Mark: [warmly] Morning, morning — welcome back to Ashley River Radio.
Mark: It is Labor Day, Monday, September seventh, I'm Mark, over there is Lauren —
Lauren: [amused] Hey.
Mark: — and coming up we've got the county putting a very shiny website about road money on the internet about two months before they ask you to vote on more road money, we've got Darlington, we've got ninety-two wind turbines in North Dakota that a whole town wishes it could un-see, and, uh... whatever it is Lauren has against playlists.
Lauren: [flat] It's not playlists.
Mark: [laughing] We'll get there.
Lauren: I have nothing against playlists.
Mark: So. I worked yesterday. Sunday. Of a holiday weekend.
Lauren: [curious] Why?
Mark: Because at about six in the morning the badge system decided every credential in the building had expired.
Lauren: [beat] All of them?
Mark: All of them. Mine included.
Mark: So I drive down, and there's already three guys from a field crew standing out front who came in to grab a truck, and nobody can open a single door.
Lauren: [dry] Great.
Mark: And I'm doing the whole thing, right, I'm checking the — I'm looking at the controller, I'm looking at the network drop, I'm thinking, did something push overnight, did somebody...
Mark: [exhales] It was the clock.
Lauren: [delighted] Oh, no.
Mark: The panel clock was off. That's it. Everything's "expired" because the panel thinks it's a different date.
Mark: Two hours of my Sunday for a fucking clock.
Lauren: [amused] Okay, and how long into the two hours did you look at the clock?
Mark: [pause] ...toward the end.
Lauren: Mm-hm.
Mark: Okay but — hang on.
Mark: Hang on. Who was it that spent an entire Wednesday night on a fake outage that turned out to be a hosts file some guy hand-typed in 2019?
Lauren: I checked it.
Mark: You checked it fourth!
Lauren: [flat] I checked it fourth. Which is still checking it.
Mark: [laughing] That's not the rule and you know it.
Lauren: Neither of us gets to say the rule out loud anymore, I think that's where we've landed.
Mark: Yeah, no, that's fair.
Lauren: Storms tonight, by the way, if anybody had grill plans. Seventy-four and wet, so — don't.
Mark: >> Which is roughly what I was doing yesterday — sitting in the truck waiting on the panel to come back, scrolling the county's new road project dashboard on my phone like a normal person.
Lauren: [amused] Oh, I have opinions about that.
Mark: I know you do. That's why I said it.
Lauren: So — the Post and Courier had it in their tri-county roundup.
Lauren: Charleston County put up a dashboard, went live off a September second release. It's every project funded by the transportation sales tax going back to 2004. Something like five hundred projects, call it a billion dollars. You can search by location, you can filter by status, funding, scope, timeline.
Mark: And? Where's the catch.
Lauren: [pause] It's good.
Mark: [surprised] Wait — what?
Lauren: It's good. I sat with it an hour Friday and it — it's actually useful. A public body built a useful thing and didn't charge for it.
Mark: I want that recorded.
Lauren: [dry] It's a podcast, it is recorded.
Lauren: Now. My condition.
Mark: [laughing] There it is.
Lauren: So my condition is — I want a filter for the 2004 and 2016 projects that still aren't built. With the promised year sitting right there in the row.
Lauren: Not "in design." The year somebody stood up and said this is happening.
Mark: See, I did that by hand, sort of. Pulled up two roads I actually drive every day, and one of 'em has been in design longer than I've lived here.
Lauren: Eleven years.
Mark: Eleven years. In design.
Lauren: Right, and that's the number people vote on, and it's the one number the thing won't hand you in one click. Which, you know. Huh.
Mark: Okay but is that hiding it, or is it just... nobody built that view 'cause nobody asked for it?
Lauren: I mean, both can be true.
Lauren: But it went up ten weeks before the extension's on the ballot, so — yeah, I'm going to be a jerk about which views got built.
Mark: >> Alright, the vote itself. November. I'll tell you right now, I vote yes and I don't read a word of it.
Lauren: [beat] Mm.
Mark: Because if it fails there's no better tax waiting behind it, there's nothing. The state's not covering it. Nothing gets built and I'm sitting in that same damn intersection in 2034.
