Criminal Defense Lawyer in Lexington, SC

LEXINGTON — Lexington County is taking steps toward managing short-term rentals, drafting an early version of regulations for properties under sites like Airbnb and VRBO.

The ordinance draft presented at County Council’s Aug. 8 committee meeting outlines rules for a laundry list of specs, including parking, maximum occupancy, minimum rental age, minimum stay length, property maintenance and sewage disposal.

“This was simply to get the ball rolling to get some text out for more discussion,” said Robbie Derrick, director of community development for Lexington County.

He expects the council to provide feedback that will lead to changes in the proposed rules before a final vote.

Lexington County has tossed around the idea of regulating short-term rentals for several months but the committee meeting represented a concrete step forward in the process. Through the regulations the county hopes to address some concerns from its building inspections division and prioritize the health of Lake Murray, the county’s biggest tourism draw and the area where most of the short-term rental activity has taken place.

A popular subject for debate in South Carolina municipalities, regulations on short-term rentals through services like Airbnb and VRBO are a balancing act in Lexington and elsewhere. Local governments are grappling with how to regulate the new system for vacation housing without squashing tourism.

In response to the early draft discussed Aug. 8, several council members requested even tighter restrictions.

One request came to bump the minimum stay length at non-owner-occupied properties from the suggested one-night requirement to a minimum of three nights.

Additionally, the draft suggested that renters be 18 years old or older, but Lexington County Council Chairwoman Beth Carrigg suggested the minimum age requirement be 21 or even 25 years old.

Council member Todd Cullum warned against overcomplicating the ordinance, suggesting instead the council make it “very simple and clear and have it enforceable.”

“That’s the key for all of this to work,” Cullum said.

County Council still has to tackle the challenge of how these proposed regulations would be enforced. Asking the Sheriff’s Department to respond to complaints about short-term rental violations would cause unnecessary strain on a team that is already stretched thin, some council members said.

The council is considering delegating the responsibility of keeping short-term rentals regulated to a county staff code enforcer, but vowed to return to the idea once a more finalized version of the ordinance is drafted.

Palmetto Politics

The council will ask representatives from Airbnb and VRBO to meet with the county.

COLUMBIA — The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is planning for a new $115 million public health laboratory in northeast Columbia.

The new space will replace and be built next to the existing facility on Parklane Road, near the Gable Hill Apartment Homes and several other state government offices.

The current lab building is 50 years old and experiencing infrastructure issues related to its HVAC system, electrical systems and internet connection, according to scientists who work in the lab.

Assistant Laboratory Director Ona Adair said the DHEC lab is one of the oldest in the country among state public health labs.

“We have to do patchwork to get things back up and running,” Adair said. “We have to do whatever we can do to keep the building functioning until we can occupy a new space.”

The new 140,000 square-foot building will give the lab more space and more advanced equipment needed by the department for testing. The current building is 87,000 square feet.

On the public health side, the lab will continue to be used for testing for disease prevention, disease control and surveillance; food safety testing; newborn screenings; public health preparedness; and infectious disease.

The lab is also used by the environmental side of DHEC to test water systems throughout the state and monitor air pollution, according to Michael Mattocks, DHEC’s assistant bureau chief of environmental laboratories.

“It’s very hard to support the valuable work and the number of staff that we have in the building,” Mattocks said of the current facility.

The initial construction plans are approved, and DHEC is in the process of ordering HVAC, elevator and other equipment for the building. Flags can be seen on the site outlining where construction is planned.

Plans for the new site were unanimously approved by the Columbia Planning Commission on Oct. 30.

Construction of the new lab is expected to finish in 2026, DHEC Director Edward Simmer said during an October board meeting.

LEXINGTON COUNTY, S.C. (WIS) - The Lexington County Sheriff’s Department incident report on a suspect’s death doesn’t explain the incident or who was there.

The report is one sentence long with the names of the involved deputies redacted.

The only documented information available about the death of 32-year-old Lexington County man Bernice Junior Smith is from an LCSD press release.

