Your move, James Island: Some in town prepare for appeal to preserve autonomy

JAMES ISLAND (or CHARLESTON, depending) — Color-coded maps strewn with neon sticky notes drape the red walls and stack up on easels in a conference room at Trent Kernodle's law office.

A pack of colored pencils sits ready on a wooden table, and satchels stuffed with manila folders line a space that once functioned as a sink. For the past 20 years, Kernodle's firm off Folly Road has doubled as a small-town situation room where the plot to incorporate James Island has thrice organized and now gears up for a possible fourth go after Monday's state Supreme Court ruling that the town had not formed properly.

'There is no human on this earth who knows the legal and geophysical limitations of James Island the way I do,' Kernodle said — not arrogantly, just matter-of-factly.

A west Tennessean by birth, Kernodle chose James Island as a home for his family and first began representing this place in lawsuits versus Charleston when the city tried to take over the island's public service district in 1990. A bearded man who keeps a box of boat carburetors on his desk alongside family snapshots, Kernodle prides himself on being one of the few attorneys willing to take on the city.

'From the time I moved here, I've seen what annexation has done. What you can't do in Disney World, you put over here,' Kernodle said, rattling off projects that, according to him, never would have flown on the historic downtown peninsula, such as Lowe's or some of the large apartment complexes. 'That's how you go from nice neighborhoods to Folly Road on a Saturday,' he added, an indisputable traffic nightmare during beach season.

Kernodle worries that, under city control, James Island will see more development without the necessary checks in place to preserve the community's Deep South, small-town way of life.

Town officials plan to ask the Supreme Court to reverse its ruling and, if that fails, to attempt to incorporate once again. Charleston officials, in the meantime, used the ruling as an opportunity to invite town residents to join the city.

Charleston planning director Tim Keane said about 100 people called his office in the days that followed.

'These people are being harassed already,' Keane said. 'One man had gone to his neighbors and said, ‘I'm thinking about annexing into the city,' and he was scared of the response he heard.'

A divided island

The city-town divide is about even in number, with 18,000 town residents and more than 17,000 city dwellers. But that disparity often makes little sense, with town and city residents living side by side in some cases, taking their trash to the curb on different days and paying taxes to separate municipalities.

Patterson and Debbie Smith live in the Parrot Creek neighborhood on James Island and decided to become Charleston residents about seven years ago to better align with their political beliefs.

'Folks in the town of James Island who were representing us did not seem to represent our view on many issues, and that is still true today,' said Patterson Smith, who runs a real estate management company and sits on the Charleston Area Regional Transit Authority board. He and his wife support Interstate 526 completion, for example.

The Smiths now vote in city elections but can't choose town officials, and they got a new garbage can with Charleston pickup. Otherwise, Patterson Smith said, life changed very little.

Operating as normal

At James Island Town Hall, a modest office in a strip mall shared with a dollar store and a barbecue restaurant, a petition to 'Free James Island!' sat on a table in the entryway this week. A receptionist answered the phone: 'Town of James Island … Uh-huh … Yes … We are operating as normal.'

If a legal appeal fails, though, that would change. City attorneys argue that state law allowing incorporated areas to cross public lands was unconstitutional, a point on which the Supreme Court sided with the town. Charleston lawyers also argued that the town's area was not contiguous, on which the Supreme Court agreed.

Kernodle said some good came out of Monday's defeat: City officials left him with a map of how the town could work legally. Should the town try for incorporation a fourth time, Kernodle now has his blueprint.

'It's all fun and games, but it's deadly serious to the people who care,' he said.

Down the street at Folly Road Tackle Shop, regulars meet for free coffee or breakfast beers against a backdrop of cast nets and mounted buck heads. This building, they explain, is James Island. But the shops across Folly Road? Those fall under Charleston jurisdiction.

Edward Allen, born and raised in downtown Charleston, began coming to the tackle shop in the 1970s and, summing up for the other patrons, said, 'They're pro-James Island. Most of the people here have been here for a very long time.'

They want their own public services and the autonomy of island life preserved. They want the people representing them living on this side of the James Island connector.

Barbara Fulford owns Attic Treasures, an antique and consignment shop in Riverland Terrace, the James Island neighborhood that, because of contiguity rules, could be excluded from a future attempt at forming a town. Fulford lives in Summerville and has rented the shop's space for nearly 22 years.

'If their taxes go up, then my payments go up, and I'm barely making it now,' she said.

One of her regular customers, Dick Kirkland, said he's neither pro-town nor pro-city as he perused the store last week. But he sums up the situation on his island with the ease of repetition: 'When people ask me where I live I say, ‘I live in Charleston, on James Island.''

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594.