The Manning Times interviewed Mac Bagnal and Tim Fry, candidates for the upcoming Mayoral Election in the Town of Summerton. This position was left vacant after the sudden death of Mayor Tony Junious in January. We presented both candidates with the same questions, in the same order, which they answered in real time. After each interview, the candidates were given the opportunity to clarify or expand their answers via email. However, broad changes to their original answers were not permitted. Clarifications are noted accordingly. This is what they had to say:
Mac Bagnal
Manning Times: Why are you running for mayor?
Mac Bagnal: I’m running, again, for mayor because I know there’s still work to be done in Summerton. As most everyone knows, I was mayor for eight years. I didn’t really know if I wanted to run again at that time but realized that there was still work to do. There’s always work to do. The citizens approached me this time about coming in and just helping provide my leadership and experience to the town.
MT: Who encouraged you to run?
MB: I’ve had several council members come to me, once they saw that there was an opening. So, what I call “leaders in the community,” that all of us look up to, asked me to bring back my leadership and my experience. I don’t really want to get into names of people, but I would use [say] leaders in the community.
MT: What is your previous political experience?
MB: I was mayor for eight years. I tried not to jump into mayor, I asked to be on council for a couple of years. Just to kind of get into get some experience. There really was no time for that. The mayor that was before me finished his term and then chose not to run again. I had a good many people come and ask me to run for mayor at that time because I do run and own several businesses in our community. [They] felt like being a business owner, running businesses, having people skills, knowledge of budgets and auditors, and working with different leaders in the community, that it would be a good idea. And as with any job, it took a little while to get on my feet and how everything works. You have a different kind of chain of command, if you will, to go through and to get some more staff. We had some staff, but we needed more staff. And they quickly gained experience and then we started doing some projects for Summerton and the community to kind of move forward. Obviously, a big concern for Summerton is water and sewage. We’ve started putting up some what we call match money. It was towards the end of my eight-year term that we put up some match money. Whenever you work on those kinds of projects, and you got people like Senator Johnson that helped us go seek those funds, as many people have heard about in the last six or eight months, he really was the one that that helped us go get those monies. But the municipality itself had to have match money to help fund that project. That project is going to be coming through soon, but what a lot of people don’t understand is small, rural towns such as Summerton, there’s just not a lot of revenue. Period. There’s not a lot of industry here. A lot of people don’t even know what a homestead tax is but because we’re older town, older community, a lot of people get a tax break on their homes once they reach a certain age. Then we just don’t have new neighborhoods being built in our town limits that brings in a big tax base. Summerton’s an old town that people love and want to live here, to raise the kids and walk the dog and all that stuff. But still, it’s a lot of work to do to bring it up to speed and get more of a tax revenue that we can do more projects with. Loves out by the interstate has been a huge asset with our water department, sewage department. Obviously, people stop in and they pay taxes on different things they get from gas to merchandise in the store. All that stuff adds up and helps but it’s just hard when you’re in an old, rural town just to make the money work each month or each year.
MT: Outside of politics, how have you been involved in the community?
MB: I was born in Clarendon Memorial, then my father passed away. I was adopted, moved out of town and then to Orangeburg. I graduated high school from Orangeburg, went to college. I was not successful there, moved back to Summerton and immediately joined the South Carolina Waterfowl Association as a committee member in 1995. I was about 19 and then when I was about 20 or 21, I joined the Junior Chamber [of Commerce]. I was in the Junior Chamber for almost 20 years. That’s the kind of an organization that does a lot of stuff for Clarendon County. I don’t really have to say a lot about it. The Junior Chamber has a very well-known name in this community. I’ve volunteered at my school, where my kids graduated, Clarendon Hall. They spent their entire life at that school, so I was a volunteer there on the booster club and helping with sports. I was also on the board of directors at the school. My family and I go to Summerton Southern Methodist where I’ve been on the board of deacons there for probably about 10 years. We also do other volunteer projects throughout the community. A couple buddies and myself started and founded Duck Fest. Basically, we were just trying to, when I was Mayor and also a citizen of Summerton, we’re just trying to find ways to be creative and come up with something that’s fun and festive. A lot of people don’t understand that politicians don’t control grocery stores. They don’t control Ace Hardware. They don’t control different entities that come into town. Our job is to provide water, sewage, and protection to the best of our abilities for our town. Anything else we can do, obviously helps the community and stuff like that, but you know, I have been involved in DuckFest since its inception. Some other stuff that we do as volunteer work is BirdFest. It used to be over the plantation and now it’s put on by Waterfowl. So, still volunteer with that. I’m a busy bee. I’m one of these people that if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I learned that quote many years ago. I never wanted to get into the politics but I really don’t look at it as politics. I look at it as, mayor or anybody on council, as a way of giving back to your community because if you go in there and you give it your all, it’s almost like a second job. Between the people that come into your house and ask you about water bills or people calling you anytime day or night to question what’s going on. You have to love what you do and love your community, or you’ll get burned out very quickly with those kinds of conversations. But I think community service is very important to not just me and my family, but to anybody, especially young people growing up nowadays. They need to get and become a part of something in their community. So yes. We do a lot, the Bagnal family.