The department claims Smith was at the Red Bank Walmart on South Lake Drive on August 9. The press release states a deputy saw him and knew he had an outstanding arrest warrant for shoplifting.

The department claims Smith ran into the woods, deputies chased him and used a taser on him after he wouldn’t follow their commands.

They were walking Smith back to the patrol car in handcuffs when he needed medical assistance. The Lexington County Coroner’s Office announced he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The incident report covers none of the department’s narrative, only stating:

“Deputies responded to this location in reference to warrant service.”

Lexington County Sheriff's Department by T R on Scribd

The report does describe Smith as a “fugitive from justice.” It does not show he was in possession of any weapons.

The Lexington County Sheriff’s Department refused to provide the report to WIS, citing the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division’s ongoing investigation.

However, LCSD spokesperson Capt. Adam Myrick confirmed it was the only incident report generated.

He said the department would not be releasing the names of the deputies involved. He also declined to provide further specifics on what happened.

WIS asked Myrick why the report was so short, who wrote it, how much discretion deputies have on report detail, and if the deputy was instructed to keep it brief.

Myrick has not responded to those questions.

SLED provided the report to WIS, but redacted the names of the deputies. WIS has reached out to SLED spokesperson Renee Wunderlich asking on what legal basis the names have been redacted.

She has not yet responded.

It remains unclear what led to the use of the taser.

LCSD policy describes a taser as an intermediate weapon, but it may have contributed to a lethal result.

The policy defines lethal force as “likely to cause great bodily injury or death.”

It addresses the requirement for the use of lethal force, including:

WIS has submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests with LCSD and SLED for more information on what happened.

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LEXINGTON — Virtually all new residential development in Lexington County will require a nod from area emergency departments, school districts and waste management under an ordinance given initial approval by County Council on Oct. 10.

The new regulation was prompted by long-held concerns over traffic, emergency response times and overcrowding in schools within the Midlands’ fastest-growing county.

“It’s very hard to continue to produce neighborhoods for people to move into when we don’t have the services,” said Council Chairwoman Beth Carrigg of her support for the measure.

Business

The new rule went into effect immediately following two 6-2 votes and applies to new subdivisions of 10 or more homes on lots less than 1.5 acres, mobile home parks, duplexes, townhomes and apartments that have not yet made a formal application with the county.

The change is just the latest effort by the Lexington County Council to slow an explosive pace of development in the historically rural county.

About two years ago, the county enacted limits on density and increased green space requirements within new subdivision proposals that hold developers to as few as one or two homes per acre across a large portion of the county. As part of that process, the county put a monthslong moratorium on new neighborhoods as it finalized changes.

Before that, the council had enacted a countywide housing-density limit, holding subdivisions to no more than four homes per acre.

Carrigg said these actions by the council have been to ensure a safe and healthy environment for residents.

She said the county’s struggle to hire first responders since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is of particular concern. For example, Lexington County’s fire department has 40 open positions.

“It’s wholly unfair to burden our first responders with continued development when they can’t meet expectations,” Carrigg said.

Lexington County increased its emergency services and law enforcement spending to $108.2 million in 2023, expanding its fire services. And for 2024, the council voted in its first property tax increase in a decade to cover pay hikes for county staff in an effort to address vacancies.

Despite all this, Carrigg contends that the county is still understaffed and “running on fumes.”

Columbia News

The concept of seeking buy-in from the county’s various public service providers, a process known as concurrency, is largely new to the Palmetto State, county staff told council members. Director of Community Development Robbie Derrick said a number of counties in the Lowcountry had considered concurrency but never enacted it. He found himself looking to towns in Florida when researching the topic.

“It’s a very untested regulation,” he said. “Very few folks in South Carolina have tried to do this.”

Still, the council chose to use a special provision to enact the ordinance in draft format, with plans to finalize the language and put enforcement policies and procedures in place at a later date.

Despite having no set plans for how the ordinance process would ultimately work, several council members said initial conversations they had with members of area school boards were positive.

