Beaufort County Council’s new leadership brings new hope. Now they need gumption. | Opinion

Beaufort County Council’s new leadership brings new hope.

It is the hope that, combined with the recent addition of county administrator Michael Moore, the chosen few who represent 200,000 taxpayers can end an era of lost trust.

That trust disappeared over years of secrecy, ineptness, corruption and backroom power plays.

Now, for the first time, both the chair and the vice chair of the Beaufort County Council are women. Their council colleagues elected Alice Howard of Port Royal chair and Anna Maria “Tab” Tabernik of Sun City vice chair on Jan. 2.

Their leadership brings hope, but women leaders on the council are nothing new.

Harriet Keyserling of Beaufort was the first woman elected to the council in 1974, and Martha Baumberger of Hilton Head Island was the first woman to chair it in 1985.

Their contributions are still visible around the county.

Keyserling has a portrait painted by Susan Graber hanging in the county Courthouse. After two years on the County Council, Keyserling spent 16 years in the state House of Representatives and documented them in 1998 in her 375-page book, “Against the Tide: One Woman’s Political Struggle.”

It is my hope that Howard and Tabernik will bring some gumption to the table to go with their lifetimes of professional and leadership experience.

Keyserling ran for office at age 52 after observing County Council meetings for the League of Women Voters. She watched the elected men plan a Christmas party for county employees, and said she had the “flippant thought” that if a woman were on the council, she would suggest that employees would prefer a large turkey to a party.

To me, that shows gumption.

And with her mastery of complex issues, the makings of an oil painting began to form.

Keyserling recalled of her turn at the council table, “Although I had accumulated a lot of generalized information, I was not good on details and always had to double check facts, figures, or names, good member of the League of Women Voters that I was, before venturing an opinion.”

She wrote that that was unlike the many men she saw “who would rather bluff it out than stay silent.”

She was especially proud of her work to bring a historic piece of public art to Beaufort. The bust of former slave and Civil War hero Robert Smalls adorns the yard of his church, Tabernacle Baptist.

She also turned a proposal to hire someone to design a new county logo into a local contest where the winner got $100. It led to our wonderful county logo.

That’s gumption.

She was taught by council chair Arthur Horne to “always count your votes before you call for a question.”

In this way, Keyserling helped leave our state with the Spoleto Festival, the accommodations tax, a regional nuclear waste pact and the Education Improvement Act.

“She did not oversimplify issues or appeal to emotions,” former Gov. Richard Riley said at her celebration of life in 2011. “She was passionate about serving the public interest.”

Baumberger was known as a precise, fair, straight-shooting, fact-based decision maker and a champion of Roberts Rules of Order after her election to the council in 1983 at age 70.

She subsequently became Hilton Head’s first, and so far only, female mayor.

On her two-year watch as mayor, the community benefited from a revised route of the Cross Island Parkway, beach nourishment, greater public beach access, an improved garbage dump, more bike paths, and the opening of the Island Recreation Center.

With the help of civic clubs and businesses, Baumberger also helped the community get new bus shelters built so island workers waiting for a long ride home would have a place to sit out of the rain and blistering sun.

That’s gumption, decency and civility — with a focus on the people, not the politician.

It is the opposite of governance by corruption, secrecy and entitlement.

Fast forward to today, and our two new leaders know this.

They seem poised to bring about change.

“We both grew up at a time when you had to prove yourself,” Tabernik told The Island Packet’s reporter Chloe Appleby. “Women were not viewed as equally competent as men, so you had to prove yourself.”

Those days are gone. The council’s era of bad leadership should follow it into history.