MT: What are the three most common issues voters are bringing up to you as you campaign?
MB: The amount of water leaks in Summerton. As everyone knows, Summerton is an old town. A lot of this stuff should have been dealt with, in my opinion, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Because this water problem has not just happened, it’s been an issue for a while, which is old pipes. It’s just old sewage. A lot of our sewage lines are old and decrepit. I’m just going to be honest, when it rains, we get rainwater going into our sewage water. So, when it goes
to our sewage ponds, that’s not all sewage water. That’s a lot of rainwater from over the years. We have broken pipes in the ground that we don’t know about until we dig or have an issue with somebody’s yard on the street. The next one will be enough jobs. There’s not a lot of jobs here. Loves was a great asset for Summerton. When I was mayor, we had Pilot Travel Center coming. I’m not sure what happened there, but my first few days or weeks in office, I’m going to piggyback on some of the stuff that we were working on when I left, find out what’s going on, and why they’re not here. I do know we were working with Dollar General when I left and they’re building that now, so a lot of good stuff is happening. But we just got to get more for our people. And that’s the top three. But I can tell you some other stuff. I can go into protection of our families, police protection. There’s some other stuff that we need.
We need beautification in Summerton. But like I said, I can list four, five or six things with the first two I mentioned, and they’d be tied for third or fourth place.
MT: If elected, what would be your immediate priorities?
MB: I’ll be real honest. I’m going to be if I’m elected, I’m going to be going in with pretty much a fresh council. Right now, we have the two council members that were at the last meeting. They didn’t have enough for a quorum, but at the last meeting they had two council members, and those council members have, I think, about two years experience or so. I’m going to be going in with a lot of new faces that have never done this kind of stuff before. So my first priority, I’d like to have an audit done to see where we’re at as far as the town goes. Then obviously, I don’t want anyone, including myself, to come in with an agenda. Let’s listen to what some of the folks have come to us and talked to us about in the last couple of weeks and see what their concerns are. I’ve already mentioned most of them. Let’s dive in and see what we can do about it. Obviously, money is a big issue here. We don’t have the money to go and hire engineers to see what we need. We got to figure out a way to save money and when I left as Mayor, we were putting up a good bit of money each month. To be honest, Loves is that big asset. We were able to put a lot of that money in savings because it was extra funding for the town. We need to have some kind of feasibility study done. One of the big assets for me and my staff was Charlie Barrineau at the Municipal Association. If we didn’t know it because we were new or we just didn’t know it, I’d advise our town administrator to contact Charlie. Once we get in there, get boots on the ground, I’d like to bring back some stuff that we were working on. When I left, Summerton has a lot of old water meters, and we’ve been able to, under my leadership before, we were replacing water meters. One of the council members told me the other day that we’re still replacing some water meters. So that’s good. That’s important to make sure people are actually paying for what they use. Some of these water meters have gotten older. Then have some kind of study done to tell us what we can do, how we can do it. And the growth of Exit 108 is really important to our town and community. I’ve always told people I’m not just the mayor of Summerton, I look at Summerton as a community. The 29148 zip code is our community. Many people remember the flood of 2015. I was pretty much told that from Rambay to Goat Island to Princess Pond to Panola to Paxville was my area and I still considered them folks as my people. Those are the people that come into our community and shop at our stores and eat at our restaurants and get gas at our different locations. We still heavily depend on those folks to come into our town and use our resources. I’ll continue to call those people our people. So, getting the studies done and continuing to ask people to come in and support our community will be huge. People from Manning come over here and do business at the hardware store, eat at the Summerton Diner, little things like that. All that stuff is very popular, but we need to figure some more ways with some investors to continue to grow Exit 108 and keep that growing out there. Also, figure ways with these studies of how we can get the Main Street Summerton, some of those buildings, used for businesses that are open every day to the public.
MT: Do you think the main street/downtown area is healthy and successful? And if you don’t, what would you do to change that?
