Mark: Morning, morning — welcome back to Ashley River Radio.
Mark: It's Monday, the thirty-first of August, I'm Mark, that's Lauren —
Lauren: [warmly] Hey.
Mark: — and today we've got Mount Pleasant thinking about telling a data center no, we've got Union Pier and seventy acres of what somebody called the DNA of Charleston, and then, uh... [laughs] then about four minutes of me arguing with her about grass seed.
Lauren: More than four.
Mark: More than four, probably.
Lauren: [dry] So — weather first, because it's the same weather it's been. Eighty-eight today, chance of storms tonight, chance again tomorrow night.
Lauren: Wind three to eight.
Mark: Three to eight? That's nothing. That's a nice day.
Lauren: [flat] That's the bad version.
Mark: [beat] Wait, what do you mean?
Lauren: I mean the wind is what moves the cell off you. Three miles an hour, it doesn't move. It parks. It sits over one neighborhood and dumps for forty minutes and then it's sunny.
Mark: ...like Wednesday.
Lauren: Like Wednesday.
Mark: [groans] Yeah, no, I don't need the reminder. I check the radar before I lock my doors now.
Mark: That is a thing I do with my life.
Lauren: It said slight chance Wednesday too.
Mark: Okay but "slight chance" —
Lauren: The last three weeks have all been slight chances and I've watched you dry out a truck.
Mark: [laughing] With a contractor bag! Sitting on a contractor bag like a man who's made good decisions.
Mark: >> Okay, completely unrelated, but I gotta tell you about this package. It's been sitting in me all weekend.
Lauren: Go on, then.
Mark: So I ordered — it's the... the bracket thing.
Mark: The mount for the workbench vise. Two weeks out. Gets marked delivered Saturday, I get the photo proof, and it's a door.
Lauren: A door.
Mark: It's a beautiful door. Blue. Nice little glass panel. Not my door, man. Not on my street. There's a street two over with basically the same name and the driver just went, close enough.
Lauren: [amused] Did you go get it?
Mark: I did. I knocked on a stranger's house at eight in the morning and explained myself. [beat] They were very nice about it.
Mark: I was not at my best.
Lauren: [dry] He got delivered, anyway. Which is more than anything else on the calendar this week managed.
Mark: >> Speaking of which — Mount Pleasant. Did you see this? Live 5 had it, Mount Pleasant's weighing a moratorium on new data center development.
Lauren: I saw the headline going around, yeah.
Mark: And that's — honestly that's all there is. It's a video piece, ninety seconds, the town's thinking about a pause.
Mark: That's the story.
Lauren: Spartanburg is the one I keep chewing on.
Mark: Mm-hm.
Lauren: Because that application went from about fifty megawatts to four hundred fifty. Fifty to four fifty.
Mark: [rushed] Which is a completely different fucking project.
Mark: Like, that's not a revision. You'd redo the whole traffic study for a Chick-fil-A if it grew nine times.
Lauren: And the PSC said unanimously it isn't a power plant, because it won't export to the grid.
Mark: Right.
Lauren: Okay, so — my position's simple. A pause is the only thing a town's actually holding. Once the interconnection's in the ground the conversation's over, you're not un-building a substation, and after that it's ratepayers holding the bag. Nobody voted for that part.
Mark: Okay but — what does Mount Pleasant DO with the pause?
Lauren: [pause] Meaning?
Mark: Meaning I watched the county extend that subdivision moratorium twenty-four months across four historic districts and I still haven't seen one page of anything drafted behind it. So they buy two years and then what?
Mark: They hand it back?
Lauren: The pause is worth it even if it's empty.
Mark: [incredulous] Whoa. Whoa, hang on. Two weeks ago you told me a pause with nothing drafted behind it is just a slower yes.
Lauren: [beat] ...Yeah.
Lauren: I'll take it. It's different when the thing you're pausing arrives with its own load profile.
Mark: [laughing] She's flipped. Write it down.
Lauren: I'm allowed. But — the part that bugs me is nobody at that podium is going to say the word "ratepayer." Not once. They'll say jobs, they'll say tax base, they'll say partnership. The cost of a four-hundred-fifty-megawatt load doesn't show up as a line item at that meeting. It shows up on everybody's bill three years later and by then it's just, you know.
Lauren: Electricity got expensive.
Mark: I want the jobs number first.
Lauren: [dry] You always do.
Mark: Because I've been on the sites, Lauren! Every one of these announcements has a number and every number has, like, eighteen months of construction trades in it and then forty guys forever. Forty. And half of those are security and HVAC.
Lauren: Sure. Doesn't change the power math.
Mark: No — but it changes what you can say in the room, and the room's the only part I get to touch.
