Mortgage Broker in Knightsville, SC

By Casey L. Taylor, JD

Tucked away near Summerville, SC – the place known as “Flowertown, USA” – is a sanctuary dedicated to gibbons (small apes). It’s a jungle-like wonderland that has lifesaving at the core of its mission.

The International Primate Protection League (IPPL) sanctuary is a secret to many locals. It is situated on over 40 acres of land surrounded by lush woods. Neighbors are lucky enough to hear the songs and great calls of these interesting primates throughout the day and night.

The sanctuary is home to 36 gibbons, the smallest of the apes, who have been rescued or retired from laboratories, deplorable “roadside” attractions, or the pet trade. IPPL provides lifetime care to these incredible endangered species and works to educate the community on the plight of gibbons in the wild.

The gibbon residents at the sanctuary have indoor night houses that are hurricane-grade, expansive outdoor habitats, and aerial walkways that give them the choice to safely move about their designated areas as they wish. It is important to the organization that each sanctuary resident is given as much freedom of choice as possible in a captive environment, while keeping them safe. Despite most residents having a rough start to their lives, they thrive at IPPL. They even have some residents nearing the age of 60!

International Outreach

IPPL is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and preserving the world’s remaining primates, great and small. For the last 45 years, IPPL has made a global impact by securing an export ban on primates from Thailand (saving thousands and thousands of lives) and working with over 20 reputable primate rescue and rehabilitation centers in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.

IPPL not only supports their efforts to care for native primates who have been rescued and are in need of rehabilitation or lifetime care, but also to thwart poachers and illegal wildlife traffickers, as well as educate local villages and communities on how they can help be part of the solution in preserving native populations of primates.

Small Team, Big Impact

With a small but mighty team of animal caregivers, maintenance technicians, office staff, and dog nannies, IPPL provides compassionate lifetime care for every resident, which includes nutritious and delicious fresh produce three times a day for the gibbons, as well as veterinary care and enrichment — to stimulate those intelligent minds of theirs!

Forms of enrichment vary from food puzzles that the gibbon must figure out in order to get their healthy treats, to special time with their favorite caregiver. Bubble-blowing is a big hit with some of the gibbons. Tong, who was one of the first four original residents at the sanctuary, loves a good foot rub — what girl doesn’t?

Absolutely nothing beats a life in the wild, but for these residents that is sadly not a reality. The team at IPPL feels that the least they can do is make the rest of these individuals’ lives the happiest and healthiest they can be. From residents used in invasive human vaccination studies and locomotion tests, to those kept in less-than-favorable conditions, IPPL’s sanctuary is a safe and loving place for them to thrive and to live as gibbons should.

Casey L. Taylor, JD is the Executive Director of IPPL.

MORE ABOUT IPPL

The sanctuary is not open to the public as an attraction, but it holds educational events in the community and offers options to visit during special times. Sign up to receive their e-newsletters on their website (www.ippl.org) and be the first to know about opportunities and events.

VIDEO: Old Fort Fire against Dorchester County's decision to terminate contract, residents concerned

DORCHESTER COUNTY, SC (WCSC) - Some Jedburg and Knightsville area residents are upset that a fire station that served them for nearly 30 years will no longer be in service at the beginning of next year.

In November, Dorchester County Council unanimously voted to not renew the contracts for three Old Fort Fire Stations. The contracts last 5 years.

Dorchester County Fire and Rescue will cover those areas. It's all part of the county's plan to unify and improve fire and rescue services that started back in 2013.

Concerned citizens gathered at the Old Fort Fire Station on Orangeburg Road, also known as the Knightsville station. Many of them don't want to see the station go away and they plan to try to do something about it.

Right now there are three Old Fort Fire Stations that serve Jedburg and Knightsville areas. Starting January 18 of next year, Dorchester County Fire and Rescue will run the two stations that are county owned. One station is in The Ponds neighborhood in Summerville and the other fire station is on Highway 78. In contrast, the Knightsville station on Orangeburg road will be closed.

Commissioner of the Old Fort Fire Department, Bill Yarborough led Thursday night's community meeting at the Knightsville Fire Station.

"It's causing problems for our firefighters, it's causing problem for the citizens here they'll have one less station to depend on, and the Town of Summerville they'll have one less station to augment their services," he said.

The meeting was to inform the community about the changes. Many were concerned about losing a station.

"We need people who already know this area and that's worked with the people before," says a local resident Larry Groover. "New firefighters coming in, I have nothing against them. I think they're going to be great eventually, but they don't have the experience yet."

Residents say they are hesitant about the change because current firefighters are familiar with the routes and buildings because the Old Fort Station has served the area for a long time. They're also concerned about longer response times.

Chairman of the Dorchester County Council, David Chinnis, says County Council voted for the changes because it will unify fire protection and reduce the costs of protection for residents and some insurance ratings.

"This means that the fire service is going to be better and partially because an automatic aid agreement with the town of Summerville," Chinnis said.

An automatic aid agreement means when a fire happens and alert will go to all stations and the closest station will respond, according to Chinnis. This is regardless if the place is in the town or county. For example when the Knightsville Fire Station is gone, the Summerville Fire Department, about a mile away, will respond to some of those area calls. In addition, when a truck leaves the station and creates a vacancy other nearby departments will be prepared to step in, in the case of another emergency at the same time.

"I don't really believe anyone looks at the door of the truck, they just want to make sure that red truck rolls up and that guy in turnout gear with a hose, gets out and is ready to fight that fire," Chinnis said. "That's the most important thing."

Chinnis says when the changes are made, three first responders will be required to be on the truck when responding to emergency calls. He says that's not always the case now.

Yarborough feels there is still a lost for the community, he says especially because there are four schools surrounding the Knightsville station.

"We could cover these schools very good, we're going to leave a hole, when this happens in this area," Yarborough said. "This station will go away, Summerville is going to have to cover it by themselves and we'll have to wait for other units to respond elsewhere."

About 18 Old Fort firefighters work at the three stations seeing changes. County officials say they will be able to apply for jobs when the county takes over the two stations in their coverage area.

"[It's] always been a contract area, it's always been a Dorchester County responsibility, but we simply contracted it," Chinnis said. "We believe at this point in time that the capabilities with Dorchester County Fire and Rescue, with where they have come in the three years....since inception that we can provide those services."

Officials at the Old Fort Fire Station on Orangeburg Road say they are going to continue to have public meetings on Thursday at 7 p.m. to spread the word about the change.

Copyright 2016 WCSC. All Rights Reserved.

Dorchester County is continuing with its plans for a large-scale rezoning effort to stop the over-building of additional apartment complexes and townhomes.

At a County Council meeting Monday, members voted and approved the rezoning of dozens of parcels of land from multi-family residential to mostly single-family. Under single-family zoning, property owners aren’t allowed to build apartments or townhomes.

Knightsville LLC is a property owner with plans for building townhomes that was exempt from the rezoning ordinance after filing a complaint in county court. County officials say there have also been some additional complaints from residents about the rezoning.

“The complaint from Knightsville LLC held more significance because of the level of investment involved,” said Kiera Reinertsen, the county planning and zoning director.

In 2004, the county’s zoning ordinance was amended and led to an increase in approvals of multi-family zoning.

After hearing complaints about traffic, infrastructure and flooding during the organizing of its 2018 Comprehensive Plan, the county announced mass rezoning plans for multi-family spaces.

According to officials, most of the property owners under the rezoning project already live within single-family spaces. The project will help bring property owners who have spaces for commercial use into compliance. Using a property for commercial use is not permitted in a single-family residential district.

The project will also help balance population densities and available county infrastructure.

Some of the multi-family areas highlighted for rezoning include property southeast of Ladson Road toward North Charleston and between Ladson Road and Central Avenue in Knightsville.

In April, Knightsville LLC filed a complaint in the county court over proposed rezoning. The owner had purchased three parcels of land off of Central Avenue in Knightsville with the goal of building townhomes.

In the complaint, the owner alleged that the rezoning plans undermined and violated their investment-backed expectations and denied them the right to pursue a planned development project.

During the Monday meeting, attorney Ellis Lesemann spoke on behalf of Knightsville LLC. He said they paid just under $1.1 million for the land in 2019. He also argued that there is enough infrastructure in place to develop the project.

“They’ve been incurring permit fees, legal fees, engineering, doing a wetlands delineation and going through other types of carrying costs to bring that project forward,” he said.

Lesemann said his client learned about the rezoning plans for their property in February. After a Monday executive session, the council agreed to exclude property under Knightsville LLC from its rezoning ordinance.

“We were pleased to be able to resolve the matter with the county,” Lesemann said.

Future approval of multi-family zoning will be based on the county’s available infrastructure and future land use.

The area above Central Avenue in Knightsville is next on the county’s list of mass rezoning. The county’s planning commission is scheduled to meet on Oct. 8 to review proposed rezonings.

A County Council public hearing is expected to follow on a later date. Officials say property owners impacted by the rezoning should’ve already been notified.

Many owners have likely received a flier on their property notifying them about the rezoning.

The droves of people moving to the Lowcountry for the low cost of living and plentiful jobs aren’t coming alone.

Often those workers have families that include young children who will attend public schools. Of the more than 750,000 people who live in the region, about 22 percent are age 18 or younger, according to the Census Bureau.

That growth leaves school systems struggling to keep up as they strive to find funding, space and dozens of teachers to instruct those new students each year.

“Right now, we are trying to basically take inventory of what we have, and trying to find different ways to deal with the growth,” said Berkeley County Senior Associate Superintendent Deon Jackson.

In many cases, districts’ annual growth is enough to fill a new school.

This year, for instance, Berkeley planned for 800 new students, but 1,400 came.

“And Volvo hasn’t moved the first car off of their plant yet,” Jackson said of the carmaker that plans to bring 4,000 new jobs to the county and will roll out its first S60 sedan later this year. “At this rate, there is no doubt in our minds that yes, we are going to need additional schools at some point.”

Dorchester, on the other hand, got an unexpected break this year. After more than a decade of 400 to 1,000 additional students per year, only 149 new students enrolled in that district this year. Officials had planned for 600.

Predictably, the schools near new development are the most overcrowded.

Cane Bay elementary and middle schools near bustling Carnes Crossroads are currently under the biggest strain in Berkeley, and the Philip Simmons schools off Clements Ferry Road are expected to feel a pinch in coming years.

Dorchester 2’s crush is in the Knightsville area on the district’s northeast side, where Reeves Elementary and DuBose Middle share a campus.

“We have a lot of development coming that could impact those schools,” said Dorchester 2 Chief Financial Officer Allyson Duke.

Lack of funding

But those new houses don’t contribute to school districts’ operating budgets.

State law, Act 388, limits the kind of taxes a school district can levy, including a prohibition on taxing homeowner-occupied residential properties for operating expenses.

“They build all these houses, but we don’t benefit from the property taxes from them,” Duke said.

Property tax bills reflect an amount for the school operating budget that is then deducted as a credit.

“There’s still confusion,” Duke said. “A lot of people do not realize that they’re not paying school operating taxes. They see it on their tax bill and don’t look and see that school tax credit at the bottom.”

Funding for capital needs like new buildings or maintaining existing ones has to come from somewhere else, often special obligation bonds.

“What we are trying to do is make sure that we’re utilizing everything that we have to the fullest extent before we start building additional schools,” Jackson said.

Charleston County, which is also growing by about 1,000 students annually, funds its building program through a 1 percent sales tax. The district expects to collect $575 million to fund new school buildings and renovations through the tax, first approved in 2010 and renewed in 2014.

But Berkeley and Dorchester 2 have both turned to homeowners. In 2012, those districts floated “Yes 4 Schools” campaigns with an eye toward easing some of the overcrowding that existed then.

At the time, they said several schools housed hundreds more students than they could comfortably hold and students were being taught in trailers, work rooms and libraries.

Seventy percent of voters in Berkeley approved the ballot measure to fund a $198 million building program that added four new elementary schools and a high school, while Dorchester 2’s $179.9 million campaign to add three elementary schools and a magnet middle school of the arts passed by a 60-40 margin.

The measures added $102 on a $150,000 owner-occupied house in Dorchester County for 20 years. In Berkeley, homeowners paid $60 more on a $150,000 house the first three years, and are now paying $120 annually until 2023, when it goes back to $60 for another decade.

“The referendum was definitely a success,” Duke said. “If we didn’t have these new schools, I don’t know what we would have done.”

End of Yes 4 Schools

Both Berkeley and Dorchester 2 will see the end of their building campaigns this year. In August, Berkeley plans to open Bowens Corner and Foxbank elementary schools, and Dorchester 2 students will move into the new Rollings Middle School of the Arts.

The extra seats have helped some but not enough, officials said.

“We need more schools, that’s all there is to it,” said Duke.

In the 5½ years since the referendums were approved, Berkeley has grown by about 5,000 students to 35,192 this year. Dorchester has gone from 23,245 to 26,240.

“We’ve completed that building program, and the growth is still coming,” Jackson said. “We’ve made our adjustments; however, it’s still not sufficient. When you have a 900-student school opening up at 750 students, it doesn’t leave you much room, not the way that Berkeley County is growing.”

The county is outpacing even the aggressive predictions of a 2015 study by Clemson’s Strom Thurmond Institute that forecast the student population could skyrocket to 55,000 by 2035. That study called for 20 new schools in 20 years.

Moving forward

But aware that taxpayers are still putting money into the 2012 program, officials are doing everything they can to maximize space.

“We are not so certain that a referendum is the only solution,” Jackson said. “We’re working with the county government and working with our Legislature to figure out what’s the best way for Berkeley County to deal with the situation we have.”

The trailers the districts removed from schools a few years ago are now being added back. At DuBose, for instance, six additional units will be added to the 18 already there for next school year.

Dorchester is not yet talking about redrawing attendance lines — always a hot topic — but Berkeley is.

“Where do you move them? To a less overcrowded school?” said District 2 spokeswoman Pat Raynor.

Officials at both districts said they have a commitment not to increase class size, which can be a detriment to learning for students and a stress for teachers.

“Talk to just about any teacher, and they would rather have lower class sizes,” Duke said. “That’s probably more important to most of them than pay, really.”

Berkeley is looking at some unconventional ways to increase capacity, such as using a “college model” of office space or shared spaces in jam-packed high schools instead of assigning teachers to classrooms. That allows each class to be used every class period, in theory increasing capacity by 25 percent.

“We’re trying to use every resource that we have to the fullest before doing something that’s going to cause us to borrow more money,” Jackson said.

Although they aren’t ruling out future referendums, both are aware that they may not get taxpayer support.

“We’re taking a collaborative approach because we are coming out of a building program that drew a lot of attention,” Jackson said. “We are definitely cognizant of that.”

Opposition to Berkeley’s referendum led to a State Law Enforcement Division investigation and guilty pleas on ethics charges from former Superintendent Rodney Thompson and Communcations Director Amy Kovach.

In addition, in the aftermath of the investigation, authorities uncovered a scheme by former Chief Financial Officer Brantley Thomas to embezzle nearly $1 million from the district and shuffle money between accounts to cover up construction cost overruns of about $7.2 million.

Dorchester 2 was also sued over its referendum. In March 2017, Summerville lawyer Mike Rose filed a lawsuit claiming that the district broke state law and its own rules during the building campaign, leading to cost overruns, delays in opening new schools and shoddy work. That lawsuit is ongoing.

SUMMERVILLE, S.C. (WCBD) – It was 1973 when Shirley McGreal, then living in Southeast Asia, saw beady bright eyes staring back at her from between the slats of a wooden crate.

The eyes belonged to a gibbon — a primate native to the region — who had fallen victim to the dangerous world of the pet trade, where gibbons were being sold into homes, zoos, or labs, only to later be discarded.

In 1977, McGreal created the International Primate Protection League (IPPL) in Summerville as a gibbon sanctuary. The now 47-acre property remains nestled in a quiet area of the Lowcountry that is illuminated by the sounds of the primates singing to one another.

Meg McCue-Jones, the Compliance and Outreach Manager, explained that the land was a sod farm in the late 70s and started taking in the gibbons that needed help soon after.

One of the sanctuary’s residents, Gibby, is one of the oldest known living gibbons at over 60 years old.

Like most of the gibbons at the sanctuary, his life started off rough.

McCue-Jones said that Gibby was wild caught, and “with every gibbon wild caught, they shoot mom out of the tree, hoping baby falls, and then they take the baby.”

He was first sold into the pet trade in by a Bangkok dealer, but that was just the beginning. Gibby went to labs at Hofstra University and the State University at Stony Brook.

Researchers embedded electrodes in his skin as part of a locomotion project.

The electrodes and thin wires were inserted into his muscles and connected him to a suit that would measure his muscle movements. McCue-Jones explained that this was obviously not an ideal situation on any aspect, whether it be a human or animal.

At 44, Gibby made it to his first sanctuary, but the conditions were hard on his body. In March of 2007, just four years after his arrival, the IPPL reached out to the sanctuary to relocate not only Gibby, but several other gibbons.

For Gibby, like the other 29 at the sanctuary, Summerville is his last stop. McCue-Jones says that the sanctuary is their forever home.

But with the pandemic, their home has become more difficult to manage.

With fear of COVID-19 spreading to the primates, volunteers were no longer allowed to assist with the many daily tasks necessary to keep the place running.

From hosing the outsides of the enclosures, to raking, food prep, and even assistance inside the office—the staff was left with mounting responsibilities.

The economic impacts of the pandemic left donors and community partners reeling financially, but the bills at the sanctuary remained steady.

As a non-federally funded organization, the IPPL relies heavily on donations to meet the needs of the animals.

Stacy Lambert, a Senior Animal Care Giver, said that since a lot of their population has started to reach geriatric ages, their vet bills are getting bigger as they are having more interventions and medications, different procedures, and checkup appointments with Dr. John Ohlandt.

While expensive, their system of care has proven to work.

Lambert says that in the wild, gibbons usually live about 30-35 years. However, in captivity, gibbons living into their 40s is normal. However, the IPPL has quite a few gibbons that are up in their 40s and 50s while, of course, Gibby is 62.

Although the interventions from the IPPL show the ability of the sanctuary, McCue-Jones said all those at the IPPL ultimately wish there was not a need for them at all, and that the gibbons could live freely in the wild.

McCue-Jones said, “as Shirley has spoken of before, if you really think about it, do humans need sanctuaries, should we have them? Should we be treating the animals this way?”

To send the Gibbons a care package full of nuts, click here.

To donate to the IPPL’s missions and day-to-day operations, click here.

To send specified items needed by the IPPL via Amazon, click here.