Border war: Powdersville residents want to stay in Anderson County, thank you very much

Powdersville resident David Gambrell was working at home earlier this week when a knock came at the door.

A field worker for the Pickens County Assessors Office had come, tape measure in hand, to measure his house and yard on Harrogate Lane. It was a rude reality check: Gambrell is among a couple dozen erstwhile Anderson County property owners who received such visits last week, the culmination of a months-long kerfuffle over the updated line between Anderson and Pickens counties.

Gambrell and his immediate neighbors on Harrogate Lane said they had no warning — that the first official notice of their new Pickens County status came with the visits last week. All but four houses in the roughly 30-year-old Harrogate neighborhood will remain in Anderson County. Two-story brick houses with tidy yards line the streets.

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"It seems like this has been like this for 100 years, and it looks like we are being forced to move into a different county," Gambrell said.

Satellite images and geographic information system data over the past decade have confirmed that 29 parcels that had been on Anderson County's tax rolls must shift to Pickens County. Included in that number are about 27 homeowners, according to Anderson County Assessor Mike Freeman, all of whom could be getting a Pickens County tax bill as early as this year.

All but two of the homes in question are along the county line between Easley, Powdersville and the Saluda River; the other two are near Clemson.

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Problem is, many people on the Anderson side who now suddenly find themselves indisputably on the Pickens side don't want to go.

"I've moved 11 times in my life," Gambrell said. "This is the first time I've moved without moving."

Phones 'blowing up'

Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns said Pickens County should have warned his staff ahead of the assessor visits last week. The border talks have been going on for more than a year as the two counties sort out what to do about 911 services and school districts, but the assessor visits this week still came as a surprise.

"The phone started to blow up," Burns said. "We thought we'd get some heads up from Pickens County."

Officials from both counties said tax revenue is not a motivator in the dispute. Burns said he wants to keep residents if that's what they want. Pickens County Councilman Chris Bowers said taking these parcels into Pickens is a matter of compliance with state law.

David Ballard, who heads up the county boundary program for South Carolina's Geodetic Survey team, said staff in Anderson and Pickens counties have known for years about the errant parcels but that a gentlemen's agreement kept things as they had been. That got harder to sustain as correcting the mistakes got a lot cheaper and faster with GPS, he said.

"It's an old state with new technology," Ballard said. "We can cover a greater distance in a lot less time."

The upshot: Citizens who want to stay in Anderson will now have to go through an "onerous process" of getting annexed into the county if they want to stay, Burns said, adding that his staff would do all it could to help.

State law would require residents (or Anderson County staff) to file a petition with the clerk of court, pay for new surveys, submit a request to the governor, possibly hold an election, and then get Pickens County Council to agree to it.

Freeman and Powdersville-area Anderson County Councilman Ken Waters got multiple calls from concerned residents last Tuesday, the day Pickens assessors were on site at people's homes.

"We have some people who thought they moved into Anderson County, and that's where they want to stay," Waters said.

Al Phillips, Gambrell's across-the-street neighbor, said he bought his house precisely because he believed it was in Anderson County. Google Maps still show their homes in Anderson County.

"There were some other houses for sale (nearby)," he said, "but the deciding factor was this was Anderson."

He said he found out about the assessors from his 1-year-old son's babysitter when he got home from work. He was relieved his dog didn't bother the assessor when he was poking around their yard.

"They hit my mailbox backing out," he said.

Schools add value

Gambrell and Phillips told the Independent Mail their houses will not be worth as much once they are in Pickens County. This, they said, is because Powdersville-area schools in Anderson District 1 enjoy a good reputation.

Gambrell said both his children are grown and he had planned on selling the home to help pay for their graduate school. He said he fears the value of his house will plummet.

"It's going to be at least one year of medical school tuition," he said.

According to a review of state Department of Education records, both school districts are among South Carolina's top performers, but Anderson 1 edges out Pickens, especially in the border zones under dispute. 

Anderson 1's Powdersville High outperforms Pickens County's Easley High in graduation rates (97 percent versus 87 percent), end-of-course testing (83 percent pass rate on all tests versus 69 percent) and LIFE/Palmetto scholarship eligibility (77 percent versus 45 percent).

Phillips, who has a 1-year-old son, said his wife teaches for Anderson School District 1.

"We moved here right at two years ago," Phillips said. "Not only were the schools good, but we wanted our tax dollars to support where she was teaching."

Anderson School District 1 Superintendent David Havird said his board agreed last year to waive the district's out-of-district tuition fee for the nine families with school-aged children who are currently enrolled. The board has not promised waivers to young children or children not yet born, he said.

"Really in some cases (parents) bought those properties so they could go to our schools in Anderson District 1," Havird said. "To have that changed is very disruptive."

Phillips said he got his property tax's homestead exemption sorted out with Anderson County in recent weeks. Now he must go through the same process again with Pickens County.

A mule and a chain

The border was established in an 1826 state law that created Anderson and Pickens counties out of the old Pendleton District. Under that law, maintained largely in its original form today, Anderson County is divided from Pickens County "by a line commencing at the mouth of Cane Creek, on Tugaloo River and running thence to the point where Eighteen Mile Creek is crossed by the road leading from Pendleton to Hagood's Store, thence to the mouth of George's Creek, on the Saluda River."

Tim de Troye, the state Geographical Information System coordinator, said state survey teams confirm GIS data using old markers — streams, iron posts, rocks or even ancient pine trees. 

"Several hundred years ago, they didn't have GIS, and it's amazing how accurate they were," de Troye said.

Seems the line from the mouth of George's Creek in Easley to that road crossing Eighteen Mile Creek near Clemson got a little wiggly over the years.

"A hundred years ago they pulled a chain behind a mule," Pickens County Councilman Chris Bowers said. "They were pretty close considering."

The mule could not be confirmed.

Calls to Pickens County's administration and Geographical Information System office were not returned, but Pickens County's GIS administrator Jimmy Threatt told the Independent Mail last year that aerial photographic prints used in the late '60s for mapping were prone to stretching and warping, creating minor inaccuracies that became apparent when GIS came into wide use over a decade ago.

"This has been going on for all this time, and nobody told me," Gambrell said.

Gambrell said he plans to be at every Pickens County Council meeting in the future to keep tabs on services to his area — including sorely needed paving on the 100 feet of Harrogate Lane that are now in Pickens County. Phllips said he has a newfound interest in local politics, too.

Freeman said officials from both counties knew as far back as 2002 or 2004 that some parcels were erroneously included in Anderson County.

"But we weren't doing anything with it because it was basically affecting Pickens County," Freeman said. "The other administrators chose not to do anything about it."