A few decades of neglect are being cleaned up in Pelzer with the aim of presenting a better face as developers are beginning to take interest in the town, said Mayor Will Ragland.
The town's aging Monkey Park has undergone a facelift in the past few months, along with the first new play equipment to be added in a generation, said Rockey Burgess, who is the mayor of neighboring Williamston and used to play there as a kid.
In the past few months, city workers and volunteers have been cutting back brush, installing new light poles, cleaning out an illegal dumping ground and they just finished adding a swing that can accommodate a wheelchair. There have been median and streetscape cleaning, especially around Lebby Street, and plantings in other parts of the town.
It's a lot of small things that add up to a major change in the town, and the months-long cleanup effort should help residents enjoy their park, take more pride in the town as well as help recruiting efforts, Ragland said.
There's a long list of projects still to go: Replace the picnic shelter roof, repaint some equipment and maintain the lawn.
The small improvements are about telling a story, said Ragland, who operates the Mill Town Players, a live theater venue in Pelzer.
Ragland uses his theater experience, talking of Pelzer as a stage, as a place to tell a good story. Regular posts on Facebook about the cleaning and other small things are all chances to tell people that the town is cleaning up and dusting off its proud history, he said.
Monkey Park was once a sprawling park, complete with a small zoo (including monkeys and a bear), skating rinks, and a pond. The rink is now a community building and the rest are just memories.
The improvements made so far are inexpensive, the new accessible swing equipment cost about $2,700 and that's one of the more expensive improvements. Most of the cost of this facelift has been in city labor, Ragland said.
It has to be affordable because of what Pelzer is, the mayor said.
Pelzer was the fastest growing city in South Carolina in the last decade, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
More:With no taxes, Pelzer faces challenges for candidates on how town can grow
But to call Pelzer the state's fastest-growing city or town in the past decade requires a bit of context, the growth was not the typical boomtown growth seen in coastal cities and Greenville-adjacent communities.
Pelzer grew in a single bound. The town annexed the former Pelzer Mill Village in 2015, and grew overnight from a population of 44 to 1,225. It's as if Greenville suddenly grew to a city of 22 million people and became the biggest city in America by a wide margin.
The town has continued to grow outside of the one-time boom but that annexation set up a big challenge.
Pelzer had no taxes when it grew. State law limits local tax increases to a percentage of existing tax rates and that percentage times zero is zero. And that's what Pelzer can raise in taxes.
It gets funding instead from utility payments and, beginning a few years ago, a local hospitality tax, for prepared food and drinks.
Ragland, a Powdersville native who moved to Pelzer in 2014, said the town had for years neglected its park, and other areas because there was no money available after the mills and many of the people moved away.
He said the hospitality money mostly sat in a bank account for years until there was about $100,000 available by the 2018-2019 budget year, Ragland said.
When he was elected in 2019, when illness and resignations changed the makeup of the town's council, Ragland and the new council decided to spend the money.
It's largely been on small things.
And that's been just fine because those small things, Ragland said, are leading to something bigger for the town.
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