner of North and Ribaut where there’s two complexes actually side by side you would you think the two single houses but there are actually eight apartments total, and we gave that to the Housing Authority. I think they’ve been very successful on that. We need to do more. We can work with your Housing Authority on the repositioning, maybe get a few more places here where we could have some affordable housing when they repurpose their property. There’s not much large land left to do anything on but there are two projects underway right now. One is on Boundary Street which is the low income housing tax credit development and another one down at the old jail two block area there they’re going to put in some houses, but you know, to me if you can’t get rent of $1000 it’s not affordable.
6. I always ask this as a last question but is there anything that you would like to add or talk about that I haven’t asked about?
I guess it’s the difficulty of being fiscally sustainable, that’s what we have to look at because we have to live within our means the best we can and we’re always trying to from strive for ways to save money, about maybe looking reasonably for sharing services or consolidation services like that that we need to look at. You also have to be mindful of that because every year we have to balance our budget and you know Mike brought up the fact that our body just pulling out of those. I’m just throwing out stuff off the top of my head but I guess you everything would be transportation and that hadn’t been discussed. I think one of the things that we can help with on the housing front people can’t live within the city they’re going to certainly try to live around it if they work in the city and it might be something that we need to look at is where our transportation options. They’ve got Palmetto Breeze down South of Broad; it’s bringing people down to Hilton Head Island and Bluffton and all that. I think we’re doing a little bit up here, but we need to see if we can get some options here to get people to work. I think a trolley system would be great to help people get to all these events from parking lots in Port Royal and Lady’s Island.
MIKE SUTTON
From: Fripp Island, S.C.
Education: Extensive training in environmental response work, chemical work and oil spill control work in the U.S. Coast Guard, Massachusetts Maritime Academy for qualified individual courses related to oil spill control, Texas A&M for certified courses in environmental work.
Job: Owner of Sutton Construction
Age: 65
Political Career: 8 years on Beaufort City Council
Been in Beaufort: Sutton was born and raised in Beaufort County. He called Beaufort home until 1977 when he left to join the U.S. Coast Guard. He stayed away until 1998, when he retired and moved back to Beaufort.
1. Why do you want to be mayor of Beaufort and why do you think you’re the best person for the job? Why should people vote for you?
I really don’t want to be the mayor, this is something that no one wishes upon themselves, but I think the issue comes to civil service attitude. I served a long time – working as a military man, then working as a sheriff’s deputy, and now on citizen boards and committees and city council. Somehow when you do that, you get engrossed into city business and understanding how we got here and how we move forward, so I’m focused on Beaufort. When the mayor resigned, I felt like it was probably time to step back into the arena based on things that were starting to happen in our city. I made the conscious choice to go in, there were a lot of phone calls and support from folks across the town saying now is the time for Mike because of the type of character I am. I feel like I’m a brick and mortars type, not just from being a builder, but because I have been so involved in so many parts of our city and I like to do research and I just felt like it was the right time to do it.
2. There has been a lot of discussion regarding preservation vs. development in Beaufort, but particularly in the historic district. How do you balance preservation with progress?
We have it spelled out in our Civic Master Plan, we’ve had documents and processes in place for quite some time. Unfortunately, newcomers maybe don’t understand that process and there are some old-timers who just disagree with it. What I see is that we have a good process in place and our historic district is protected and we have the means by which we can continue to protect it. The city has established itself as a certified local government which follows state law which sets out how projects are reviewed to protect the historic district and that process has been followed. The boards have come and gone with different people, but basically all the projects today have been approved for building. There is no structure in town, that I know of, that has been built without approval. So that is an important part of the conversation that needs to happen, that we have a process, and it is followed and there is maybe a very small group of folks who don’t like the outcome and are trying to take another bite at the apple. I will say that change is tough for everybody.