MB: Main street/downtown is not healthy. I could not tell you how successful it is. I do know we have several businesses there that seem to be doing well. They’ve been here a long time. That usually answers the question, how strong they are and how long they’ve been here. So, we do have several businesses that have been here a long time. We do have several of the buildings and there’s been some turnover. There’s a little bit of weakness there. One of the things that we did before, we were working on, is who owns all those buildings and what can we do about them being dilapidated. [People continually ask] why don’t you go in there and condemn those buildings and take them. And I say, well, you know, we can do that. We can change the name to the Town of Summerton, but the municipality doesn’t have the funds to go in and fix that building up and rent it or sell it. From a political standpoint, that’s not our job, not our obligation. We want to seek people to come in to use those buildings. But we’re not we’re not in the business of owning businesses, that if that makes sense. We’re in the business of providing you with clean water, sewage, fire protection, police protection, trying to raise your family at the best you can. But I have talked to a couple of council members, and we do want to send letters out to the owners of those builders. We did that before, with our previous administration and it got nowhere. Somebody’s still paying taxes on them, or what have you, because they’re still there. They’re not being taken over by the county and put on the county tax sale. That is one of my concerns and if I’m a successful winner, I want to finish figuring out what’s going on Main Street. And there’s some other places throughout the town that need some cleaning up and fixing and I’ll just kind of leave it at that. If somebody drops into town, it wouldn’t take them long to identify the areas that need some more TLC. And as anyone knows, this stuff has to have policies and procedures. You just can’t say I want you to do this, to do that. You have to go through the format and formality of setting policies and procedures. Then you got to have staff that execute it. We got a bunch of new staff members up there. Not sure what each and everyone’s job description is, but all that stuff will be learned very quickly. And you know, there’ll be a lot of stuff addressed when we get in.
MT: How do you plan to involve residents in the decision-making process in Summerton?
MB: Well, the first thing is, you got to have citizens that want to be involved. As anyone knows, nowadays it’s hard to find people to get involved with anything, much less community projects. There are people already saying, what are you going to do about this? Why did you let this happen? You know, just the naysayers. But we got to have people willing to get on a committee that helps set guidelines for residents. Then, you got to have somebody to help execute. And my phone’s always available. My doors are always open to anybody that wants to help do stuff. I tried with the last council to appoint different subcommittee heads for the beautification of 95, have a council member and some people to go find contacts and phone numbers and what we can do out there. I tried to have one council member go work with the local schools to pick up trash. That’s something that the community can get involved with, the way our town looks. Right now, DuckFest pays to have our flowerbeds and our entrances into the town redone a couple of times a year. Citizens that want to get involved to help plant flowers. I know some people that have put flowers up around the Town Hall, that kind of stuff is important as we have a lot of outside travel, people traveling through our town. There are ways that people can get involved as much or as little as they want. There’s different zoning and different committees people can be on. There are different things that I would like for my council members to go and be a part of, to find people in the community and build more subcommittees to help make Summerton great again. If you talked to some people that were born and raised here, before 95 was built this town was thriving. Other towns, all along the 95 corridor, have really struggled and Summerton is one of them. Some businesses maintain and continue but that was really hard. I still say we have to figure out a way to get people to get off at the 108, come through our town and get back at 115 or reverse. We don’t need all those people to get off, but we need a percentage of them. Getting off and visiting our shops and visiting restaurants and stopping. I’d love to have some kind of tourist attraction here. Briggs versus Elliott is a huge part of our town and community. If there was a way to have a little visitation area and museum or some kind of little welcome center, that would be huge. But then again, it takes money. I’ve heard about the library, and I’ve heard about this and that. I’d love to incorporate some of the stuff and make this, not really a tourist destination or attraction, but some sort of stop. Get out of your car, spread your legs, walk around and see a few things. Visit a little library or a little museum or do a little research about the town and the community itself. There’s a lot a lot of history here, dating back to the Civil War.
Clarification: DuckFest also pays for and coordinates the town’s yearly Easter egg hunt and Christmas tree lighting ceremony with Santa.
MT: Has there ever been a time where you’ve had to do something at work because of a policy that when it gets to your values?