Mark: If you go in talking about kilowatts, you lose. If you go in and say, this is four hundred permanent jobs and here's why it's actually sixty —
Lauren: [flat] It's sixty either way and the bill goes up either way.
Mark: [exhales] Fine.
Lauren: >> Okay, different thing but not really. Post and Courier had the Union Pier piece — Beemok putting together the framework for streets and parks.
Mark: Read it Sunday. Read it twice, actually.
Lauren: So, nearly seventy acres. Two hundred fifty million dollar deal with the Ports Authority, signed last year, and the sale doesn't close until twenty twenty-seven.
Mark: Twenty-seven.
Lauren: They asked more than eleven hundred people — city leaders, residents, business owners, preservationists — what gives Charleston its soul. Over a year and a half. And somebody from the Preservation Society called that patient capital virtually unprecedented.
Mark: [thoughtful] I mean... for around here? It kinda is, though.
Lauren: Patience is a thing you can afford when you already own the parcel.
Lauren: That's just what having the deed feels like.
Mark: Okay but you know what the other version looks like.
Lauren: I do.
Mark: The other version is five speculative parcels, five different LLCs, everybody builds to the property line, and in nine years there's a seawall argument nobody's responsible for. I'd rather have one owner who's slow.
Lauren: Sure. What I want to know is what "incremental" means for the housing part specifically.
Lauren: Because the phrase in the story is that the other plans will be incremental, and there is not a unit count anywhere in it. Not one.
Mark: [pause] Yeah, I noticed that too.
Lauren: Eleven hundred stakeholders and nobody in that consultation is waiting on a place to live. That's the thing. You don't get invited to the DNA-of-Charleston session if you're working two jobs in Hanahan.
Mark: >> The line that got me was the stormwater bullet.
Lauren: Say it.
Mark: "Ensure stormwater management and resiliency remain at the forefront." That's in the goals list.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: And look — I'm on job sites. Resiliency at the forefront in a vision document and resiliency in the final grading plan are two completely different documents, and the second one gets written in twenty twenty-nine by a value engineer who has a number to hit. I have watched detention get shrunk by a third in a conference call.
Mark: Nobody's mad, nobody's lying, it's just... the number.
Lauren: And nobody's in the room.
Mark: Four people and a spreadsheet! That's the whole meeting.
Lauren: Right, and — this is my whole thing — it's cheapest to argue about it right now. Today. While it's a bullet point and it costs nothing to move. And nobody will, because it's not interesting yet.
Mark: They'll say it was public.
Lauren: [flat] Published and notified are two different words.
Mark: [laughs] There it is.
Lauren: Eleven hundred meetings is a real effort, I'll give them that. It's still hundreds of small-group meetings.
Lauren: Small group means invited.
Mark: >> Okay, and — connected to this, sort of. Did you see the tariff thing? SC Daily Gazette had it.
Lauren: The Canadian retaliation.
Mark: [rushed] Six hundred twenty-nine product categories. Twenty-seven point six billion dollars of American goods, effective September eighth. Matched basically dollar for dollar. And the trade talks are, per the U.S. Trade Rep, completely stalled.
Lauren: Maine's lobster people dodged it, right?
Mark: Lobster got the twenty-five percent pulled, yeah. One industry. Out of six hundred twenty-nine.
Lauren: Mm-hm.
Mark: But here's what I keep saying and you keep hating — every project we just talked about is being priced against materials nobody will quote you past thirty days. Steel, aluminum. So the contracts are going to move.
Mark: Fixed price is dying.
Lauren: Find me one.
Mark: [beat] One what?
Lauren: One dynamic-pricing contract that refunds the buyer when lumber gets cheaper. One. You said this in August, I asked you then, I'm asking again.
Mark: [defensive] I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying it's happening —
Lauren: Right, but a risk that only moves one direction — that's not pricing. You've got a word for that on your own job sites.
Mark: Yeah, no, I know. I'm not defending it. I'm telling you what's in the drafts.
Lauren: [dry] Then we're still where we were Wednesday.
Mark: [exhales] Yep. Nothing's moved.
Lauren: Fine.
Lauren: Nobody feels a steel contract, though. They feel groceries.
Mark: Ohhh, okay, hold that, because I want to do the farmers market thing later.
Lauren: [amused] Park it.
Lauren: >> Alright, James Island. There's a commentary in the Post and Courier — "Protect this piece of James Island, before it's too late." That's the headline and, uh, that's genuinely most of what I've got.
Mark: You read the whole thing?
Lauren: I read enough to be suspicious of the genre.
Mark: [laughs] Here we go.
