Steve Riley thought he’d be on Hilton Head for 3 years. Why the town manager stayed 26.
Steve Riley, Hilton Head Island’s departing town manager, was the final word on where the South End began.
And when on earth that bike path-blocking fence got there.
And how much money we spent to clean up after Hurricane Matthew.
He won’t acknowledge he was the last word. When he talks about his 26 years as Hilton Head Island’s town manager, he says it was a team effort, that he was proud to work with town staff while the island was deciding what it was going to be.
He won’t tell you about all the callers wanting to know why traffic was backed up, or whether the Coligny Marriott had the first rooftop bar on the island (it didn’t, but it had the first rooftop pool).
Riley took all the calls. He was the authority on those matters.
A lot of people can say they’ve been on Hilton Head for 30 years. But Riley was here as the town developed. He was in the room, usually guiding the discussions, when the decisions were made.
He wasn’t elected. He didn’t have a vote. But people knew he knew everything. They trusted him. So they’d call him up and ask.
After nearly 30 years with the Town of Hilton Head Island, Riley retired Dec. 31. He plans to stay at home on the island with his wife, Mary Jo, and spend time with his four adult children.
He may even turn off his phone for a little bit.
Here, he reflects on his history with the town, what he did right, what he regrets, and the “good ol’ boys club.”
Riley thought he’d be on Hilton Head for 3 years
When Steve Riley walks into his office at Town Hall, now renamed the Stephen G. Riley Municipal Complex, he puts down his leather messenger bag, greets everyone in the room and asks about their day before he sits down to work.
The last nine months with the town have been such a stark change from the previous 29 years.
His staff works from home, and he stayed out of the office in the weeks leading up to his retirement instead of relishing in his final days in the halls there.
Prior to Christmas he hadn’t even seen his name on the town building.
Like most on Hilton Head, Riley relocated here.
The Omaha native and University of Iowa graduate moved to Beaufort County in 1985 to work as a planner for Beaufort County and then to the City of Beaufort.
“I had never been east of the Mississippi River before I moved to Beaufort County,” he said. “I’d never heard of Hilton Head. I’d never vacationed here.”
After a stint consulting in Minneapolis, Riley came back to Hilton Head as the community development director under town manager Michael O’Neill. He had a three-year plan: do his job and move on.
But Riley began coaching his kids’ sports teams, chaperoning field trips, and volunteering with scouting programs. Volunteer leaders used his name to guilt others into signing up.
“Steve Riley is on the list of volunteers, why aren’t you?” they’d tell other parents.
When Riley heard this, he thought “Great, now they all hate me again.”
But they didn’t. He was a part of the community.
When he was acting town manager in 1994, most of the council and community supported him for the full-time job because they knew him. He was working concession stands, standing on the sidelines at youth sport games and sitting on school buses with his kids and others’.
Longtime Island Packet columnist David Lauderdale, now retired, described Riley as the guy who was unafraid to get into the nuts and bolts of government. And he was a young, but familiar, face.
“We really knew him,” Lauderdale said.
It was that simple.
The good times and the good ol’ boys
Riley is candid about the things he did right and wrong, the good years and the bad.
Any islander old enough to remember the town without the Cross Island bridge can probably guess what some of those are.
He remembers with fondness his time working with Mayor Tom Peeples, who served from 1995 to 2010. The two were seen in lockstep on issues. Because of their age difference, Riley considered Peeples a mentor.
“Tom and I had a good relationship. We agreed on a lot, and we became good friends,” Riley said. “He was coming out of raising his kids here, and I was just starting to. We clicked on a number of levels.”
But where some saw synergy, others saw behind-the-scenes coordination.
Hilton Head and Beaufort County have often been accused of operating under a “good ol’ boys” system, where the same unelected people influence decisions and hold positions of power.
At times, Riley, some islanders believe, has been a part of that system. But he sees that “system” as an echochamber of feedback that he says he and council members often get stuck in.
“I think that’s in every community, though,” Riley said. “There are opportunities for having input, and there are a lot of usual suspects who pick up the phone to talk to council members.”
He said people in government “don’t realize who they’re not hearing from.”
“The good ol’ boys change all the damn time,” he said. They are ”the people who pick up the phone or shoot off an email.”
Highs and lows
Riley looks back on some initiatives and wishes he had handled them differently.
He regrets not pushing town council members harder to buy a massive plot of land at the end of Singleton Beach Road. It could have been a beachfront park, but no one wanted to develop it. Instead, homes went up.
Riley said he encouraged certain development on the island under a rate-of-growth ordinance he wrote with town attorney Curtis Coltrane. The ordinance led to an abundance of office space and lower cost hotels.
That’s not something he’s proud of.
“It wasn’t set up to reward high-quality resort or accommodations, it was ‘first one in the door gets the permit,’” Riley said.
But as he looks back, Riley says he got some things right.
Although the Cross Island Parkway was controversial because it cut through historic communities and cleared trees, the toll road took pressure off Hilton Head’s other major roads and made it easier to get around for islanders and visitors.
The long-begrudged toll on the parkway is set to end in July.
Hilton Head’s distinctive beach preservation fee has singlehandedly maintained the island’s most well known attraction since 1993. Without a plan to renourish the beach —and a designated funding source — the island would have had to spend nearly its entire capital project budget every seven years.
Nothing else would get done, Riley said.
“The beach would have deteriorated, and it would have been a stain on the desirability of this place for residents and vacationers,” he added.
His response to Hurricane Matthew, which devastated the island in 2016, allowed a surprising return to normalcy after islanders experienced catastrophic losses to their homes and community. His leadership earned him the coveted Grand Marshal sash in the 2017 St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Beyond disasters and projects like the Lowcountry Celebration Park, Riley will be remembered for how he did his job and stood up for staff.
He was never one to shift blame, or throw his staff under the bus, to appease an angry resident or frustrated Town Council. When traffic backed up on the south end because of USCB campus construction on a Saturday in July 2018, Riley told the press he’d forgotten to tell the crews not to close roads on changeover day.
When paving on Pope Avenue was botched and bumpy, Riley took the fall for it.
“If there was a question I should have asked, information that should have been out there, I was willing to say I could have done better,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s on me, and passing it down is cowardly. I just don’t have any use for passing the buck.”
Political divides
As he turns in his town phone, keys and Palmetto Pass to glide into retirement, Riley said he’s looking forward to seeing how a new generation deals with the major issues on the island.
No. 1 on his list is U.S. 278.
The single entry and exit point to Hilton Head is due to be redesigned and constructed in the next five years. A final plan for the corridor is scheduled to be released by the S.C. Department of Transportation in March, pending input from an independent engineering firm and a land use planner.
Riley sees the project as more straightforward than others.
“After watching this for 20-plus years, I think it has to be six lanes, it has to go through where it’s going through,” he said of the highway, which bisects the historic Stoney community.
As for the residents and businesses in the area, both native island and otherwise, Riley said the town didn’t consider the impact of the highway when it expanded to four lanes. Doing so may have meant relocating more people then and avoiding the situation he sees the town is in now — intense resistance from residents who don’t want to abandon the land their families have held for generations.
But as the town moves into the future without Riley at the helm, he said he’s been thinking about the necessity of finding common ground.
When he looks at the U.S., and even individuals involved in town management across the country, there’s growing resistance to compromise. He said people who disagree on one thing and decide to be enemies for life are part of why he decided to retire now.
“How can anyone live their life that way?” he asked.
Those political divides make public service more difficult. Still, Riley’s legacy will be one of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work.
“There aren’t any national issues here,” he said. “The garbage has got to be picked up, the roads and potholes have to be fixed; there’s no political solution in there.”