MB: Well, I’m a very common-sense person. I’ve been very blessed to have common sense. I don’t have as much book sense or as much schooling as others have. A lady told me one day after a council meeting, she said, Mayor, you laid the hay down, where us goats can eat it. I said, huh? [She said] you are just a common-sense person, you just said it where everybody should understand what you’re saying. I’m the kind of person, if I have a problem at home or work or town council, let’s lay it out. At the end of the day, we might agree to disagree, but I really can’t say that I’ve ever had an incident to where there’s really been hard feelings, or somebody went against something wholeheartedly that I believe in. I think at the end of the day, most of the time, we’ve come up with some kind of compromise. One of the things that I tell my children and I tell other young folks, is just because I do something a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s the way it has to be done. This is the way I do it, but there’s multiple ways of doing stuff. I believe that out in the community, whether it’s at work or whether it’s politicking, as I go around and knock on people’s doors and ask them to vote for me, support me, and they asked me some of the same questions that you have ... I just want to be a straight up person. A common-sense person. We’re a Christian family. I’m a Godly man. We put Him first and foremost in everything we do, and I think if we lay that upon Him, whether it’s at work, or whether it’s at church, or whether it’s in that council room, or whatever. I think we’ll all get farther in life, and I think at the end of the day, we should come up with some kind of compromise or some kind of policy that will suit almost everyone that’s involved. I don’t know if I tip-toed around your question or if I’ve answered the question, but I try to answer from my heart.
MT: What is your greatest professional achievement?
MB: Professional Achievement? Oh. I don’t know. Because I don’t think I’m where I’m at in life professionally or being a father or a husband or whatever, by myself. I don’t think I did it by myself. But I feel like I was successful as a mayor, for eight years. I will say it took a couple years to kind of learn how things work and get staff to learn what’s going on in politics. I’ve been a successful owner of a landscaping company for 23 years and I do have some rental houses. It’s nice to be able to put people in a place when they don’t have somewhere to go. Also, my family, we own the Summerton Diner. If you look at the greatest accomplishments, professionally, is being able to employ 25 people, between my wife [at the diner] and I. I think that’s a great accomplishment, that we didn’t even think about whenever we decided to buy the Summerton Diner, but we provide enough for people to make money to provide for their families. I think that’s a great accomplishment that neither one of us really thought about. We started this and really don’t think about it on a daily basis other than we’re just like any other business. We need good employees that will come to work hard every day. So, could that be a great accomplishment? Owning a couple of businesses in the town of Summerton this successful? Sure. I know you said professional, but you know none of this is possible without having God first and surrounding yourself with like-minded people, with positive minded people. There’s so much negativity in this world. So, I think it’s a lot of contributing factors that that make people successful or “professional.”
MT: What do you feel sets you apart from the other candidate?
MB: The biggest thing that sets me apart is being in this community for 25 years. Knowing people, watching families grow. Watching kids grow up and seeing the needs of the town, understanding budgets, knowing how to work with all kinds of people, the negative people, the rich people, the poor people, the educated people, the non- educated people, I think me living here, raising our kids in this community. Just having an interaction with folks, all 360 degrees of this town and this community. I just know so many people and I think that’s a huge asset. Like I said, I own a business here, employing people. We do for others when we can.
MT: What neighborhood do you live in? Why? What are your favorite places to spend time in town?
MB: To be honest, I live where I live, because it was the only house for sale when we decided to get married. That’s the God’s honest truth. And it really wasn’t for sale. I knew the family lived there and they were in limbo whether they were to add onto this house or move. I went up to [the previous owner] one day and I said, man, I’m getting married in about three months. I got to have somewhere to live. So, I live on Main Street Summerton. We were fortunate enough to be right beside my wife’s, Lisa, mom and dad. Then, we had kids and that helped tremendously. The things that I enjoy the most about his town, and have enjoyed, is watching our kids ride bikes throughout this town till they got old enough to ride a golf cart. Living in a safe community, knowing that you can put a child out down the road and walk around or bike ... but I may be getting off subject. But at the time we bought the house, we didn’t know that much about what it was like to raise a family and stuff. We just knew Summerton. We love to get out this time of year, when it’s nice and pretty. Riding golf carts and seeing people sitting on the porch swing and started speaking to them while they’re watering the flowers and next thing you know, it’s dark and we’re like, man, we need to get home and get supper. To kind of answer your question, Summerton is fun and festive. A lot of good, positive folks that live here. That’s just some memories. My kids are now 18 and 21 now. But as they were growing up, just some good memories of just running around, seeing people do the same thing we do. Even at Christmas time, going around and looking at Christmas lights. Stuff like that, just some positive stuff that I liked in our 23 years of living here.
Tim Fry
Manning Times: Why are you running for mayor?