Lauren: [flat] I'm voting yes too. Obviously.
Mark: Okay, so —
Lauren: [interrupting] But I'm mad about the shape of it. It's a sales tax. So the guy buying a truck battery on Savannah Highway on his lunch break is paying the same rate as anybody, and a chunk of what he pays widens a road that mostly exists because somebody approved four hundred houses out there with no road attached to them.
Mark: [conceding] Yeah.
Lauren: The subdivision got approved. The road got deferred to a referendum.
Lauren: That's a shitty way to build a county.
Mark: It is. And I'm still voting yes, 'cause the guy buying the truck battery is the same guy stuck in it every morning.
Lauren: I know. And saying yes quietly is exactly how you get the identical list of unbuilt roads in 2034.
Lauren: >> There's a public walkthrough thing, by the way. They're doing a session on the fifteenth. At noon.
Mark: [beat] Noon.
Lauren: Noon on a Tuesday.
Mark: [sighs] Here we go.
Lauren: I'm not — look. Same argument as North Charleston, right? If the only people who can show up are people whose job is showing up, the room tells you the roads are basically fine.
Mark: I think that's just staff scheduling, honestly. Noon's when the staff are in the building, that's all it is.
Mark: That's just how the calendar's always been set. Inertia.
Lauren: Inertia that lands the same way every single time.
Mark: Okay, but the fix for that is you record it and post it, not that you pay people forty bucks to show up.
Lauren: Recording's one-way, though. You can't ask a video a question.
Mark: [grudgingly] ...no.
Lauren: I'm not saying pay everybody. I'm saying if you want renters at a land-use meeting, stipends work and everybody knows they work.
Mark: >> Okay, hard left. Did you watch any of Darlington?
Lauren: Some of it. Late.
Mark: Man, that was a night. So — Saturday, lightning wipes out the entire day. No practice, no qualifying.
Mark: They set the field with zero on-track time.
Lauren: Which is ninety minutes up the road, and I want it on the record that I never once considered going.
Mark: [laughing] Then they move the green flag up ten minutes to beat the storms, and it still rains anyway. Red flag with about thirty laps left.
Lauren: And Bell finally wins one.
Mark: [rushed] Finally! Seven second-place finishes this year, and he hadn't won since Bristol last September, that's thirty-three races. First one ever at Darlington. He gets out of the car and yells "it's been too damn long" on the broadcast, and — yeah.
Mark: [laughing] Thirty-three races, man. That's the whole season right there.
Lauren: How'd he get it?
Mark: So after the red flag, Larson stays out on the old tires. Everybody else pits, Bell pits. Larson gets this huge lead on the restart and for a minute it looks brilliant, and then Bell just... runs him down. Goes low, clears him with eighteen to go.
Lauren: On tires.
Mark: On tires. Ty Gibbs second, Reddick third. Oh — and Briscoe was going for his third straight Southern 500, and he got a pit road penalty for running out of goddamn fuel at the end of stage two.
Mark: Led the thing, dropped to twentieth.
Lauren: [amused] Ran out of gas.
Mark: In a sport that is entirely — the whole sport is how much gas you have!
Lauren: >> Okay, so explain the new points thing to me, because I only half followed it.
Mark: [excited] It's the Chase, they brought it back. Sixteen drivers, points reset after the regular season, ten races, most points wins.
Mark: No rounds, no cutoffs, nobody gets eliminated at Martinsville.
Lauren: And a win's worth more now?
Mark: Fifty-five for a win, up from forty. Thirty-five for second. And they killed bankable playoff points completely, so you can't stockpile them in June anymore. Right now there's about a hundred points covering all sixteen guys, and it's decided at Homestead November eighth.
Lauren: [thoughtful] Okay. So the part I hate is still in there.
Mark: [pause] Which part?
Lauren: The reset. You run twenty-six races, and then they take all of it and turn it into — what, Hamlin gets twenty-five points for winning the regular season?
Mark: Twenty-five, yeah.
Lauren: So twenty-six races of actual racing becomes... a twenty-five point head start. Cool.
Mark: [conceding] Uh, yeah, no, I hear that.
