Emmanuel Nine Memorial
What is the proper amount of money for the Isle of Palms to contribute to the creation of a memorial to nine Lowcountry residents who lost their lives in a mass shooting in 2015? That question apparently was answered recently, but not without some minor squabbling among members of the City Council.
At its regularly scheduled meeting Sept. 26, the Council voted 5-4 to change a proposal to help pay for the Emanuel Nine Memorial and raise the city’s contribution from $50,000 to $100,000. Shortly thereafter, the Council approved the amended motion by a 6-3 count.
When it’s completed, the memorial will pay tribute to the nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston who were murdered by a white supremacist during a Bible study the evening of June 17, 2015. There was little dissent at the IOP Council meeting concerning the need to make a donation to the cause; the amount of the contribution, however, was at issue.
The motion to double the proposed expenditure from $50,000 to $100,000 – to be taken out of the money the city raises by investing funds in interest-earning accounts – came from Council Member Rusty Streetman.
“We’re talking about a tragedy that happened in the Lowcountry area. Other communities are participating and giving on behalf of this, and I think as well as we’re doing that another $50,000 for this great cause would be the right thing for us to do,” Streetman said.
Council Member Katie Miars disagreed with her colleague, pointing out that the proposed contribution was much lower when the matter was discussed at the Council’s September workshop.
“Councilman Streetman is putting us in a bad position now of having to sound like we don’t care about a really wonderful thing that the city and the community are doing, and I totally think that we do need to be as supportive of this as we can, within reason,” she commented. “If we wanted to be in step per capita with somewhere like Mount Pleasant, that’s where we came up with the number $15,000 or $12,000 or something like that. And we all thought that sounded low, so we said $50,000. For a community our size, this is a very generous donation.”
Streetman said “I’ve got a rebuttal for that,” but, before he could voice his opinion, Miars pointed out that “I don’t think I was done speaking.”
“I think $50,000 is a very nice, generous donation, and I don’t think we’re going to be scoffed at for that,” she said before yielding the floor to Streetman.
“I resent the insult because I didn’t mean it personally,” he responded. “Our city is a rich little city. Will it last forever? I don’t know. But we have the funds. We have the opportunity to give more on this than $50,000, and I think it would be a good gesture on our part and a humanitarian gesture to do just that. I’m not casting any aspersions on anyone or the city itself. And I’m not trying to grandstand on this either. This is something I think is the right thing to do.”
Council Member Scott Pierce agreed with Miars that $50,000 would be “a very generous” contribution and pointed out that “we do not have an endless amount of money. If we look at all the revenue coming in this year and all the expenditures going out, we’re upside down $641,000. We are a strong financial city. We’re not a rich little city that has an endless bucket of money.”
Pierce also suggested that the city ask the Charleston Area Convention & Visitors Bureau to match IOP’s $50,000 donation, which would bring the total contribution to $100,000. The city sends well over $1 million a year in accommodations tax money to the CVB. His suggestion apparently fell on deaf ears.
According to Mayor Phillip Pounds, the city has a fiscal year 2023 surplus of between $1.2 million and $1.3 million and $41 million that’s generating interest income.
“It’s certainly not going to hurt our city to do something,” he said.
Voting to raise the contribution from $50,000 were Pounds, Jimmy Ward, Kevin Popson, Jan Anderson and Streetman, while Miars, Pierce, John Bogosian and Blair Hahn opposed the amendment. The amended motion passed 6-3, with support from Hahn.