Not everyone on the council thought it was a good idea.

Councilman Todd Cullum worried about the council abdicating its own decision-making authority and voiced concerns about not having a process to provide recourse for those who wish to develop their property.

“They can say no, and then we have a disapproved project,” he said. “We’re going to approve and put something in place that if you get turned down, you’re just put in landowner purgatory.”

Councilwoman Charli Wessinger saw it less as an abdication and more as a “courtesy” to service providers and other governing bodies.

Councilwoman Debbie Summers chimed in, raising the issue of possible economic development ramifications.

“It was stated within our meeting that we did not feel like we can handle any more stress on our basic services here in the county,” she said. “The message that we send to corporations and businesses looking to move to Lexington County, to me, that’s not a very positive message ... that we might not be able to handle their facility or their employee safety.”

Summers and Cullum were the only two to vote against the proposal.

Columbia Education

The council had previously discussed the possibility of seeking outside buy-in when it came to new apartment development, but the ordinances passed Oct. 10 expanded that to nearly all residential development.

The council could have chosen to enact the changes through its traditional ordinance process, requiring three separate votes and a hearing allowing for public comment before rules take force, but Carrigg said this special process allows the county “to push the pause button now instead of three or four months down the road.”

“It’s very difficult to make responsible changes when you’re still operating business as usual,” she said.

Carrigg expressed confidence in the county’s various department heads to make judgment calls on any development proposals that may come to the county between now and when final processes for determining a project’s viability are put into place.

Columbia Business

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to correctly attribute a statement made by Lexington County Councilwoman Beth Carrigg.

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Regardless of whether we still want to talk about it, COVID-19 is on the rise again in South Carolina and Lexington County.

That’s what Dr. Jonathan Knoche, a medical consultant with the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, told the Chronicle as he helped contextualize COVID numbers acquired by the paper from May through August.

From May 6 to June 24, weekly hospital admissions of confirmed COVID patients — the metric now used to set warning levels for the virus from low to medium to high by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — mostly went down in the state, lowering from 88 to 56 by June 24.

But since then, the state has mostly seen a sharp increase, hitting 102 on July 22, 107 on July 29, 161 on Aug. 5 and 246 on Aug. 12 and 19.

“We've kind of been at a generally low level of circulation in the community, but over the course of the last month and a half or so we're starting to see the number of hospitalizations go back up and the percentage of [emergency department] visits due to COVID also increasing,” Knoche said. “For July 1, that week, the percentage of ED visits due to COVID was 0.5%. And for the week of Aug. 19, that weekly percentage of ED visits was 3%. So that's six times as many.”

He noted that the current numbers aren’t terrible — there were 793 people admitted to hospitals in the state with COVID the week of Dec. 31, 2022, he cited as an example of how bad it’s been in the past — but people should still be concerned and take caution.

The fall and the holidays have seen a pattern of spikes, so the numbers could continue to rise.

“That's why you're hearing public health professionals, physicians, people's primary care doctors really strongly recommending that people stay up to date with their vaccines,” Knoche said. “Because the time that people need it is when they're traveling, when they're getting together with their loved ones during Thanksgiving and over Christmas. Those holidays, those family gatherings and travel are when you see opportunity for these viruses to spread.”

While there are a variety of factors that are likely playing into the rise in COVID cases — recent high temperatures pushing people to congregate inside, for instance — Knoche emphasized that the expected mid-September recommendation of a new COVID vaccine that protects against the XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant could be a particular help, as the virus’ mutation could be part of what is driving the increase in hospitalizations, particularly when it comes to people who are getting COVID again.

He added that typical good habits when it comes to respiratory illness also help stem the spread, including washing hands regularly, covering coughs and sneezes and not going into school or work if you are ill.

Case numbers shared by DHEC for Lexington County and neighboring Richland County fall in line with the rise in COVID statewide.

