by Don Moniak
November 3, 2023

Three candidates vying for the Mayor of the City of Aiken position faced off in the August 8, 2023, Republican Primary election. Incumbent Mayor Rick Osbon earned 1,556 votes (42.6%), and challengers Teddy Milner and Kathryn Wade respectively earned 1,070 votes (29.3 %) and 1,026 votes (28.1%). In total, challengers bested the incumbent 57.4 percent to 42.6 percent.

Because Mayor Osbon did not gain the support of more than fifty percent of the votes, a runoff election on August 22nd was required between the top two candidates. Teddy Milner won that election by only fourteen votes, 2,135 to 2,121.

Candidate	Cash Contributions	In-Kind Contributions	Expenditures
Milner	$25,555	$2,000	$19,899
Osbon	$43,224	$2,753	$44,091
Wade	$3,348	$350	$3,698

The campaign finance disclosures for all three candidates, through September 2023, are now available from the South Carolina Ethics Commission. The total contributions and expenditures reported from that information is in Table 1. Teddy Milner remains the only candidate with an active campaign, as both the Osbon for Mayor and the Wade for Mayor campaigns have closed out their accounts and can no longer raise funds.

In summary, the disclosures show some of the following trends and highlights:

• Relative to spending during the Primary campaign, the Wade campaign easily achieved the most votes per dollar spent—$3.25 per vote tallied. In contrast, the Milner campaign spent just under $16 per vote tallied, and the Osbon campaign spent just over $19 per vote.
  
• The Osbon campaign spent ninety percent of its contributions to hire an outside political campaign and public relations firm to help manage the campaign and produce and distribute all of its advertising.
  
• Both Milner and Wade ran grass-roots campaigns, did not hire any professional political operatives, and spent a major portion of their contributions on local businesses.
  
• The Osbon for Mayor campaign was the only campaign to accept a donation from a Political Action Committee (PAC), and from developers who are identified only by their company name.
  
• The Osbon for Mayor campaign raised the most funds from outside sources ranging from Florida to Chicago to Connecticut. The Wade campaign funds were derived entirely from local contributors, and the Milner campaign had only four out-of-state contributions by individuals.
  
  The reason for this emphasis on “outsider” contributions and special interest contributions and expenditures is two-fold:
  
  1. As described in The Monkey in the Room, a stealth effort to elect Rick Osbon as Mayor via a write-in campaign was revealed on October 18, and that campaign was seeking to hire an unidentified, outside political operative. Mayor Osbon signed a legal pledge to abide by election results, but the loophole for enforcing that pledge is the lack of an “active” campaign by a defeated party.
  
  Most recently, the campaign became more overt with a letter to the editor of the Aiken Standard by Osbon campaign contributor Sam Erb, suggesting that Aiken residents write in the “defeated candidate’s name.”
  
  2. Even without this latest development, the Osbon for Mayor campaign was the only campaign to castigate “outsiders” and “special interests” as a negative factor in the election process, when its campaign management firm mailed a flyer to voters headlined:
  
  “OUTSIDERS AND SPECIAL INTERESTS CONTINUE TO
  FALSELY ATTACK MAYOR OSBON.” (Figure 1).

The flyer appeared shortly after the Osbon for Mayor campaign issued a news release touting endorsements from “20 Conservative Leaders.”

Half of these conservative leaders, who were all deemed as “local” in the “Outsiders and Special Interests” flyer, live outside of Aiken city limits and are ineligible to vote in City of Aiken elections. Four of them do not even live in Aiken County. (1)

A note on “Outsiders” and “Locals”.

Technically, an outsider in any election is a nonresident ineligible to vote in the jurisdiction. But the City of Aiken is a county seat, and a hub of regional commerce and medical care, so county residents often must visit Aiken to conduct county business, seek medical care, or access necessities. Without spending by county residents, the City of Aiken would likely shrivel to a fraction of its size.

Since most Aiken County departmental headquarters are located in the city, all county residents have a vested interest in the election because their tax payments help subsidize the City of Aiken’s economic base; and decisions made by the City of Aiken can greatly influence County spending decisions. Furthermore, some of the contributing Aiken County residents own businesses in the City of Aiken and pay business license taxes.

From a practical matter, city residents can only be sorted from county residents with a 29803 or 29801 zip code through a tedious search in the Aiken County property database, a method that also does not work for anyone renting their home.

Therefore, for the purposes of this summary, “outsiders” are considered to be outside of Aiken County in terms of their address and ineligibility to vote in the election. This does not imply that outsiders do not have any vested interests in Aiken County, some are not benefactors, or that a candidate is beholden to any contributor. The summary is not final, as the Milner campaign is still eligible to raise funds and is known to be spending funds.

The Ins and Outs of Expenditures.