3. Do you believe that the projects that have been initiated in downtown Beaufort have any chance of being stopped?
I don’t think they have any chance of being stopped. The economy drives everything and that’s kind of how the process unfolds. If the economy doesn’t stay strong, projects like this often will just fall to the wayside and not get built. When the economy is strong, if everything goes to play, then you know this stuff comes out of the ground and it gets built. So, development is tough, and the developers seldom use their own money to build things, so if they can’t get the funding they might make a big plan and aggravate a lot of people with trying to get something designed and then when they get to the end of the day it never gets built the financing doesn’t pulled through. In this case we have a hotel that looks like it’s going to come out of the ground and it looks like it’s been approved. I actually like the design of the hotel, I think it’s been misrepresented continuously as a big red box, that has scared people. I’ve had people actually tell me why are they building a red hotel downtown and I’m sitting here thinking that’s totally crazy. Some people just don’t want to do their homework. Some people hear the word Marriott for example and they’re thinking of a big square Marriott on the side of interstate somewhere and they don’t realize it’s a boutique hotel with Marriott brand. It’s not what people perceive it to be. It has a New Orleans flavor to it with the Lowcountry architecture, it has porches, columns, it has all the things that we ask for our in our Beaufort code. It met all the requirements for building in size in the preservation manual, you know, contrary to anything you may hear. It meets all the requirements of the preservation manual and again if we don’t like that then we need to change the preservation manual. If the public says that we don’t want it to happen again, they need to have that community discussion and that’s the thing time to fix it. It’s just unfortunately after the fact is not the best way to do it, but it you learn from experience.
4. Reimagine Ribaut – Do you agree with the direction it’s going? Yes or no and why?
No, not at all, I think it was ill-conceived from the beginning and I believe the process is broken in the sense that we had an entity that had marching orders to produce the documents and they were about the way they normally do it by hiring consultants to come in and put up you know some public meetings and talk to the public about what they want and I don’t think they really connected with the city local government first to say here’s what we’re thinking. They should have had a good roundtable discussion with the city mayor and council to understand first of all what was it planned for Ribaut [Road] in the years earlier. I mean we have institutional knowledge of things that we’ve talked about for the last 20 years about Ribaut [Road] and they’re in our civic master plan, but the plan that was presented didn’t even meet that requirement. So you know, I feel like we kind of went about it backwards, so now I don’t support the Reimagine [Ribaut] as it was presented. I do support burying power lines and widening sidewalks and making connections to get the pubic from one neighborhood to another neighborhood across Ribaut. So instead of speeding traffic up, we need to figure out how we can get the public safety increased, slow the traffic down, we can do that by narrowing our roads, we can bury the power lines, we can stop butchering our trees and we can try and accommodate better sidewalks for both pedestrians and bike traffic. Those are the things that would have been a home run. If they came out and said they simply want to improve pedestrian access to Ribaut Road across neighborhoods, connecting trails to downtown and trails to the hospital area, trails to Port Royal. If they just said they wanted to bury the power lines to save our trees and make those other public safety improvements, it would have been a home run, and we would all be happy thinking that was going to happen when funding became available.
5. In a matter of about eight years, the price of rent on a 1,000 square foot home or apartment has doubled. There is obviously an affordable housing crisis in Beaufort. Is this something we can fix?
It’s not something that people can fix as a government, this is going to have to be a community effort and that means it’s not in my opinion. It’s not the responsibility of government to provide structured pricing on housing or beating the market for housing but it is the responsibility of government to remove roadblocks that keep affordable housing from happening and to look at ways to find funding through sources that are available but not off the tax rolls. I mean, I can’t justify taking real estate tax money from citizens working hard to keep their homes to put it into homes for other people to live in, like just can’t do.
6. I always ask this as a last question but is there anything that you would like to add or talk about that I haven’t asked about?
Yeah, I mean I think there’s a lot of issues that face a city our size and timing is everything. The regional growth and how it’s impacting us is the bigger issue. We know that affordable housing is a challenge, but we have issues other than the infrastructure stuff. Just on a humanity scale we have mental illness issues, we have homeless in the park and problems that are not going away by ignoring them. It’s maybe nothing that a small government like Beaufort can handle or deal with but we have to, at some point we’re going to have to be bold and take our own actions. We can’t be hiding in the shadows of what’s happening on the West Coast, you know we can look at other communities for solutions, but if there’s solution is causing us a problem, we shouldn’t follow that at all times we need to find our own solutions. So right now, I have concerns about issues related to homelessness and how it relates to addictions, afflictions and mental illness related issues. The community needs to talk about it, we must get the communities to start talking about or it will never go away, and we don’t have a way to manage it. I think those are discussions we need to have. Not just about traffic and not just about history, but quality of life that affects us all.
Delayna Earley formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
