electrician in Indian Land, SC

Road experts say a fix for the U.S. 521 and S.C. 160 intersection in Indian Land could take a design they haven’t seen anything quite like in this region.

One option under discussion would allow only right or left turns off of S.C. 160. Any traffic heading straight across S.C. 160, or turning left in either direction off of U.S. 521, would have to drive north or south along U.S. 521 past the intersection and make a U-turn to get to their destination.

David Hooper, administrator with the Rock Hill-Fort Mill Area Transportation Study, said the proposal is one piece of a larger puzzle along U.S. 521, or Charlotte Highway, where growth continues to bring more and more traffic.

“We’re having to get more innovative here to make all the movements work the way they should,” Hooper said.

Bradley Reynolds with engineering company WSP updated the RFATS policy committee in late February on a months-long corridor study for U.S. 521. It runs almost nine miles from the North Carolina line to Waxhaw Highway. The study includes upgrade recommendations for intersections at S.C. 160, Marvin Road, Jim Wilson Road and Dobys Bridge Road. Some side roads heading into the highway could be widened too.

All options studied involve widening Charlotte Highway to six lanes.

A traditional widening would keep signalized intersections largely as they are.

A superstreet option would have traffic take right turns onto the main highway and drive a distance before U-turning to create what ordinarily would be a straight or left turn movement. It’s similar to Fort Mill Parkway recently had installed at the new Elizabeth subdivision. A third option would be a hybrid of the other two.

Traditional widening for the full corridor would cost an estimated $102.7 million. Widening with superstreets would cost $142.6 million. A hybrid option would cost $114.6 million.

Hooper said those costs are high, but compared them to comparable projects like the I-77 and Carowinds Boulevard interchange upgrades. The Lancaster County panhandle has had a 90% growth rate two decades in a row, Hooper said, and in recent years has grown at unprecedented rates within the region.

“This area, this panhandle, is the single fastest growing area from here to Hickory,” Hooper said.

The corridor study is an attempt to help with growing traffic concerns in the panhandle. More work is needed to nail down exactly what will be done and how it will be funded. The new study began as a search for what road planneers can do, and how much it might cost.

“We wanted to be able to answer those first two questions first,” Hooper said.

Intersections off Charlotte Highway aren’t all the same. Some are largely developed with businesses. Some have more room north or south on the main highway than others. So, the same improvements don’t fit each intersection.

A superstreet concept wouldn’t fit at 521 and Dobys Bridge Road. Instead, traditional widening is proposed there and at nearby Collins and River roads. It’s the same at Jim Wilson Road. At Marvin Road, the superstreet concept seems to make the most sense.

It’s at S.C. 160 where neither works as well. Superstreets tend to work well when a smaller, neighborhood road feeds onto a much larger one. The way homes from Elizabeth in Fort Mill will feed onto Fort Mill Parkway. But S.C. 160 is no small road.

“You have two major corridors here,” said Brian Carnes, who represents Indian Land on Lancaster County Council.

Reynolds said there are a few examples of four-lane highways with designs like the one proposed at 521 and 160. Reynolds isn’t aware of a six-lane version. A proposal shows two lanes each turning right and left onto 521 from Fort Mill to the west. Coming from the east there’s one lane each for right and left turns. Both directions have two lanes of traffic coming off 521 and onto 160.

Charlotte Highway would be three lanes each way, with one more turn lane onto S.C. 160 in each direction.

The new study looks at bicycle or multipurpose lanes. It looks at intersection design options. It doesn’t detail options for roundabouts.

“It would be a challenging proposition,” Reynolds said.

Roundabouts got a preliminary look, Hooper said, but the volume of traffic on U.S. 521 and six lanes planned there quickly steered the study elsewhere.

“On a high-demand corridor,” Hooper said of roundabouts, “it could have a destructive effect.”

The study looked at traffic conditions out to 2045. Improvements could increase traffic counts in some areas, up to 40% between S.C. 160 and Jim Wilson Road and 25% from Jim Wilson to Rehobeth Road. Other areas would see reduced traffic counts, between 10% and 20% at Marvin, Shelley Mullis and Henry Harris roads.

There isn’t always a straight line, though, between road improvements and decreased drive times.

“If we widen the road, more traffic is there,” Reynolds said. “The opportunity for more traffic is there.”