Outside influence was most evident in the expenditure columns, summarized in Table 2.

Candidate	Local	Non Local	Campaign/PR Firm
Milner	$20,697	$353	0
Osbon	$2,753	$43,030	$42,983
Wade	$2,953	$545	0

The Osbon for Mayor campaign spent ten percent of its cash contributions on local businesses Newberry Hall and the Inn at Houndslake. The other ninety percent was spent on a Columbia-based political campaign and public relations firm called First Tuesday Strategies (FTS). How and where FTS spends its consulting fees is unknown.

Former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Matt Moore is the firm’s managing partner. (2). Moore was also one of the twenty “local conservative leaders” who endorsed Rick Osbon for Mayor.

The first payment to FTS, for $30,482, was reported as being on August 9th, the day after the primary and the beginning of the runoff campaign. At the end of the campaign, FTS received an additional $12,983 payment, for a total of $42,983. The work completed by the firm was listed as “Campaign Direct Mail, Direct Text, Social Media ads and management and brochures.”

One of the First Tuesday Strategies’ direct mailings came under scrutiny during an August 17th candidates forum, when Mayor Osbon failed to recognize one of his campaign flyers. The issue arose when a citizen pointed out the word “woke” in the flyer, and asked Mayor Osbon to define the term in his own words.

Mayor Osbon denied the flyer was from his campaign five separate times during the ensuing discussion. This in turn led some of his supporters to label the flyer as fake. As for the term “woke,” Mr. Osbon said, “it is not in my vocabulary.”

After the meeting, Mayor Osbon acknowledged to the Aiken Standard that the brochure was from his campaign. The Standard, for its part, chose to bury that information deep in its story about the forum, even though the gaffe and resulting uproar were the highlight of the evening.

Neither the Wade for Mayor nor Milner for Mayor organizations hired any professional political consultants to manage or help manage their campaigns.

The Wade campaign spent 85 percent of its campaign funds on Aiken County businesses. The Aiken Horse, Reuben Cora Designs, and Tyler Press were paid for advertising, flyers and signs, and website design, respectively. The organization’s only significant outside expenditure was $500 involving three payments to a mass texting service from Washington, D.C.

The Milner campaign spent 97 percent of its cash contributions on Aiken County businesses. Innovative Solutions and Quality Printing and Graphics were paid to make flyers, buttons, and signs. Paid advertisements appeared in The Aiken Horse, The Aiken Leader, and the Aiken Standard. It’s sole outside expenditure was $353 for campaign buttons from Amazon.com.

The Ins and Outs of Contributions:

The shorter-lived Wade campaign had 14 contributors, only two from outside the county, and none from out-of-state. Just under 95 percent of her cash contributions were local.

The Milner campaign has had ~60 contributors as of September 30th, of which all but six were local; and 86 percent of her contributions were local.

The Osbon campaign had ~92 contributors, of which ~73 were local; with ~29 percent of his funds from outside the county. This contrasts substantively with his 2015 campaign. In that campaign more than 90 percent of contributors were local, out-of-county and out-of-state contributions collectively totaled less than five percent of cash contributions, and special interests and outside developers were absent from the list.

Candidate	Aiken County	In-State, Out of County	Out of State
Milner	$22,035	$1,500	$2,020
Osbon	$29,674	$4,750	$7,800
Wade	$3,348	0	0

This year, Osbon for Mayor’s outside contributions from individuals, development firms, and one special interest group, all of whom are ineligible to vote in City elections included:

• $1,000 from the South Carolina Realtors Political Action Committee. 

• $3,000 in contributions from three Miami, Florida residents who are prominent within the firm Property Markets Group (PMG), whose website features panoramas of the New York City and Miami skylines on its homepage.  The company has a multi-billion dollar portfolio of condominiums and other residential units “totaling more than 8,500 residential units and over 16 million square feet of development” spread across six different states.(3) 

• $2,000 on August 9th, the day after the Primary, from Equus Holdings LLC of Hollywood, SC.  On October 9, 2023,  the firm gained final approval from City Council for its concept plan for a four-story hotel and townhouse development at Beaufort Street and Richland Avenue. 

• $1,000 from SE Aiken LLC,  an Augusta-based developer whose firm Southeastern LLC is redeveloping the  Aiken Mall, and who also was the sole-source developer of the new Aiken Public Safety Building and new City Hall. 

• $1,000 from Tony Denny, a partner in the Columbia-based lobbying firm of Capital Resources, LLC

The Project Pascalis Connection

Locally, the Osbon for Mayor campaign collected $7,100 from Project Pascalis investors and decision-makers, including $3200 in total from two former AMDC members, Philip Merry and Chad Matthews. (4) Notable among the Pascalis investor contributions was $500 from Aiken Attorney William Ray Massey, who was the most instrumental, publicly known figure on the private side of both “public-private” Project Pascalis efforts.

