Is it too late for Bluffton?

While in the process of relocating to Bluffton from the Northeast, my wife and I were very impressed with so many good things that this town and the surrounding areas had to offer. Their natural beauty, restaurants, stores, and friendly people to name a few.

But there were two big disappointments for us: the endless and repetitive TV ads of certain personal injury lawyers, and the big commercial “For Sale” signs in front of huge swaths of land lined with tall and majestic pine trees.

In New York City, the route number for the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway is 278. Fording Island Road bears the same number. The BQE can be a “parking lot” at certain times of the day — every day of the week. Is this the fate of Fording Island Road?

Will chirping frogs and those beautiful pine trees be replaced with honking horns and roaring truck engines?

A well thought out master plan and strong zoning laws can prevent this.

As a member of a government board for almost six years in a rapidly growing New York City suburb, I often called for a “buildout analysis” to gauge the limits of our town’s infrastructure. I could not get enough momentum behind this. When big developers come knocking on the door with promises of tax relief, politicians may foolishly sell out on quality of life.

Hopefully, here in Bluffton, it is not too late.

Foundation helps with Hilton Head sewer service

In mid-January an article appeared in The Island Packet that addressed local public sewer connections.

Failing septic systems have long been a problem here. The Community Foundation of the Lowcountry established the Project SAFE (Sewer Access For Everyone) fund in 2000 to begin to address this. Since then, the fund has provided grant dollars to low-income homeowners to pay for sewer connection fees.

With the average cost of about $6,700, the fund plays a crucial role in helping families connect.

In 2015, we launched a campaign to raise $3 million to provide greater assistance. We partnered with Hilton Head PSD and the Town of Hilton Head Island, forming a public/private partnership that has been nationally recognized by HUD.

Since then, we’ve connected 162 families. Some of these families lived in neighborhoods where sewer mains had been laid years before, but they could not afford the connection fee. For other families, the lines were newly laid and a grant from Project SAFE meant they didn’t have to wait to connect.

Some families haven’t yet hooked up, perhaps because their septic systems seem to be working fine.

But with the high water table and soil types here, no septic system really performs well. And, once those systems fail and people will be forced to connect to public sewer, Project SAFE will be there to help them.

Project SAFE is funding sewer connections now and will for years to come. We’re proud to be part of the solution.

Questions for Trump

If I worked for the federal government, especially if I voted for President Donald Trump, I would be asking him the following questions:

“Why did you tell us that Mexico would pay for the wall? Why did you tell Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that you would be proud to own a shutdown?

“Why, when all experts say a wall is an ineffective solution to illegal immigration, do you continue to insist that it is something more than a campaign slogan? Why do you create your own statistics about criminals, terrorist threats and drug smuggling when your own agencies report dramatically different facts based on real findings?

“Why did you say in 2013 that ‘A shutdown falls on the lack of leadership. I mean, problems start at the top and have to be solved from the top. A shutdown means the president is weak’?

“Why did we vote for you, and do you really expect us to vote for you again?”