The study found the average speed difference is almost negligible between doing nothing and any of the three improvement options. The superstreet concept actually adds total and vehicle stop delays compared to doing nothing. The difference is, the improvement models all funnel considerably more traffic through the system.

Without any upgrades, the system would see an estimated 40,900 to 53,600 vehicles per day by 2045. Upgrades like those in the study would increase those daily counts to 45,800 to 67,200 vehicles.

A large, prime piece of Fort Mill property once slated for new homes is one of several large property sales in February. All at $1 million or more across York, Lancaster and Chester counties.

Combined, eight such sales total more than $30 million.

Here, according to land records from each county, are the largest property sales for February:

? A Rock Hill hotel is listed as a $15.8 million sale on Feb. 7, but it’s a re-recorded transaction with the same owner. Waxhaw-based Raaj Kumar Hotel Investments owns the four-story, more than 66,000-square-foot Home2 Suites hotel at Old Springdale Road and Bilwyn Drive, near the Galleria mall.

? Kestrell Timber bought four parcels from Charlotte-based BMWM Timber in Chester County on Feb. 8 for a combined $5.8 million. Together, the properties total more than 1,700 acres. The smallest property is 181 acres. The largest is more than 1,100 acres. The connected properties are off Mt. Pleasant Church and Mt. Prospect roads, between Center and Pinckney roads.

? Wellington Square Acquisitions out of Columbia bought 33 properties off Black Highway near U.S. 321 Bypass in York County Feb. 17 for $4 million. The York duplex sites on Wellington Square Drive range from 2,100 to more than 3,000 square feet.

? Two large properties between South Dobys Bridge Road and the Catawba River in Fort Mill sold Feb. 2 for a combined $4.2 million. One is an 86-acre farm property at $2.2 million. The other, beside it, is 75 acres that sold for almost $2 million at 1598 Rivers Edge Drive.

Almost a decade ago the properties were part of plans that would’ve brought hundreds of new homes to Fort Mill. Town staff and council decided against those plans and the sales do a developer didn’t happen. Now, Indian Land-based Saviria LLC is the new owner.

The properties touch both South Dobys and the Catawba, and are bordered by Preserve at Riverchase on the west and larger residential lots to the east.

? A more than 7,000-square-foot home on Creole Road in Lake Wylie sold Feb. 22 for more than $1.8 million.

? More than 134 acres of farm land at 1723 Sharon Road in York sold Feb. 14 for almost $1.3 million. Lotsales, Inc., which bought the site in late 2021 for $1.75 million, sold it to 4Farm Holdings out of Charlotte. The site has more than half a dozen utility garages but is listed mainly as timber property.

? A 4,400-square-foot Carnoustie Court home in Indian Land sold Feb. 20 for almost $1.2 million.

? A 3,800-square-foot Kirkbride Court home in the Springfield subdivision of Fort Mill sold Feb. 23 for a little more than $1 million.

This story was originally published March 2, 2023, 8:31 AM.

Land acknowledgments have become increasingly common nationwide over the past few years. Many mainstream public events — from soccer games and performing arts productions to city council meetings and corporate conferences — begin with these formal statements recognizing Indigenous communities' rights to territories seized by colonial powers.

Indigenous leaders and activists have mixed feelings about land acknowledgments. While some say they are a waste of time, others are working to make the well-meaning but often empty speeches more useful. The debate is more than a niche issue; the pros and cons of land acknowledgments are the subject of myriad mainstream media articles, social media posts and online videos. And they've even been parodied on TV, in series like Reservation Dogs, about the exploits of a group of Oklahoma Indigenous teens.

"If it becomes routine, or worse yet, is strictly performative, then it has no meaning at all," said Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and undersecretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian Institution. "It goes in one ear and out the other." (Gover said only one or two Smithsonian museums have land acknowledgments; the National Museum of the American Indian is among those that do, and its acknowledgment is only one sentence long.)

Gover said the statements — which first appeared in Australia back in the 1970s in the push for Aboriginal peoples' rights and more recently blossomed in Canada with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, which brought to light how generations of Indigenous schoolchildren had been stripped of their native languages and cultural traditions — can also feel disempowering to the very people they're supposed to uplift.

