Monitoring of Aiken County Council’s legislative proceedings is hindered by several unique factors that serve to under-inform the citizens of Aiken County. Agenda information is withheld from the public almost until the legal limit. Committee meetings are held in backrooms. No meetings are live streamed and archived. Meeting minutes are minimal, tell no story, and provide no real history. At the present time, the only accurate archive of meetings is an audio recording that is only available upon request, and not openly shared on the Aiken County website.

This opaque situation could be easily improved. Some simple measures include live streaming and archiving of public meetings, releasing meeting agendas and documents on the same day that Council members receive their copies, holding all committee meetings in spacious Council chambers rather than in small back rooms, and publishing meaningful meeting minutes.

by Don Moniak
September 8, 2026

Aiken County Council meets twice a month (first and third Tuesdays of the month) from January until June, and once a month (third Tuesday) for the remainder of the year. The meetings usually begin around 5 pm with upwards of three Committee Meetings—Development, Administrative, and Judicial and Public Safety—that consume up to an hour in total. These are followed by a Work Session at 6 pm and the Regular Meeting at 7 pm. Public input is allowed during any planned Public Hearings (1) during the regular meetings, and during the “Informal Meeting of the Whole” (2) which marks the end of meetings—barring any closed-door Executive Session.

Meeting agenda background information is mostly contained in a package known as “CC Docs.” Citizens interested in Council business must figure out the order of meetings for the day and navigate between multiple documents to follow the issues.(3)

In regard to agendas and background documents, Council under-informs by legislative fiat. The Aiken County Code of Ordinances mandates a two-tiered information dissemination system, in which Council members receive their packets four days before the meeting while their constituents and media receive access to them the day before the meetings.

Section 2-55 of the County Code states that “the county administrator shall distribute all regular meeting agendas to the (Council) members, with associated background documents, the Friday evening preceding a Tuesday council meeting.”

The Ordinance goes on to state that the administrator “shall make the full agenda package available to the general public and the press at 8:30 a.m. on the Monday morning preceding a Tuesday meeting.”(4)

There is no discernible motive for this two-tiered system of information dissemination for Council’s meetings; but it does serve a purpose. By restricting access to the agenda until the day before meetings, the practice functions to protect Council members from being pestered on the weekend by calls and emails from constituents concerned with any agenda items—and prevents them from being inundated with calls regarding any proposed controversial measures.

A case in point occurred on January 20, 2026, when the Council’s Administrative Committee chaired by Councilman Andrew Siders had “possible dissolution of the Aiken Barnwell Bamberg Edgefield (ABBE) Regional Library system” at the top of its agenda.

With barely a day’s notice, approximately forty Aiken County residents traveled to the meeting, Administrative Building, driving from all over the County to attend a committee meeting. Although public input was not sought or allowed, numerous citizens held up signs saying “Save ABBE.”

The message from concerned citizens would certainly have been more pronounced if citizens had known on the previous Friday that the beloved ABBE system was under consideration for the chop block.

The Smokeless Back Rooms

This event also highlighted another aspect of Council’s propensity to under-inform. For the past few years Committee meeting venues have been in small conference rooms—-literally back rooms without smoke—instead of in the spacious Council chambers which seat upwards of 150 people.

The back rooms in this case are two conference rooms, one of them only about 300 square feet with a public seating capacity of about fifteen. Council members, the County Administrator, and the County Attorney sit at the table with their backs to the audience—instead of facing constituents as practiced during Work Sessions and Regular Meetings. The atmosphere is more clubby than legislative.

In the case of the library issue, the crowd was standing room only, with more than a dozen people confined outside the room, out of hearing range. Concerned Aiken County citizens were rudely shut out of the process and under-informed by choice of Council. (Figure 1)

The Twentieth Century Council Meeting

The most problematic means of under-informing the citizenry is Council’s refusal to modernize by live streaming its meetings and then archiving the recordings. The only way to actually hear a meeting without attending in person is by requesting an audio recording and traveling to the County building to retrieve it.

The Board of the Aiken County Public School District, the North Augusta City Council, and the Aiken City Council—as well as its three decision making bodies (Planning Commission, Design Review Board, and Board of Zoning and Appeals)—all live stream their meetings for remote viewers in the spirit of openness and access. The City of Aiken has meetings archived on You Tube that date back more than a decade. The most recent City Council meeting drew 128 views—enough people to fill the council’s chambers.

In contrast, citizens in a county the size of Rhode Island must travel to the City of Aiken to “see their County Council in action;” as Chairman Gary Bunker states when bringing meetings to order. With Council’s regular meetings being as short as half an hour, and rarely longer than ninety minutes, any resident in the Beech Island, Jackson, Monetta, Windsor, Wagener or other far flung areas can spend more time traveling than at the actual meetings.

The only time Aiken County Council has live streamed its meetings was when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a public health emergency by Governor Henry McMaster. When the state of emergency was terminated, live streaming ended,

The ongoing lack of live streaming is not a unanimous choice.

The current discussion began at the Administrative Committee’s February 20, 2024 meeting when Committee member Kelly Mobley asked for the issue to be placed on the agenda. The idea did not proceed any further while Mr. Mobley was in office.

The issue resurfaced at the February 4, 2025 regular meeting, when Council voted on a proposed budget amendment to fund the live streaming of Council meetings. The meeting minutes read:

“Councilman (Mike) Kellems made a motion for an amendment to the budget to include the $80,000 for broadcasting expenses to live stream Council meetings. Councilman Ball seconded the motion. The motion failed with a 5-3 vote. Councilman Kellems, Councilman (Landon) Ball, and Councilwoman (P.K.) Hightower were in favor.”