Summary

In a campaign flyer sent to an unknown number of Aiken voters, the Osbon for Mayor campaign lambasted unidentified “outsiders” and “special interests” as “attacking” Mayor Osbon. When asked to identify examples of these “attacks,” neither candidate Obson nor his campaign management firm chose to respond.

Meanwhile, the Osbon campaign was accepting thousands of dollars in outside contributions, spent 90% of contributions on an outside professional political campaign firm, and touted the endorsement of ten politicians who are ineligible to vote in city elections. In contrast, both the Wade and Milner campaigns kept their spending local and relied mostly on local funds from individuals.

Footnotes:

(1) The twenty conservative leaders listed in the Osbon for Mayor news release were :

United States Congressmen, Joe Wilson and Jeff Duncan; South Carolina State Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, Senator Tom Young; State Representatives Bill Hixon, Bill Taylor, Bart Blackwell, Melissa Oremus; Aiken County Council Chairman Gary Bunker, Vice Chairman Andrew Siders, Ron Felder; Aiken City Councilwomen Andrea Gregory, Kay Brohl, Councilmen Ed Girardeau, Ed Woltz; former State Senator Greg Ryberg; Aiken County Sheriff Mike Hunt; Solicitor Bill Weeks; former SCGOP Chairman Matt Moore and former Aiken County Republican Party Chair K.T. Ruthven.

Joe Wilson, Jeff Duncan, Shane Massey, and Matt Moore all live outside of Aiken County and are ineligible to vote in the City of Aiken. Joe Wilson’s and Shane Massey’s districts do include Aiken County.

Bill Hixon, Bill Taylor, Melissa Oremus, Andrew Siders, Ron Felder, and Mike Hunt are Aiken County residents, but do not reside in the City of Aiken, and are ineligible to vote there. Siders’ district does include parts of the City of Aiken.

The list of Osbon for Mayor endorsements did not include County Councilman Phil Napier, whose District Six includes parts of the City of Aiken; nor the four remaining County Council members. Republican candidates James Hankinson (County Council District 8) and DeMarcus Sullivan (City Council District One) also declined to openly endorse any candidate.

K.T. Ruthven is currently President of the Aiken Republican Club. In response to an email question as to whether he was pursuing a write-in election—as well as a letter to sixteen of the elected officials who endorsed Osbon for Mayor officials asking for their preference in the General Election—he stated he was not a write-in candidate and that as President of the Aiken Republican Club he supports the party nominee—but did not name Teddy Milner as that nominee.

(2) FTS also received $8,000 in the 2015 Osbon for Mayor campaign. That year, twenty percent of expenditures were local. In contrast, Lessie Price spent eighty-percent of her campaign funds on local businesses and consulting.

(3) PMG does have an Aiken County connection, as co-owner of the Tod’s Hill equestrian subdivision north of Aiken along Cook’s Bridge Road. Aiken County land records list PMG as the co-owner of 12 unsold lots. The other Tod’s Hill co-owner is Cook’s Bridge LLC, whose address in county records is the same as as PMG’s: 220 5th Avenue, 9th Floor, New York, New York.

Cook’s Bridge LLC purchased the approximately 640-acre, 40-lot subdivision, originally called “The Plains,” in 2013 for $1.35 million. Since that time the PMG holding firm has sold numerous 10-acre to 22-acre parcels for ~$10-15 thousand per acre. The sale signee for several purchases in 2021 was Cook’s Hill LLC Vice President Dan Kaplan, who is also an MPG Managing Partner.

Karl McMillan is identified as the contact for Tod Hill. McMillan is also the agent and sole member (as of December 2020) of Equus Holdings, LLC, the Hollywood, South Carolina firm identified as the developer of a complex of townhomes and a four-story hotel at Beaufort Street and Richland Avenues. Equus Holdings also owns one residential property in the city.

(4) Notably missing from the “Pascalis” list are former Aiken Municipal Development Commission members Chairman Keith Wood and Vice Chair Chris Verenes. In their December 9, 2023 resignation letters, both Wood and Verenes identified only two Council members willing to hear their debriefing on the issues associated with the failure of Project Pascalis. Mayor Osbon was one of the five members reportedly unwilling to meet.

The result is that City Council has yet to be debriefed by the two top members of the AMDC regarding the failure of Project Pascalis that cost taxpayers at least $10.5 to $11.0 million from land purchases, legal costs, consultants, project management, employee labor, tenant relocations, property management and maintenance, and other project expenditures.

If the actual costs have been quantified by the City of Aiken, that information has yet to be disclosed. The less tangible costs, such as the loss of public trust described by Councilwoman Lessie Price at a special-called January 17, 2023 Council Meeting, cannot be quantified or adequately measured.