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Date Published: October 21, 2004
Campaign coffers set for final push
By LESLIE CANTU
Item Staff Writer
lesliec@theitem.com
With a little more than a week left to push their
candidacies, the four state Senate candidates in Districts 35 and 36
are in wildly divergent financial positions.
State Sen. Phil
Leventis, D-Sumter, has $11,470 on hand, according to his
pre-election filing with the Senate Ethics Committee. Challenger
Dickie Jones, on the other hand, has $110,198 left to spend.
In the last period, Leventis out-raised and outspent Jones,
raising $58,223 and spending $71,655. Jones raised $40,424 in the
last period and spent $34,222. However, he has also been the
beneficiary of advertising paid for by the South Carolina Republican
Party.
State Sen. John Land, D-Manning, still has $53,816 in
his campaign account, but his opponent, Bob Gibbons, has only $211
left.
Jones received 13 donations of $1,000 in the last
period, including $3,000 from poultry and pork farms and $1,000 from
the Farm Bureau.
The South Carolina Farm Bureau and the
South Carolina Poultry Federation pressed for passage of the
“right-to-farm” bill in the spring. The Farm Bureau saw the bill as
protection from regulations that differ from county to county by not
allowing local governments to pass more stringent requirements than
those passed by the General Assembly, and said the bill would still
allow counties to choose not to zone an area agricultural if it
didn’t want poultry farms there. Livestock regulations would be
science-based under DHEC’s administration, the organizations
argued.
Leventis opposed the bill because he said it removed
control from the local level.
“What the agricultural industry
wants is for Columbia to issue permits for confined animal feeder
operations and for the local government to have no control over
that,” Leventis said.
Leventis said he has assisted
agricultural businesses like Goldkist in the past by protecting a
tax loophole that doesn’t require them to pay a tax on the fuel used
to heat barns, because passing the cost on to consumers would raise
the price prohibitively.
“I don’t want Columbia directing
what goes on in Sumter and Lee,” Leventis said. “Sumter and Lee have
passed laws to set standards for where confined animal feeder
operations can go.”
Jones said the right to farm legislation
was important to Goldkist, Sumter County’s largest employer after
Shaw Air Force Base. The legislation would have made life easier for
Goldkist, which operates out of several different counties and faces
different regulations in each one, he said.
“There is a
provision in that bill that this would not intrude on the county’s
home rule,” Jones said. “A place like Goldkist ... they need some
kind of uniform regulation that would apply across the
board.
“This is one of those issues where state regulation is
probably better than local regulation,” he said.
Jones said
Leventis wouldn’t listen to Goldkist when it approached him about
the bill. He also said that South Carolina already has one of the
toughest livestock regulations in the nation.
Nancy Vinson
of the Coastal Conservation League doesn’t agree with that. She said
the setbacks that DHEC promulgated for hog and poultry farms after
the Swine Bill of 1996 are minimums that are more lax than the
setbacks suggested by the American Society of Agricultural
Engineers.
The society recommends one-mile setbacks from
public areas while the state requires only 600-foot setbacks, she
said, and it recommends one-quarter to one-half mile setbacks from
neighboring residences while the state only requires 1,000-foot
setbacks.
Jones said 1,500-foot setbacks would force farms to
have at least 266 acres to conduct business.
Most of the
farms interested in this bill aren’t mom-and-pop operations,
Leventis said.
“I have held hearings on things that are
directly related to this and had a lot of farmers who share the same
concerns I do about land-use planning,” Leventis said. He added that
he is trying to find some middle ground on this
issue.
Goldkist deserves more consideration, Jones said,
because they have been good neighbors.
“The way Goldkist
works, if there’s severe objections, they don’t want to go in
there,” he said.
Leventis received 10 donations of $1,000 in
the last period, including $1,000 from Vinson, and a $5,000 donation
from the Senate Democratic Caucus.
Leventis and Jones will
meet at 7 p.m. tonight at a debate in the Nettles Building
auditorium on the campus of the University of South Carolina Sumter.
The public is invited to attend the debate, which will be broadcast
on WDXY 1240 AM and WIBZ 95.5 FM.
Contact Staff Writer
Leslie Cantu at lesliec@theitem.com or
803-774-1250.
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October 21, 2004 