Lauren: No, I mean it. A commentary asking for a place to be protected almost always shows up after the parcel's under contract. And the ask is never attached to a vote, or a purchase price, or a date.
Lauren: It's attached to a feeling.
Mark: A commentary is how a councilperson gets asked a question in public, though. That's not nothing.
Lauren: It's a way of feeling like the fight happened.
Mark: [pause] That's harsh.
Lauren: It's the same shape as the Graham thing. An affordability platform with no vote attached, a conservation plea with no dollar figure attached. If nobody has to write a check or take a roll call vote, it didn't occur.
Mark: >> Can I give you the version from permitting meetings?
Lauren: Please.
Mark: On James Island, the fight is almost never about whether the land is pretty. Nobody at that table cares. It's drainage capacity and who inherits the water downstream. That's it.
Mark: That's the whole goddamn hearing.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: I've sat through three projects — three — where the conservation argument lost flat, and then the drainage argument won six weeks later on the same parcel. Same land! Different sentence.
Lauren: So you win by being boring.
Mark: Boring and specific. You bring the basin study. You say, this outfall is already at capacity in a two-year storm, and here's the four streets that go under.
Lauren: [beat] And that only works when the water reaches somebody with a lawyer.
Mark: [exhales] ...Yeah.
Lauren: That's the part I can't get past. The technical argument wins, sure — it wins for whoever's downstream and has a lawyer. Flooding lands on a street of rentals, that study sits in a drawer.
Mark: I'm not gonna argue with that. I've seen the drawer.
Lauren: It's the pattern every time. A basin is known to flood for a decade, ten, twelve years of everybody saying yep, that floods, and then the money shows up the exact year somebody wants to build on the parcel next to it.
Lauren: And we all act like that's a coincidence.
Mark: [flat] It's not a coincidence.
Lauren: Fourteen years of hundred-year floods. At some point that's just called the weather, and we're the assholes still permitting there.
Mark: God, no. Yeah. It's the calendar and everybody knows it.
Lauren: And nobody can tell me what "before it's too late" means as a date. That's what actually bothers me. More than the development would. Is it a rezoning hearing? Is it a closing?
Lauren: What's the day?
Mark: Two years of a hard no is still two years of people in their houses. That counts for something.
Lauren: [pause] That's the moratorium argument again.
Mark: It's the same argument, and I'm still right about it.
Lauren: A pause with nothing drafted behind it is a slower yes.
Mark: And that's two more years of somebody's kids in the same school.
Lauren: [beat] We're not settling this one either.
Mark: Nope.
Mark: >> At least a piece of James Island holds water. Unlike my backyard.
Lauren: [flat] That is the worst pivot you've done all month.
Mark: [laughing] It got us there!
Lauren: [flat] It did not.
Mark: I've been on the lawncare subreddit at night —
Lauren: Why.
Mark: — and I want to talk about fall overseeding. Okay. There's this post: guy moved into new construction two years ago. Builder put fescue sod in the front, seeded the back in June, covered it with, and I quote, "wire mesh crap."
Lauren: In June.
Mark: In June! Fall twenty twenty-four he pulls all the mesh up, throws down Scott's seed, covers it with straw. No soil test. No fertilizer.
Lauren: [dry] Mm.
Mark: Then fall twenty twenty-five he aerates the front where the sod is, and not the back, and says in the post he can't remember why.
Mark: And the title is, "Will this ever end, or am I doing this every fall for the rest of my life?"
Lauren: [pause] Okay, so my read on that is not a lawn read.
Mark: [amused] Course it isn't.
Lauren: That's a warranty problem being described as a hobby. The builder scraped the topsoil off the lot, sold the house, and now that guy's doing two years of unpaid remediation and calling it "lessons learned." He wrote "I've learned so much in twenty-four months" like it's a growth experience.
Mark: I mean, he has learned a lot —
Lauren: He's learned that dirt costs money and somebody else decided not to spend it. He bought a house and now he's buying the soil back, in bags, on his goddamn weekends.
Mark: [laughing] Okay, that's — yeah. That's fair, actually.
Mark: >> Counter-post though. Fourteen-day overseed. Guy scalped it, raked the thatch out, manually aerated —
Lauren: Manually.
Mark: Manually! Twin City resilience seed, starter fert. And he says he wasn't sure any of it did anything until he went back and looked at his day one photo. And the day one versus day fourteen is genuinely dramatic, man.
Mark: Like, night and day.
Lauren: [skeptical] How much of that is the photo?
Mark: What do you mean the photo?
Lauren: I mean angle and time of day. Before-and-after is the most reliably dishonest format on the internet. Day one is high noon, flat light, dead on from standing height. Day fourteen is golden hour, camera down at ankle level, shooting along the blades. You can do that to a parking lot.