Mark: Okay but dropping the elimination rounds, that's a real fix. Genuinely. Guy having his best year doesn't get knocked out at Martinsville 'cause somebody in front of him picked up a flat.
Lauren: Sure. They fixed the second-fakest part of it.
Mark: [laughs] That's cold.
Lauren: >> And then the Hamlin thing, which is the part I actually got annoyed about.
Mark: Lap two thirty-seven.
Lauren: McDowell hits him from behind, he goes into the turn four wall, and he gets on the radio and says the toe links are gone. And no caution comes out.
Lauren: He limps around and finishes eighteenth.
Mark: Right.
Lauren: So my read is cautions come out when the broadcast wants one. That one didn't, because the racing was good.
Mark: [beat] See, and I hate this, 'cause I think — I think they got it right.
Lauren: [flat] Mm. Bullshit.
Mark: No, hang on — the toe links weren't actually broken. The car kept going. If it's not shedding parts and it's not stopped on the track, they don't throw it.
Lauren: The driver said his suspension was gone.
Mark: Dude, drivers say all kinds of things going eighty into a wall.
Lauren: [dry] Which is exactly when I'd like somebody to believe them.
Mark: [exhales] Yeah. I don't love agreeing with race control. Felt weird all night.
Lauren: >> Different sport entirely. Emma Navarro's in the quarters at the Open.
Mark: [excited] Yes! Sunday night, right?
Lauren: Six-four, six-two over Kalinskaya, who had beaten her both times they'd played on hard courts.
Lauren: And it was all serve — Kalinskaya hit nine double faults, Navarro hit one. Six aces.
Mark: [excited] That's the furthest she's been there since the semis in '24, right?
Lauren: Furthest at any major since the Australian quarters in '25, yeah. Tuesday she gets Pegula.
Mark: Who is four-oh against her.
Lauren: Four-oh. And it's the first all-American women's quarterfinal at that tournament since 2015, so there's an American in the semis regardless.
Mark: [warmly] Local kid, man.
Lauren: [beat] Okay, so — the "Lowcountry native" framing.
Mark: [groans] Here we go.
Lauren: Pegula is the two-time reigning champion of the Credit One Charleston Open. Which is owned by Navarro's family. As is the stadium on Daniel Island. As is the seventy acres at Union Pier they're buying off the Ports Authority for two hundred and fifty million, where the housing is still described as, quote, incremental.
Mark: Okay but she didn't sign that deal.
Mark: She was in Strasbourg winning a five hundred in May.
Lauren: I know.
Mark: She lives here, she's twenty-sixth seed, she went to Virginia, she won an NCAA singles title — I'm allowed to want her to win a tennis match without running a goddamn land title search first.
Lauren: [conceding] You are. You absolutely are.
Lauren: I just notice that the same week nobody can tell me how many apartments fit on seventy acres of waterfront, we're all calling the family a hometown story.
Mark: [pause] Yeah, no, that's... yeah.
Mark: Everybody's signing something over to somebody this week, huh.
Lauren: [dry] Funny you say that. That's the thing I read Saturday.
Mark: >> Okay, so this is the one I wanted to do. It's a Canary Media piece, I got to it through Mother Jones. Wishek, North Dakota.
Mark: Eight hundred and fifty people, ninety miles southeast of Bismarck.
Lauren: Mm-hm.
Mark: Badger Wind Farm. Ninety-two turbines, two hundred fifty megawatts, built by Ørsted, the Danish outfit. Came online in January. It is far and away the biggest economic development project in that town's history.
Lauren: And a lot of the town wishes it wasn't there.
Mark: Loudly, yeah.
Mark: And the piece is basically two guys. There's George Wolff, fourth-generation farmer, thirty-five hundred acres, two three-megawatt turbines on his land, he's getting lease checks. And then there's Larry Wald, lifelong resident, used to be the mayor, who says the towers are the first thing you see coming into town and the last thing you see when you leave.
Lauren: [thoughtful] Okay. So — the piece wants that to be a mystery about rural feelings, and I don't think it is.
Mark: Say it.
Lauren: The lease money goes to whoever owns acreage. The county gets a tax based on annual generation, which is real money but it shows up as, like, a road grader and a line in a budget. And the view lands on everybody. Including every person in that town who rents and owns exactly zero acres.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Lauren: So somebody in an office decided who gets paid. It's a spreadsheet.
