Our view: David Ames best choice for Hilton Head Town Council

David Ames is the right choice in Tuesday’s special election for a seat on Hilton Head Island Town Council.

He is in a field of four candidates seeking the Ward 3 seat vacated by Lee Edwards, who moved out of the district.

Brendan Reilley, Palmer Simmons and Ryan McAvoy make a good field, each with something special to offer.

Reilley is a young businessman reared on the island by leaders in the hospitality industry, Tom and Diane Reilley. Simmons is a businessman and church leader reared on the island by Charles and Rosa Simmons in the iconic Gullah family best known for his late grandfather, Charlie Simmons Sr., an inaugural member of the Hilton Head Island Hall of Fame. McAvoy seeks to be a cage-rattler in his fourth attempt at public office.

But Ames would bring a unique perspective to the council, and the community would be wise to capitalize on it.

He is experienced in community development from several perspectives.

First, he was a land planner with the late Charles E. Fraser, founder of Sea Pines and the inspiration of Hilton Head’s modern development. Ames, now 71, was a young man with a degrees from Princeton and Penn when Fraser hired him in 1973. Among the projects he worked on was the initial planning for Hilton Head Plantation.

Next, Ames was a co-developer of Long Cove Club on Hilton Head, with its success being quickly replicated off the island.

Ames also brings the experience of community-building in the non-profit sector. Most notably, he played key roles in capital campaigns to deliver new buildings for the Boys & Girls Club and the Children’s Center to the island, both aimed at helping working families.

Meanwhile, David and Nancy Ames raised their two daughters on the island, participating in schools, swim teams (when there was no public pool) and all the rest.

He was an active participant in planning for the island prior to incorporation in 1983, and has not let up since.

Ames thinks long-term and big-picture, but has wrestled with plenty of minutiae. He knows every nuance of what made Hilton Head successful in the first place, and has a great concern for what might keep it that way. To that end, he has worked with a mayor’s task force on the future, and joined those wading through the weeds of redoing the town’s rock, the Land Management Ordinance.

He’s smart and thoughtful, and is pushing for a community vision that is sorely needed as Hilton Head searches to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive tourism field.

For example, he and the other members of Circle to Circle task force aired a good idea of a new shuttle service that was featured on the front of Friday’s paper. That’s thinking long-range about how we get cars off the road as the number of day trippers increases, most of them headed to the same spot: Coligny Beach Park.

Any vision for the future must be rooted in the successes of the past, and Ames is a rare person to have taken a front-row seat in both eras. It would be a shame not to tap that resource for Town Council.

This story was originally published May 1, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Our view: David Ames best choice for Hilton Head Town Council."