There was minimal dialogue on the topic during the meeting. Only after the meeting did Vice Chairman Andrew Siders share his thoughts with the Aiken Standard, stating that:

“First of all, it’s a tight budget year and there was an $80,000 price tag with that, Second of all, when you have that sort of system, everything changes, from the audience to Council. We believe it becomes more of a performance than a real dialogue, and we want this to be real dialogue. We don’t want it to be a performance.”

The controversy lay dormant until June 2026 when Council’s Administrative Committee (Siders, Kellems, and Ball) returned to the issue; deciding that day to ask staff to report back with an estimate of costs and a recommendation for venues—Facebook vs You Tube.

A month later, at its July 21, 2026 meeting, after staff reported that a suitable camera would cost ~$4,000 and that You Tube was the better choice for streaming, the Administrative Committee unanimously recommended furthering the project.

Andrew Siders told the Aiken Standard afterward that:

“I was against it before because I thought, there would be too much grandstanding. But I think we’ve moved beyond that point, and I think we’re ready for it as a council now. There is always the possibility [of grandstanding], but hopefully we can keep from [doing] it.”

But then, at its August 18, 2026 meeting, County Council voted against the live stream option by a vote of 5-3. Siders, Kellems and Ball voted to approve; while Chairman Gary Bunker, Councilmen Phil Napier, Sandy Haskell, and Ron Felder, and Councilwoman P.K. Hightower (5) voted against live streaming. Councilman Danny Feagan was absent.

The vote occurred without any open deliberation from Council members. After the meeting, Chairman Gary Bunker repeated part of Andrew Siders’ original objection when he told the Aiken Standard that:

“When County Council meetings were live streamed because of COVID-19, ‘I know the numbers that were watching (the meetings during COVID-19) were not very high, so I would question whether there is really a significant viewership out there. Second of all, I think there was a concern about the cost. And third of all, I think there is concern that by broadcasting…the County Council meetings could become less deliberative and more performative in front of the camera. Cameras tend to change peoples’ behavior.”

In all these instances, both Chairman Bunker and Vice-Chair Siders chose to share their opinions with a subscription newspaper but not with meeting attendees.

But even if they had also shared their thoughts with meeting attendees their statements would still have escaped inclusion in the meeting minutes.

The Council’s sparse meeting minutes continue to function as the final means of under-information. As described in “Obscuring the Present,” meeting minutes are minimalist at best, arguably falling short of South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act requirements.

The majority of Aiken County Council members do not appear to understand how their opposition to live streaming, as well as other opaque practices, counterproductively fosters distrust of County government. A sense that something is being hidden permeates the public discourse. Instead of addressing this shortcoming, a majority of Council chooses a subtle regulation of speech to stem the bogeyman prospect of “performative” behavior or “grandstanding.”

This is unfortunate. As described in Aiken County Council, regular meetings are civil and professional affairs. Citizens seeking redress of any issues are treated with respect. Important legal information is conveyed when necessary in a thorough manner. The staff conveys a positive impression. Debate is mostly deliberative. In short, there is no reason to not share the proceedings and archive them in a more open manner that meets the spirit of South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act.

Footnotes

(1) In regard to Public Hearings, County Council further under-informs in two ways, although these practices are not unique to the County.

First, the notifications meet the barest minimum requirement for publicizing public hearings. The only published announcements are made in the Aiken Standard, whose flagship newspaper the Post and Courier demands a $180/year digital subscription rate. The County refuses to post these advanced (14 day) notices on its website. The same holds true for the Aiken County Planning Commission.

Second, the narratives of public hearing notices often under-informs through the omission of key information.

For example, the notice for the Public Hearing regarding the sale of a County owned quarter-acre tract to an adjacent landowner conveniently left out the fact that the sale price was a mere $100. At that same meeting, an Ordinance Amendment failed to identify the subject was animal control, a subject that can draw considerable interest and controversy.

Finally, as reported in Transparency and Openness Needed in Aiken County Council Meetings, Council routinely fails to publicly disclose the names of companies and nature of business involved in Ordinances governing Fee in Lieu of Taxes agreements.

(2) County Council considered, but ultimately rejected, a proposal to place the Informal Meeting of the Whole public comment period AFTER any Executive Session. See Details Matter Regarding Protecting Freedom of Speech.

(3) Agendas are published by individual meetings. There is no summary agenda. As a result, there are up to nine separate files to follow for every meeting day. By comparison, the City of Aiken has two at the most.

Each committee has an agenda with its own packet, but agenda items are cross referenced with the Council’s documents, which creates more confusion. (Figure 2).

(4) Seldom are the terms of the Ordinance met, as the release of information to the general public and the media generally occurs after 1 pm and sometimes as late as 4:30–barely meeting the SC FOIA mandate for release of agendas for public meetings within 24 hours.

Notably, the Aiken County Planning Commission employs even greater opaqueness regarding agenda packets. The County Planning Department does not even release, on the County website, the agenda documents provided to the Commission. Only the agenda is published. Citizens have to be on a mailing list to obtain the entire agenda packet.

(5) . An email was sent to Ms. Hightower inquiring as to the reason for her changed vote. No response has been forthcoming.

For a more detailed discussion of the live stream debate see Call for Livestreaming, Recording, and Archiving of Aiken County Government Meetings.