The Fifth and Final Public Meeting
With great anticipation we prepared for the fifth and final public meeting. We anticipated an even larger crowd so we returned to the Palmetto gym and pulled the full wall of gym bleachers out for everyone to sit and hear the presentation. ECOS took the map with the most positive stickers and redrew it, adding popular features from the other maps. The map was printed on a large foam board and placed on an easel with a cloth draped over it for the great unveiling.
Shannon, the ECOS lead, opened the meeting with remarks to prepare the audience for the map they were about to see. She reviewed the process that had gotten us to this point with what seemed like a consensus of ideas.
Before Shannon finished her remarks, a very well dressed women in her 70’ whom none of us recognized, stood and said this whole approach amounted to a taking of their land. She said we were a bunch of communists. With that, another man on the other side of the room stood to say he agreed and then a third sitting down front. We did not recognize any of them from previous meetings.
This outbreak left Shannon speechless. I walked to the front of the room to stand next to Shannon trying to find my own words. My mind was racing. What was happening? All I could think to do was state the obvious. I said “there appears to be a change in momentum on the ideas we have been discussing over the last few weeks.” I paused trying to think of what to say next. There was a quiet pause that fell over the room of some 200 people for an awkward period of time which seemed much longer than I am sure it was. At last, one women stood. She said the discussion over the last several months had given her and her family hope that the rural character of the area would be in place for her grandchildren when they were grown. The full room broke into an applause. Shannon and I started breathing again.
With relief, Shannon found her voice and continued. The map was unveiled and following the presentation there was festive conversations as people mingled around the map for a closer look. I noticed that the people who had sat separately in the audience were clustered in a corner talking. I approached them curious to find the identity of each. It turns out they were a couple who speculated on land around Georgia and the third was their lawyer. They had chosen to sit separately to appear as though there was larger dissent than the reality. They had done this before in other places I later found out.
Five landowners with more than 180 acres had never attended a meeting or responded to the invitations. One was an out of state bank, one was land held in an unsettled estate, one was an individual who would not respond but made it known he opposed these efforts and would not participate (we later found he was assembling land for expected traditional development) that left two landowners whom we had no profile on.
This couple was one of the landowners we had been trying to engage with. They hadn’t paid much attention to our previous invitations. They learned we had momentum and minimal information but heard we wanted to limit how land could be developed. They were concerned our ideas would negatively effect the value of the land. Seeing their public stunt had not worked, Mrs Stubbs invited me to lunch at their country club. They later became one of the three landowners to match the $250,000 Woodruff Foundation challenge grant, but that is another story for another time.
With a map representing a public consensus, we were ready for the next step to begin the process of government approvals. Attached is the map that was unveiled that historic night and a picture of the crowd that evening.