"If I hear a land acknowledgment, part of what I'm hearing is, 'There used to be Indians here. But now they're gone. Isn't that a shame?' And I don't wish to be made to feel that way," Gover said.

But other Indigenous experts say land acknowledgments do have value. If people are thinking about how they go about crafting and using these statements, they can provide a first step toward action.

"The land acknowledgment gets you to that start," said Cutcha Risling Baldy, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and an associate professor of Native American Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. "Now it's time to think about what that actually means for you or your institution. What are the concrete actions you're gonna take? What are the ways you're gonna assist Indigenous peoples in uplifting and upholding their sovereignty and self-determination?"

Baldy demonstrates how land acknowledgments can be used in talks she gives around the country. For example, she used the land acknowledgment at the start of a lecture at Dominican University in River Forest, Ill., in November 2022 to ask audience members to support an Indigenous community garden nearby Chicago.

"She put up a QR code for people to donate directly to the First Nations Garden," said Fawn Pochel, who was in Baldy's audience that day. "She literally paused so people could take pictures and create donations."

Pochel, who identifies as First Nations Ojibwe and is part of the community organization effort around the First Nations Garden, said her group received more than $200 in unexpected donations within 24 hours due to Baldy's callout during the land acknowledgment.

"That was a direct result of her uplifting our space during her conversation," Pochel said.

Sometimes land acknowledgments can lead to more than one-off donations.

At Shotgun Players, a theater company in Berkeley, Calif., all performances and staff meetings begin with a 45-second-long statement acknowledging, "that the land beneath our theater and our studios and throughout East Bay is Huichin, the traditional unceded land of the Lisjan Ohlone people."

Artistic director Patrick Dooley, who's not Native American, said having a land acknowledgment helps remind his theater company and audience of their privileges.

"We're just here for a brief time," Dooley said. "And the way we can really honor our opportunity to live wherever we live is to acknowledge and honor the people that came before us."

The company developed its land acknowledgment three years ago in collaboration with the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit focused on Indigenous land return.

"When we work with people around creating land acknowledgments, it really has to be a reciprocal relationship," said Corrina Gould, co-director of the land trust and tribal chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan-Ohlone.

The theater company takes the reciprocity seriously.

Artistic director Dooley said Shotgun Players pays a voluntary land tax — known as "Shuumi Land Tax," incorporating the Chochenyo word for "gift" — of between $3,000 and $6,000 a year to the trust. (Dooley said the amount depends on the company's annual income). The theater company has also offered the trust tickets to performances and invitations to use its space.

Sogorea Te' Land Trust co-director Gould said she'd like to see Shotgun Players do even more, including hiring Indigenous theater artists.

"We're hoping that it'll be a long-term relationship that our children will be able to say, 'Hey, this started a long time ago, but we're still in this together,' " said Gould, who added her organization has been developing deeper relationships with a variety of local organizations including Oakland Roots soccer team and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Shotgun's Dooley said he agrees. But he admits he still needs to do more to seek out Indigenous talent for his theater's productions.

"We have a seasoned selection committee," the artistic director said. "And one of the priorities that we have is to do that."

Audio and digital stories edited by Ciera Crawford. Audio produced by Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento. Web copy edited by Beth Novey. Editorial consultant, Sam Yellowhorse Kesler.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

INDIAN LAND, S.C. — York County, South Carolina is an area that has become as one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. Sensing the opportunity, a new Lapels Cleaners will soon be opening one mile away, in Indian Land, S.C.

Todd and Christine Huston are the owners of Lapels Cleaners of Indian Land, S.C. The locationbegan operations on December 19. A Grand Opening will be held on April 1.

Todd Huston, owner of Lapels Cleaners of Fort Mill and Lapels Cleaners of Berewick in Charlotte, NC, acquired this location, previously a Natural Green Cleaners. Lapels Cleaners of Indian Land began operations on December 19. A Grand Opening will be held on April 1.

“It was a fairly straightforward transaction,” says Huston. “Since it’s a satellite location, we were able to conduct business as Lapels Cleaners of Indian Land on day one —clothing from the store is cleaned at our plant at Lapels Cleaners of Fort Mill.”

Huston believes this was the right time for the expansion.

