Your local reps may have changed: Horry County finalizes redistricting maps
Horry County voters: Check the county’s new voting district maps. Your local representation may have changed.
That’s because Horry County leaders on Tuesday voted to finalize new voting district maps that will determine the districts for county council and school board members, and the districts have changed substantially.
Voting district maps are redrawn by local leaders once a decade, following the U.S. Census, per federal law. The 2020 Census found that more than 80,000 new residents moved to Horry County over the past 10 years, causing the district maps to shift drastically. Districts as of 2010 had roughly 24,000 people each, but now have around 32,000 each.
View the new Horry County voting district maps here.
The biggest changes to the district maps came in the form of consolidation. Areas, such as Carolina Forest, that were once split up among several districts now exist as their own unified voting bloc. Carolina Forest, a large portion of the S.C. 90 corridor and the Forestbrook area are now more compact and represented by a single county council and school board member, rather than being split up.
That was a change that some residents from those communities took issue with, arguing that having multiple county council members, for example, gave them additional leverage to address community issues. But county leaders in charge of redrawing the district maps said that federal law requires “communities of interest” to be kept together, and that streamlining representation for growing areas could actually help residents address issues more easily.
“We’ve had enormous growth over the last 10 years and we’ve had a lot of communities develop that weren’t there prior,” said County Council member Tyler Servant, who’s led the county’s ad-hoc redistricting committee. “Highway 90 is now going to get more singular representation, Carolina Forest is going to get more singular representation.”
“You’re seeing these communities across the county are hopefully going to have better representation by a council member that lives in their area,” he added.
Consolidating growing areas, Servant argued, also makes it more likely that residents of a given area will be represented by someone who lives there and is more intimately familiar with the community’s issues. The three council members who represent the city of Myrtle Beach, Servant pointed out, don’t live within city limits.
The new maps change that dynamic. County Council member Dennis DiSabato, for example, who’s current district is split between Myrtle Beach and Carolina Forest, will now exclusively represent Carolina Forest in the new districts.
Throughout the redistricting process, county leaders have agreed to change the maps in response to resident concerns. In an earlier draft, a neighborhood considered to be Conway-adjacent was included in the Carolina Forest district. That neighborhood was later shifted to a Conway-area district. An earlier draft also broke up a Black neighborhood in Myrtle Beach, though leaders have since kept that neighborhood together in a single district.
And most recently, leaders adjusted the maps to keep the small Black neighborhood of Cochran Town in a Conway-adjacent district rather than splitting it up between that district and a more rural one.
“If districts are broken up, there’s potential for scenarios where you could have not-as-centralized representation,” Servant said.
With the ad-hoc redistricting committee voting to approve the new maps Tuesday, the maps now head to county council for three rounds of votes. Leaders hope to have the maps finalized by the end of February, before candidates begin filing for election in March.
Servant advised voters to check the maps to see if their county council or school board representation has changed. He said he believes the new maps will improve representation for residents over the next decade.
“It’s exciting to see this map move forward,” he said. “Over the next 10 years you’re going to have representatives on county council and the school board that live in these communities of interest.”