Lauren: And it's fixable, that's the maddening part — you cut checks to households instead of landowners and the whole fight goes away.
Mark: [flat] That's fucked, when you put it that way. Because the guy with thirty-five hundred acres was already the guy who was fine.
Lauren: The turbines are a wealth multiplier for people who already had land, and a skyline change for everybody else.
Mark: And I'll tell you how it happens, because I've sat in the permitting version of this. It's individual leases. Signed one at a time, quietly, so no two neighbors ever compare their numbers.
Lauren: [beat] Wait, is that deliberate?
Mark: I mean — it's efficient. Which ends up being the same thing. You get a consultant with a pretty rendering, couple hearings maybe forty people even hear about, and by the time that room's actually mad the approval's been sitting there eighteen months.
Lauren: Like Church Creek.
Mark: [exhales] Yep. Dominion certificated that line in 2024, six miles, and Seagate Village found out when a guy showed up wanting to buy land.
Mark: Nobody in that neighborhood was in any room.
Lauren: And still nobody will tell me who the customer is for that power.
Mark: [laughing] Every episode.
Lauren: Every episode until somebody says a name! Spartanburg went from fifty megawatts of projected load to four hundred fifty. Somebody knows who's plugging in.
Mark: Okay, so where I land on Wishek — the town's got to get a real say. A real one, teeth and all, even if that kills some projects. Because once people know they got steamrolled, that's the next twenty projects gone too.
Lauren: [pause] And that's where I get off.
Mark: I know.
Lauren: Because a local veto is how nothing gets built anywhere, ever, and then we all act surprised.
Lauren: Every project in the country is somebody's back forty.
Mark: So they just eat it? That's it?
Lauren: No — you make the money structural. Not a hearing where a nice person hears their concerns. Checks. To households, indexed, for the life of the thing. You buy the view because you're actually taking it.
Mark: And if they still say no?
Lauren: [beat] ...then I think that's a harder question than I want it to be at eight in the morning.
Mark: [amused] We're leaving it there.
Lauren: Sure. Oh — the reporter did the whole trip in a rented F-150, which is somehow the detail that stuck with me.
Mark: [delighted] Okay but what's on the radio, though, that's the real —
Lauren: [laughing] Don't.
Mark: >> Okay, no, actually. What do you listen to? At eleven at night, on the floor of that closet, flashlight in your teeth.
Lauren: [pause] A playlist.
Mark: [flat] A playlist.
Lauren: A playlist I made. Which is different.
Mark: Alright, hold that, because I want to make my case first. Best way to watch a race is TV muted, MRN on.
Lauren: Radio call.
Mark: Radio call. Because on the radio somebody's got to describe the whole track, all of it, every lap. TV gives you one camera and then a replay of a thing you already watched.
Lauren: Mm, okay, that's a real point.
Mark: And the trades are the last people on earth who still listen to something live, start to finish, no scrubbing. Job trailer, radio's on at six-forty in the morning, nobody's picking tracks.
Lauren: [dry] Until somebody hauls in their own speaker.
Mark: [laughs] Okay, that is a real thing and there is a rule. Whoever's there first at six picks. That's it.
Mark: That's the whole social order.
Lauren: [skeptical] Is it whoever's first, or is it whoever's loudest?
Mark: It's whoever's first.
Lauren: Because in my experience a sub shows up at eight with a bigger speaker and the rule evaporates.
Mark: [pause] ...he has to get there first, though.
Lauren: [flat] Sure he does.
Lauren: >> Okay, so here's what I actually can't stand. The auto-generated station. The "we made this for you" thing.
Mark: You don't use any of it?
Lauren: I mean — no. Hand-built playlist, I add to it maybe twice a month, and I skip every station the app tries to build me.
Lauren: And the second something is labeled an AI DJ I'm out of the room.
Mark: Why, though? I've used it, it's — honestly it's pretty good at it.
Lauren: Because it's a shuffle button with a marketing budget. It's tuned for how long I stay, not for what I actually want to hear.
Mark: [amused] You know what this is, right?