In Lexington, there were 106 new COVID cases on May 6, with that number mostly going down each week through July 1, when the county had 58. The county has since seen sharp increases, hitting 112 on July 22, 142 on July 29, 240 on Aug. 5, 293 on Aug. 12, 400 on Aug. 19 and 608 on Aug. 26.

Richland saw much the same arc during that time, going from 148 on May 6 to 93 on June 24, and then climbing to 155 on July 22, 185 on July 29, 318 on Aug. 5, 496 on Aug. 12, 563 on Aug. 19 and 898 on Aug. 23.

Knoche cautioned that these numbers might actually be higher than what’s been reported, as the results of at-home tests often don’t make it to DHEC.

Lexington County saw a total of eight COVID deaths between May and Aug. 19, he said.

Weekly hospital admission figures from May through August weren’t immediately available, but both counties saw a spike recently.

In both counties, there were 38 new patients with confirmed COVID admitted to local hospitals in the week leading up to Aug. 12, a 65.2% increase from the previous week, before dropping slightly to 37 in the week leading up to Aug. 19.

That Aug. 12 increase is sharper than the nationwide increase during the same stretch, which was 21%, as 12,613 new confirmed COVID patients were admitted to hospitals throughout the U.S.

The hospitalization numbers are still well below the threshold to raise the county’s Hospital Admissions Level from low to medium, which is 10 admissions per 100,000 people. As of Aug. 19, the latest date for which the levels were updated, the 37 cases in the Lexington area equated to 4.8 admissions per 100,000 people.

Lexington Medical Center, the 607-bed teaching hospital in West Columbia, told the Chronicle it has seen a recent spike in COVID patients, going from a census of nine patients with the virus the week of Aug. 20 to 26 on Aug. 28.

Knoche said that while the recent rise in COVID represents a particular threat to those who are elderly or immunocompromised, getting this message through to the public can be difficult at this point.

“I think that there's a significant amount of fatigue related to hearing about COVID,” he said. “And I get it. I've also been working on this as the beginning of the pandemic, and sometimes you're tired of working on it and trying to say the same thing and message it. But it doesn't change the fact that it's still here. It doesn't change the fact that it's still harming people. And that won't change the fact that we're still going to try our best to educate people about the risks and and the way to reduce those risks by being vaccinated and practicing good health practices.”

Keywords

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According to residents, the land used to be full of trees. Now it's a construction site, and soon, a new housing and shopping development.

LEXINGTON, S.C. — An area near Red Bank in Lexington is starting to look very different as developers turn a 50-acre plot of land into shopping and residential property.

Austin Dunn is a physical therapist and a client director at Drayer Physical Therapy along Platt Springs Road in Lexington. He's been at the location for two years and recalls seeing a large plot of trees across the street, but he said that the landscape is changing quickly.

"We've seen the trees swaying like the Lorax, falling down. But as I've been coming to work the last few weeks, I've seen more and more clearance and now it's basically a dirt lot."

That's a similar story for Brittany Harris; she lives by the property and has seen it change shape.

"I just noticed they were clearing the area out. A lot of different work trucks and different people out there sometimes during the day. I just kinda figure that they were probably going to put another housing development over there or something," she said.

It's all part of a 50-acre development, according to the NAI Columbia commercial real estate firm.

A press release from the company said the group will be developing the area into a mixed-use area named 'Platt Springs Crossing.' The firm said it will be "bringing multiple national and regional users, along with a residential component, to a growing Lexington market."

The idea of a new place to shop or live makes Harris excited about the possibilities.

"I would definitely like to have another sit-down eatery spot. Just, you know, more family oriented where me and my family can come sometimes on the weekend and just dine in."

Dunn, a White Knoll high school graduate, claims he's seen the area take shape over decades. He's excited an increase in population could mean more business-

"Being a physical therapist, that's my main thing, is trying to help people get better. If there's any injuries or anything else going on...I can get a better opportunity to help people, then that's the main goal."

We reached out to NAI Columbia, who said they are not yet releasing information about the possible businesses or plans for the development.