A Bad Moon Is Risin Over The Palm Republic

For there is nothing hidden
that will not be disclosed,
and nothing concealed
that will not be known
or brought out into the open…
consider carefully how you listen

- LUKE 8:17,18

UPDATE Beach Parking May 2022

​With much bombast, but little fanfare, the chief cheerleaders at the Isle of Palms for limitations on beach parking, published a statement calling for more of these restrictions.  Among many inaccuracies, it includes cheesy personal attacks on the South Carolina legislature and Secretary Hall at the SCDOT.  With no apparent sense of irony and no self-awareness, they dressed up their statement as a cheap imitation of Thomas Jefferson’s immortal Declaration.  Despite the fecklessness of their “declaration” and the minimal interest it has generated, it deserves to be called out for the dishonesty it is.

​Wrapping themselves in a phony cloak of victimhood, they make the same worn-out arguments that Home Rule protects a municipality like the IOP, Sullivans Island and Folly Beach when it seizes state property and converts it to the exclusive use of its residents.  The new secessionists say they want to examine facts.  Good.  Let’s remember how all this began.  All three of our beach municipalities used the COVID pandemic to seize control over STATE OWNED AND MAINTAINED bridges and roads by excluding anyone not a resident or RENTER on their islands from driving over them.  This appalling action was, of course, a one-way barrier to access.  Residents of all three islands and their rent paying guests freely drove back and forth on these bridges.  The lie their leaders told -  that they were protecting their residents from the “spread of the virus.”  It goes without saying that when these same residents freely drove to the mainland to hardware stores, grocery stores, hospitals, doctors’ offices, dentist offices, and, when they opened, bars and restaurants, the goal of isolating them from “the spread” was emasculated.

​Only when Charleston County launched legal action to stop this illegal seizure of state bridges did this outrage stop.  The new secessionists say they love their mainland neighbors and welcome them to their beaches.  Not all of them felt this way while their leaders were illegally turning their islands into gated communities by stealing state bridges.  Many of them posted sarcastic or openly arrogant videos bragging about how they now had exclusive use of the beaches we all own.  Folly even hosted a big golf cart parade.  The outrage over the videos of that event helped spawn public determination to reclaim our bridges, our roads and our beaches.

​When their thieving fingers were finally pried off of our bridges and their armed police removed from their posts keeping mainlanders off of their islands by force, the three beach islands immediately commenced actions to bar nonresidents from the beach in other ways.  The IOP was the most arrogant and the most active in this.  Chief among the tactics was another theft – of state road rights of way.  That is where so much public parking has always been.  The abuses by beach islands of the public’s access to state road rights of way led directly to the passage of what is now SC Code 57-5-845.  This statute passed the SC Senate unanimously and the House with very few objections.  This was not because the members were chasing votes, as the new secessionists claim.  They were acting to crush unacceptable abuse of public rights by three arrogant, out of control beach municipalities.   The state always has the power to protect state property.  Home Rule has nothing to do with it.

​The new secessionists included a particularly smarmy personal insult to Secretary Christy Hall in their faux declaration.  They claim she “punished” them for opposing her efforts to protect public use of public property by changing lane designations on the bridge to “their” island.  They also make an utterly unsubstantiated claim that this change caused accidents on the bridge to double.  One of the leaders of the new secessionists is a trial lawyer who should know better than to make such phony claims of cause and effect.  All of them should know better than to publicize nasty personal attacks against a public servant who has done nothing but work to serve the public interest.  It tells you all you need to know about these people to read their insulting claim that her actions were taken because they didn’t “treat her with the dignity and respect demanded of her high office.”  The stench of arrogance and entitled privilege is coming from the IOP, not from Columbia.  

​The new secessionists perhaps should lay off the cocktails, as pictured in their coat of arms, before they write anymore grand statements.  Maybe they should also go back and review tapes and transcripts of the events leading up to the state’s actions they whine about.  If some glimmer of modesty survives in their rum-soaked souls, they just might see how wrong they are.  Those of us determined to protect our beach access need to persevere.  We need to support the SCDOT as it guards public rights to public property.  And we need to catalogue all illegal obstructions to public road rights of way so that a comprehensive report can be made to the DOT of all signs and obstructions placed in violation of law by IOP residents in rights of way.  Finally, we need to lobby against anymore of our tax money being paid to renourish beaches at islands whose governments continue to try and interfere with public access.  If these abuses continue, it may be, that an effort should be launched to revoke the municipal charters of any beach community that attempts to violate state law or encourages its residents to violate state law so as to deny public access to beaches.