Lauren: Don't.
Mark: This is the fifteen-dollar eBay ten-gig card.
Lauren: [flat] It is not.
Mark: It's exactly it! You're picking the worse experience because you own it and you can undo it.
Lauren: [pause] ...I hate that that landed.
Mark: [laughing] I know. I watched it land.
Lauren: The card worked, eventually.
Mark: For you. And now you're its support department till the day you die.
Mark: >> One more music thing and then we're done. Holiday weekend, small rooms — pay the cover. Just pay it. Ten bucks at the door goes to the band that night, in cash, in a way basically nothing else does.
Lauren: Agreed on the cover.
Mark: Good.
Lauren: My problem is why it has to matter that much. It matters because streaming pays them damn near nothing and everybody's agreed to be chill about it.
Lauren: So whether a musician eats now depends on whether enough of us feel civic on a Saturday night.
Mark: [conceding] Yeah, but the ten bucks still helps.
Lauren: It does. Cheering for small venues isn't a payment system, though.
Mark: Look, there's a place on —
Lauren: [interrupting] Nope. Three things left, and one of them is a horse.
Mark: [laughing] Fine.
Lauren: >> Okay. Thursday and Friday at the Gaillard, and this one's actually this week. The Post and Courier had it. It's 9/11 Day — up to eight hundred volunteers in the grand ballroom packing a hundred and eighty-three thousand red lentil jambalaya kits for the Lowcountry Food Bank.
Mark: Wow.
Lauren: Setup's the tenth, packing's the eleventh, shifts run seven-thirty to one. You pre-register at volunteer dot nine-eleven-day dot org. It's the first year Charleston's done it, and it's part of a national thing — fifty-plus cities, seventeen million meals.
Mark: [warmly] That's great.
Lauren: And their spokesperson said the specific ask is people who can lift fifty pounds without hurting themselves, to load meals onto trucks.
Mark: [flat] And that's the slot that doesn't fill. Every single time.
Mark: Everybody wants the table with the scoop, man. Nobody wants the truck.
Lauren: >> Next one. Guy in Chattanooga named Geoffrey Joynt, forty-six, has never set foot in Charleston, and he's finding ruins here from his house.
Mark: [surprised] Wait, wait — how?
Lauren: Public LiDAR. It's aerial laser scans, and the useful trick is you can filter the trees out. So you're looking at bare ground. He's turning up Confederate earthworks on James Island near the Stono, another fort on Johns Island, shell rings that are thousands of years old, and the old horse track and the Confederate prison camp under Hampton Park.
Mark: [delighted] Okay that's amazing. That's — dude, from his couch in Chattanooga.
Lauren: [dry] It is. I'm also a little irritated about it.
Mark: Why?
Lauren: Because that data's been public and free this whole time and it took a guy in Chattanooga to look at it.
Mark: >> Last one, and it's the horse. Saturday afternoon, I-95 near Walterboro, mile marker fifty-five. Northbound semi hauling a horse trailer, suspected blowout on the front right tire, it goes into the median, takes out about a hundred feet of guardrail, rolls onto its side and slides into the southbound lanes.
Lauren: [flat] God.
Mark: Racehorse trapped inside, one leg wedged in a side window, and it's past ninety-five degrees out. So they've got three firefighter-paramedics who actually know horses working from a back window to keep it calm, ladders up onto the trailer, positive-pressure fans blowing cooler air in, fresh water. And when the power tools scared it, they stopped and called animal services and the vets in.
Lauren: They stopped cutting.
Mark: Right. Vet gives it a sedative, they get it out. Injuries, but nothing life-threatening, and as far as I can tell nobody came out of that seriously hurt.
Mark: Which — holy shit, given how it started.
Lauren: [exhales] That's a good one to end on.
Lauren: So that's us. Thanks for listening, thanks for spending part of a holiday with two people arguing about a dashboard.
Mark: [amused] A good dashboard.
Lauren: With a missing filter.
Mark: We're back Wednesday, the ninth. And if it does half of what they're saying tonight, uh — just stay off the roads.
Mark: It's going to sit right on top of us.
Lauren: Seventy-four and soaked. Take care of each other, we'll see you Wednesday.