Mark: [delighted] Not a parking lot, Lauren, come on.
Lauren: You could get close.
Mark: [laughs] Okay, but visible progress is the entire point of a yard. That's what it's for.
Mark: It's the one thing in my life that responds.
Lauren: [beat] That's a little sad.
Mark: It's extremely sad and I don't care.
Lauren: >> Also — neither of those is a Lowcountry yard.
Mark: No.
Lauren: Fescue here in September is not the same animal as fescue wherever Twin City guy lives. Not close.
Lauren: And my lot is — I've got a seventies ranch, it's half sand and half whatever the previous owner buried out there. I hit something with a shovel two summers ago and stopped digging on purpose.
Mark: [laughing] You just left it.
Lauren: I left it. It's fine. It's structural now.
Mark: See, this is my whole thing about you. You'll run a half-height rack in a closet, you'll do — what did you do, the VLAN thing —
Lauren: It needed doing.
Mark: It did not fucking need doing! And then the yard just gets whatever happens to it.
Mark: You do the rack on hard mode and the yard on whatever-happens mode. On purpose.
Lauren: [pause] ...I'm not going to deny that.
Mark: See.
Lauren: The rack does what I tell it.
Lauren: >> Alright, quick stuff. Brack in the City Paper on the Senate race.
Mark: Mm-hm.
Lauren: Graham beat Norman by five percent. Eighteen thousand and sixty-nine votes statewide — and in Horry County alone she got sixteen thousand eight hundred forty-one more than him.
Mark: [surprised] So basically the whole margin is Horry.
Lauren: One county where Trump held a rally. Norman took the Upstate, which is his home area, and she carried the Midlands, the Pee Dee and the Lowcountry.
Mark: And now it's her against Annie Andrews.
Lauren: Two women, in a state with twenty-four women out of a hundred seventy lawmakers.
Lauren: Fourteen percent. In a state that's fifty-two percent female. Are you shitting me?
Mark: [flat] Cool.
Lauren: Ten weeks out, and Winthrop's got a generic Republican up ten.
Mark: [amused] So what's your prediction, since you're batting so well this month.
Lauren: [dry] I was wrong about her once already, I'm not being wrong twice.
Mark: Reasoning off the shape of the thing instead of the content —
Lauren: [interrupting] I know what I said. [beat] My prediction is she still doesn't name a company, a rate case or a hospital system between now and November.
Lauren: Affordability, no target.
Mark: [laughs] That's a prediction!
Lauren: It's a small one.
Mark: >> Okay, my farmers market thing. Live 5 — Ridgeville Farmers Market, shoppers up fifteen to twenty percent since late July.
Lauren: Because of the recalls.
Mark: [rushed] FDA flagged jalapeños, Brussels sprouts, blueberries — possible salmonella. That's on top of the Cyclospora warnings on leafy greens and onions earlier in the summer.
Mark: And federal health officials have opened nineteen outbreak investigations already this year. Nineteen. In eight months.
Lauren: Nineteen.
Mark: And people are just driving to Ridgeville instead. Which — honestly? Good. That's money staying local, you meet the grower, that's a good outcome.
Lauren: [flat] A farmers market is not a food safety system.
Mark: [beat] Well, no, but —
Lauren: It's what people do when they've stopped trusting one. Nineteen investigations in eight months and a bunch of parents deciding the labeling doesn't tell them anything. The market's lovely.
Lauren: The story is the nineteen.
Mark: [conceding] Yeah, no. Okay. Both, though. I'm allowed both.
Lauren: You're allowed both.
Mark: >> Also Thursday the third, Yappy Hour at James Island County Park. Off-leash dog park, live music, drinks. I'm going.
Lauren: [pause] Do you have a dog?
Mark: [beat] ...I'm going.
Lauren: >> Last thing, and it's not a light one. Grand Canyon flooding.
Mark: Mm.
Lauren: Flash flooding started around two-thirty Saturday afternoon. A man's body was recovered Sunday along the Colorado near Crystal Rapids, and about fifteen people are still unaccounted for. Sixty-two were airlifted out of Phantom Ranch and the lower North Kaibab by Sunday morning.
Mark: [flat] Jesus.
Lauren: Nearly every footbridge over Bright Angel Creek is gone. The Park Service is asking anybody who was in the inner canyon on Saturday, or had a campground reservation there, to call them.
Mark: [pause] And we opened the show making jokes about a slight chance of storms.
Lauren: [beat] Yeah. We did.
Lauren: Anyway. That's us. Thanks for listening, everybody — check your radar before you lock your doors, apparently.
Mark: [dry] Learn from me.
Lauren: We're back Wednesday.