In our county, as in most counties and municipalities throughout the coastal Southeast, we have some pretty strict building codes that were written with the intention of giving new homes a better chance of surviving hurricane-force conditions. Since our island has danced with a few hurricanes in the last six years, the higher costs associated with these building codes are much easier to justify. For us, it isn’t so much an unjustified fear of hurricanes that could threaten our homes, but rather a healthy realization that we live in a part of the world where hurricanes happen. Even though our island hadn’t had to deal with a hurricane for well over fifty years prior to Hurricane Matthew in 2016, we still knew that it wasn’t a matter of if the next hurricane would hit, but when. So, while one could say that it was out of respect for the possibility of a hurricane hitting us, you could also rightly say that it was out of fear of the inevitable that new building codes were adopted and we residents went along with the costs associated with those codes.
Fear is a powerful motivator. Frankly, our politicians understand this truth quite well, which means that we will all be bombarded with non-stop statements between now and the election about the horrible things that will happen if we elect the wrong person. Unfortunately, in politics, there isn’t nearly the focus of fear of what will inevitably happen. Instead, there is the fear of what might happen. While I realize that it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between what could happen and what will happen, I would submit that it is really important for us to try to figure that out before we try to determine what we will allow that political battle to cost us as a community. After all, paying for a fire department only makes sense if there is agreement that a fire is inevitable. A few decades ago, our community realized that we needed a fire department that could serve the entire island, so the residents voted on and approved the establishment of a new tax district with the express purpose of protecting our residents against the various fires that would undoubtedly come.
Recently our island has been dealing with another fear – the fear of being overrun by too many homes being used as short-term rentals. One does not need to look very far to see the impact of STR’s on neighboring islands such as Hilton Head or Tybee, where renters arrive in multiple vehicles and fill homes to their extreme capacity, spending their week living in a very different manner than a typical resident would. There is no doubt that people who have travelled for a vacation will, on average, have a very different impact on the community than residents. Some are grateful for certain of those impacts, while some would prefer that they just stayed away. No one questions the types of impacts that can happen. However, what is in doubt is what that impact will be in total, especially since it is very difficult to build anything on our bridgeless island that offers significant challenges to even the most experienced builders. This might be a good time to point out that when modern resort-style development began on Daufuskie in the early 1980’s, Beaufort County projected that our island’s full-time population would currently be well over 5,000.
It would be a tremendous shame to see the fabric of our community be torn by fear of something that could happen, as opposed to something that absolutely will happen. And I realize that the recent discussions and votes in our community may have already gone too far, and caused significant stress on longstanding relationships. But we are a different community. Being a bridgeless island changes so many of the dynamics at play in our daily lives, whether it be building homes or building relationships. Please don’t let what might happen years down the road destroy the precious relationships that already exist.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron