On the evening of Oct. 28, I attended a “Homebuyer Workshop” at Fairfield Middle School, which was announced in the Oct. 22 issue of The Voice in a short article on page 5A. My purpose in attending was to gain information from SC Housing on “Specialized assistance for…housing preservation.” The ‘workshop,’ however, turned out to be a Town Hall meeting with SC House Representative (Dist. 41) candidate Annie E. McDaniel officiating along with candidate for Fairfield County Council Dist. 3, Kennedy Bates.
Neither Ms. McDaniel nor Ms. Bates, were mentioned in the article. Yet both candidates, like snakes in the grass, used the meeting to draw attention to their political aspirations.
I felt duped into sitting through a re-election campaign rally!
Robert McDonald, Director of SC Housing, and his two assistants did a fair enough job of sharing the main bullet points of the SC Housing website, but none of my questions were adequately answered and he was only too quick, as on cue, to defer to Ms. McDaniel.
Toward the end of the meeting, Ms. Bates took the floor to present her bio and inform the audience that she is running for political office and would appreciate our votes. As I was leaving, she handed me her campaign card and said she hoped she could depend on my vote.
Prior to that campaign speech, Ms. Bates took the mic from the SC Housing presenters on several occasions to ask how they planned to make housing affordable for Fairfield County residents. She frequently passed the mic to Ms. McDaniel, seated next to her, who pressed the SC Housing presenters on how they specifically planned to make the projected new $500K homes (to accommodate the pending influx of homebuyers Scout Motors may generate) available to existing Fairfield County residents.
Ms. McDaniels both opened and closed the meeting with references to the midterm elections and stated that she organized this meeting as “an aid to her House District 41 constituents” and promised that more of the same would follow.
I felt the meeting was an obvious ruse for collecting votes for both candidates.
Errol Alger
Winnsboro