District 22 - Meet your Candidates for Greenville County Council

Meet Democrat Karine Debaty and Republican Frank Farmer, candidates for Greenville County Council District 22 in the November general election. District 22 generally represents North Main, Wade Hampton in and near the city of Greenville, the north side of I-385, and Pelham Road out to Boiling Springs Road. In this episode, each candidate has 10 minutes to introduce themselves to the voters. Your vote is so important! Please take a listen and share with your neighbors.

Links:

Karine Debaty

Frank Farmer

Sample Ballot

Transcript

Katy Smith:
I'm pleased to be joined today by Karine Debaty, who is running for Greenville County Council District 22. Thanks so much for joining me.

Karine Debaty:
Thank you.

Katy Smith:
Great. Well, tell us about yourself and why you're running for office.

Karine Debaty:
So first and foremost, I'm a Southern country girl, and I have a very Southern accent. Other than that, I arrived in Greenville 30 years ago. I raised three kids. I worked at Liberty Life, the insurance company, then at Michelin. I was a business analyst, a financial auditor, and a project manager. And my projects were mainly on transformation, where you need to totally redesign the way you are working. And I'm a conservationist. I belong to several organizations, and three of them are local too. It's Upstate Forever, Conservation Borders of South Carolina, and CCL, Climate Citizen Lobby. And actually, I went to Washington, D.C. in June. It was a fantastic experience to lobby for acts and reforms that are very important for the development of South Carolina. So one of them being the energy permitting reform, which would accelerate the validation of clean energy projects for South Carolina. And I'm also a conservationist to a point that my house is solar powered, is energy efficient, and I have one acre of yard and I'm rebuilding a forest.

Katy Smith:
Thank you. What do you believe are the biggest issues facing your constituents and what would you do about them if elected to county council?

Karine Debaty:
Well, the reason I'm running is, like many, I am worried about the way the county has developed within the past 30 years. I feel that I see too many car washes, gas stations, storage facilities, which provide no jobs to our constituents and their profits go out of state. We see a lot of gear cutting. The roads are broken. There is a lot of transit. It doesn't seem to be under control. So I do believe we need to rethink the way we are growing and we need to do it now. We must ask ourselves the question, should we let growth decide randomly where we go or should we manage it? So that's why I want to run and be in office. I want to put my professional experience, my hard work, my ethics at the service of the communities to steer a dynamic but sensible development with foresight for a blooming county for today, for tomorrow, and for all.

Katy Smith:
What would you do in the first 30 days after being sworn in?

Karine Debaty:
First biggest challenges the constituents are facing right now are the cost of living and the roads. For the cost of living, I see two major costs that are going up and up and up without being controlled. It's the cost of energy and the cost of housing.

Karine Debaty:
And I think we can do many things about it. For the energy, we must go through a mixed sourcing of energy, and we have lots of sun in South Carolina. It is a proven source of energy. It is cheap, way cheaper than any other energy. And I would like to make sure that we have incentives, regulations, so that we can have more solar panels put either on people's house. So we need the HOAs not to prohibit this. We need to incentivize big boxes, industry parking lots to put solar panels everywhere they can because these are perfect surfaces for solar energy. We need to make sure people have tax breaks to upgrade their housing so they are energy efficient. We need to make sure that developers build energy efficient homes for the future.

Karine Debaty:
And the least last, but not the least, we need to keep up trees. So trees, we all talk about trees, but they have a very pragmatic usage. They provide shades and under trees, people will have a cost of energy that will be way lower than they have today. So not only trees will provide a certain quality of life, but we need trees to cut down the cost of energy. And then housing, I do believe we need to think about more mixed development and we can work with that with developers.

Karine Debaty:
And I also believe that we need to do something about property taxes when children inherit the houses from their family so young families can still continue to live where they grew up. And in terms of roads, I see two major problems, the maintenance and repairs of the roads. So I think I don't need to go through that. People are, I think, very fed up with the state of the roads. It's an urgent issue. South Carolina is the number one in the nation for road fatalities. So there may have been a mismanagement of the county money. But this is the past.

Karine Debaty:
We need to think about the future. So we all have heard about the proposed solution, which is the Penny Tax. And that proposed tax will be, I believe, on the referendum when we vote in November. So it will give a chance for every one of us to say yes or no for that tax. But I think there is misinformation about it. So that tax will be 1% not on necessities. So it will not impact the medication, the groceries, the gas, and it will be paid even by visitors. So one third of the money this tax could raise will be from people who don't live in the state but use our roads.

Karine Debaty:
And there will be an oversight committee for transparency. It will be only for roads and bridges projects. It will not be for– it is against the law in South Carolina to use the money for something else. And it would raise more than a billion dollars in eight years. And about the transit, we see more and more congestion, especially during schools and office hours. And we need to think about new solutions. I see some buses running. I think we need to optimize the way they run and add roads and buses where we need them the most. And I'm thinking about teenagers riding the bus after school to go to their activities. We need to find ways to remove cars from the road, especially in rushing hours. And for that, I think we also need to look at the comprehensive plan and what could be the accountability of the developers when they add houses and cars on the road. How can we work all together to have a sound development? So my first 30 days in office, first, I'm going to look for the coffee machine. I'm going to make sure they have one because I will need one. And then I would like to work on the comprehensive plan. On the communication we have with constituents.