“The pandemic changed a lot of things for a lot of people,” he says. “That’s led many to realize they could live and work anywhere and nearby York County was one of those places where people wanted to relocate. With the growth in population comes the need for the variety of cleaning services we offer at Lapels. Whether you were a customer of the previous cleaners or new to the area, you’re going to love what Lapels brings to the table.”

Huston spent nearly three decades in the fashion retail industry in nearly all facets of the business—sales, marketing, merchandising and operations. Looking for a new challenge, he began researching franchise opportunities where he could best utilize his sales, marketing and organizational skills. Lapels’ emphasis on using an environmentally friendly cleaning process is one of the reasons Huston says he was attracted to the company.

“I have a degree in fashion design,” he says. “Before opening Lapels Cleaners of Fort Mill, I had a very long and successful management career in retail, specifically in apparel. I have never seen a drycleaning process that cleans and extends the life of clothing like Lapels,” says Huston, who also saw the need for more and better garment cleaners in the greater Charlotte area.

Huston was named Lapels Franchise Owner of the Year in 2019 and 2020. “Lapels Cleaners also sets itself apart with our customer service,” he says. “And that’s another area where we will delight customers.”

Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at ddavis@atmags.com.

By Kanu Sarda: The Supreme Court on Friday reserved its order on a petition filed by the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), demanding land for the construction of chambers for lawyers that was allocated to the top court and measuring 1.33 acres.

A three-judge special bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, and Justices SK Kaul and PS Narasimha heard the arguments of lawyers and all stakeholders but questioned how it could be done on the judicial side, adding that it was already dealing with all such issues on the administrative side.

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READ | Supreme Court forms special bench to hear plea seeking land for lawyers’ chambers

At the beginning of the hearing, senior advocate and SCBA President Vikas Singh expressed his gratitude to the bench for taking up the matter.

On March 2, senior advocate Vikas Singh urged the CJI to list the matter and went on to state that they would have to take it to the judge’s residence if the matter did not get listed.

After that, CJI Chandrachud lost his temper and questioned the senior lawyer, saying, “Is this a way to behave?”

During Friday’s proceedings, the CJI expressed his reservations over hearing this matter on the judicial side, saying that it wouldn't be the right thing to do.

ALSO READ | CJI vs Vikas Singh: SCBA convenes SGBM to express solidarity with Bar president

“Lawyers are a part of us. It’s a part of our institution. If we use our judicial orders, it’s a message – look what the Supreme Court is doing. You are using judicial power and using it for your expansion. Today it is land, tomorrow it will be something else. The message should not go that we are using our judicial powers to bulldoze the government,” the CJI said.

Singh then urged the bench that the land opposite to the Supreme Court, which currently houses the Foreign Correspondents Club and the Indian Law Institute, could be taken over for construction of the lawyers’ chambers.

Echoing the CJI’s views, Justice Kaul said the judiciary had been taking up issues of infrastructure, including the needs of lawyers, with the government on the administrative side.

Justice Narasimha also added that the discussion on the administrative side could be more fruitful.

ALSO READ | CJI DY Chandrachud skips SC bar body's Holi event after spat with its chief

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for the Supreme Court Advocate-on-Record Association (SCAORA), highlighted the requirement for chambers for AoRs, who are considered an integral part of the Supreme Court, and said that at least 800 AORs have become eligible for such chambers.

Assuring Singh and other stakeholders in the case, the CJI said, "We are in the process of having a new Supreme Court building that can last for the next 75 years and our first concern is that the bar should get due space. And I am extremely happy to share with all of you that the PWD planning has been done already and drawings has been done and we judges even went to the Delhi High Court to check out the construction and underground parking etc, and I can assure you all that we understand your challenges and needs and we shall certainly work on that."

ALSO READ | Whatever I lay down is the practice of the court, do not try to dictate: CJI Chandrachud tells SCBA president

Justice Kaul added, "I can also tell you, Mr Singh, the Chief Justice has also taken on board the opinion of all future Chief Justices till 2030. So I can also assure you that things will go on."

Towards the end of the hearing, Attorney General for India R Venkataramani said that the flexibility of the administrative process has a certain advantage and said he could play a better role in the matter if it is taken up on the administrative side.

The SCBA is seeking conversion of land measuring 1.33 acres, which was allotted to the top court, into chamber blocks for Supreme Court lawyers.