Tim Fry: I’m running for mayor to serve the community. At this point in my career, I’ve retired from Continental Tire in Sumter. And as part of my retirement, I’m looking for other opportunities and ways to serve the community. It was unfortunate what happened to Mayor Julius, but the position for mayor opened up and I chose to pursue it.
MT: Who encouraged you to run?
TF: I have several friends from the church that have been talking to me for several years now about running for mayor, including some former council members.
MT: What is your previous political experience?
TF: I really don’t have any previous political experience. I do count that as a plus because sometimes political experience can get in your way of getting the job done.
MT: Outside of politics, how have you been involved in the community?
TF: Basically, through the [Summerton Baptist Church] activities.
MT: What are the three most common issues voters are bringing up to you as you campaign?
TF: Well, the first one is the water system. The water system is in pretty bad shape. The second is lack of services here. And the third is there’s no grocery store available within the short distance here in the town. Everyone has to go to Manning or Santee.
MT: If elected, what are your immediate priorities?
TF: The first thing we’re going to look at is the integrity of the system here. I’m going to ask for a financial audit of the system here so that we have an idea of what we’re looking at accounting wise. That’s the short-term goal. The long-term goal would be the water system. We’ve got funds available, if we want to choose to utilize them, to upgrade the system. There are infrastructure issues here in the city that prevent us from expanding like I would like to. For example, in order to service the community with the grocery store, we have to have about 2400 people in the local surroundings. In order to do that, it’d be great to have housing, but our infrastructure won’t allow that. So, we need to expand our infrastructure so that we can develop and implement, what I would consider as, affordable housing.
MT: Do you think the main streets/downtown area is healthy and successful? If not, what would you do to change that?
TF: It’s definitely not successful. We just had Logan’s pizza close down again for the second time. There’s limited traffic, there’s limited opportunities to be down there. A very difficult situation, as in many towns with the downtown area. But adding to the local area’s population and surrounding area is going to help to get traffic down there. I’d like to see more of the smaller businesses, like the artisan shop, expand down there. That would be a good draw for people to come down to Summerton. We need to upgrade and beautify the area because it’s got dilapidated buildings that I think need to be torn down. Well, they have to deal with that when we get with council and make those kinds of decisions. But really, a rework of the area. Adding people looking for businesses that will be able to thrive on less traffic. Maybe tourist type businesses would be great to put in there. We’ll have to see what we can do to get that done. But it is a very difficult situation anywhere in the country for the for the downtowns.
MT: How do you plan to involve residents in the decision-making process in Summerton?
TF: Well, we’re going to change the system from the executive level to open forums. I know right now, we have internet access to broadcast the town meetings, live meetings, so there’ll be open meetings or open forums. I want to eliminate the need for people to come in with Freedom of Information Act [requests]. They come into the office and get the information they need, the information they want. This town belongs to the people, not to the mayor or to the council. So, open doors and communicate as best we can with the community and ask about their needs and what they want.
MT: Has there ever been a time where you’ve had to do something at work because of a policy that went against your values?
TF: Well, the one thing I think of is in the past with, not necessarily in South Carolina, because I did work in other states and have vast amount of experience. I had a conflict with secure information with my security clearance, where there was a foreign company that had an entity within our company, and they had asked for military specifications. I couldn’t give them that information. So, I had to resolve that directly with the supervisor and explain to him the exact law. He didn’t really understand what the law was concerning security information. But once we resolved that situation, we went back to the requester and explained clearly to them that the law would not allow us to do that. It was cleared up then and we had no issues.
MT: What is your greatest professional achievement?
TF: Well, I think there’s several, but I like to talk about my work with Secret Service and an application with the presidential limousine. I work directly with the Secret Service and developing what would be the next generation limousine with security systems. My application was the wheel division, and I was very successful in doing that. And even today, that current application is on the vehicle now. Even several years later, that is still the working application for the vehicle.
MT: What do you feel sets you apart from the other candidate?
TF: Well, I have a vast background in manufacturing, vast background in design and development engineering. I have 47 years in industry. I have an electrical engineering degree. I have an Industrial Technology Degree. I’ve lived here for 10 years, so I have a strong foothold here. My wife and I intend to stay here. We’re going to stay here as long as we’re allowed to stay here.
MT: What neighborhood do you live in? Why? What are your favorite places to spend time in town?
TF: Well, we live on the edge of the town, and we just love it here. It’s just a great area to be. We spent more time in Manning because of the restaurants and some other things, but really enjoy our time at the church. We enjoy the people there and the activities that we have locally here. That’s more of an answer to your question, is really the church is kind of our focus here.