Karine Debaty:
Develop good relationship with my team, and make an audit of the spending. So comprehensive plan. I'm a business analyst. I was explaining what the comprehensive plan is today. And I believe it's vague and incomplete. It has no vision. And it needs to be fleshed out. We need a vision. we need to move away from what I think is chaos in the way we grow. We need, and it puts us in a weak positioning with developers. So we need to revise the comprehensive plan, the bidding process with our suppliers to make sure that whatever we select is in the county's best interest. So we need to make sure we have negotiation, guidelines. So we have all optimized benefits. We need to see milestone and performance indicators that we share with our constituent. For the communication, I'm an experienced change manager. So we need tools to communicate with everybody in a language they can understand so that our constituent know where we are going, where we are at, and they need to have a voice. They need to be able to come back to us and specifically say, we like or dislike what you're doing.

Karine Debaty:
I'm a team player. I'm a project manager. I want to develop strong, respectful working relationship with my team. It is important to be a team. Nobody by himself, herself can find a good solution. And I think we need to audit the spending so far, at least to feel for the lay of the land, see where the revenues are, where the spending is, and see how we can optimize.

Katy Smith:
Well, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you so much for your willingness to serve our community.

Karine Debaty:
Thank you. You have a nice day.

Katy Smith:
I'm pleased to be joined by Frank Farmer, who is running for County Council District 22. Frank, thanks so much for joining me.

Frank Farmer:
Thanks for having me.

Katy Smith:
Tell us about yourself and why you're running for office.

Frank Farmer:
I am a born and raised Greenvillian. I lived here my whole life outside of the five years that I was in the Army. I came back home last November and actually had no intention of running at all. But I was approached by a few of my neighbors who were very concerned and were showing me sort of the problems that we were having in the county. And they told me that they thought that I'd be a great candidate to help represent and bring some much needed transparency to the council. And that's part part of the reason why I'm running as opposed to the other myriad of issues like the infrastructure needs and these crazy tax hikes that we've recently seen.

Katy Smith:
Thank you. What do you believe are the biggest issues facing the constituents and what would you do about them if elected to county council?

Frank Farmer:
So there's been a huge, like I was saying, there's been a huge lack of transparency on the council. One of the things that I want to do to combat that is I've built a coalition of people who are both on the council now and who are about to be elected to council. We want to create a forensic audit of the budget so we can see where all of our money is being spent so we can cut out the waste. Other things that we're facing as well is, you know, our roads. Our roads have historically been in terrible shape for a very long time and everyone always complained about them. and I'm going to sit here and complain about them too.

Frank Farmer:
But what we'd really like to do is chop the fat out of the budget and reallocate all of those funds to help improve our roads that we've been seeing. And we may even have a little extra help, depending if that capital sales tax gets passed, which will generate over a billion dollars over eight years just to go towards our roads that we have in the county. Another thing that a lot of people have been talking to me about is the break-ins around their neighborhoods, especially like the Dovetree area. I've spoken with the sheriff and just sort of things that we can do in order to increase our security. I know that we'd love to hire some more officers.And I'm looking forward to working with the sheriff's department any way that I can there and just, you know, keep our keep our streets safe. And another thing is Greenville is such a pretty place. And we want to make sure that it doesn't turn into a place like Columbia, like a parking lot. So we need to kind of hold our planning commission and check a little bit. It's often been said that the planning commission has a plan, but it doesn't follow it. And so we kind of need to hold their feet to the fire and stop the urban sprawl that we've been seeing.

Katy Smith:
Great. What would you do in the first 30 days after being sworn in?

Frank Farmer:
So one of the things that I've made a promise over the campaign, and which I've told a few people to hold me to it, is I would love to kind of do what Benton Blunt has been doing, but I'd love to do more of like a long form Facebook live sort of deal where after each County council meeting, I go on and I just kind of say, hey, these were the agenda items. This is what's going to happen next month at the next meeting. This is what we should be looking at. Here's where I stand and then open it up for public comment and just kind of see, where people stand on the issues. Because the way that I would love to represent Greenville County is I would love to give a voice to the people. I want to hear every single side. And then that way, I can make a pragmatic decision that best suits all of us.

Katy Smith:
Great. We have a little bit more time. Is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners?

Frank Farmer:
No, that's that's about it. But my Instagram is Frank Farmer Greenville. My website is frankforgreenville.com. And then my Facebook page is Frank Farmer for Greenville County Council District 22. I generally get back to everyone within 24 hours, but I will admit I took a month off after the primaries just because I needed some desperate downtime. And I've been working on my businesses in that meantime. But I'm ready to keep going. I'm ready to push ahead. And if you ever need to contact me, my cell phone number is 864-752-8167. And I'm hoping to hear from y'all.

Katy Smith:
Well, Frank, thanks so much for joining us. And thanks so much for your willingness to serve our community.

Frank Farmer:
Thank you.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.