Criminal Defense Attorney inFountain Inn, SC

At 34, G.P. McLeer is the youngest mayor in Fountain Inn’s history, and his city administrator, Shawn Bell, at 36, took on his current position five years ago at age 31.

The two men are sharing their vision for a Fountain Inn that is a little more transparent and transformative than small cities have been in years past.

Fountain Inn’s growth has necessitated a different approach to everything from local business to infrastructure.

“I’m really proud of where our city has been heading,” McLeer said recently. “And I think we’ve been trying to do it in a way to not impede Fountain Inn’s future while still maintaining its downtown charm. We still have some tweaks that we want to do in order to ensure that that stays intact. We’re about to redo our comprehensive plan, which is a really big deal. That is the master plan for the community.”

The last master plan was adopted in 2017, just a few months before Bell joined Fountain Inn as city administrator. They’re in the process of drafting a new plan to succeed the 2017 document, which achieved all of its stated goals in less than five years.

The two men have different backgrounds, but a common goal for their adopted city.

A native of Anderson, McLeer helped to start the Younts Performing Arts Center in Fountain Inn, and he started the Mauldin Cultural Center, running it for six years, three of them as director of the Office of Cultural Affairs. He also served on the economic development team and worked to market the city.

After working in both Fountain Inn and Mauldin, he ran a statewide nonprofit focused on political advocacy work, the South Carolina Arts Alliance. He also is the executive director of the Upstate Mobility Alliance, which works with government entities to advance transportation solutions across the region.

Through that work, McLeer fell in love with local government, and it’s still one of his passions.

“I think it’s the most effective form of government on your daily life,” he said. “It deals with some really important issues that aren’t on the top of the ballot box when people go to vote in a presidential year – like their trash pickup or their parks or their Main Street revitalization. Those types of things that are extremely important. … I also love trying to find ways to make local government more efficient and transparent. I like policy and process – those are my two focuses.”

Bell grew up in the St. Louis area, in a small town called Glen Carbon, Illinois, which he said reminds him of Fountain Inn.

“Glen Carbon is this historic coal-mining town, which has had a similar population trajectory to Fountain Inn. Its next-door neighbor, Edwardsville, saw significant growth in the 1990s and 2000s very similar to that of Simpsonville,” Bell said.

He majored in political science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and he spent the early years of his career working in government relations and politics.

While obtaining a Master’s in Public Administration at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, he became intrigued by the idea of city management after one of his professors discussed it in class. That same professor helped Bell get an internship with the city manager in Ferguson, Missouri.

Bell’s wife grew up in Charlotte and wanted to be closer to family, so they moved to South Carolina after Bell finished grad school. He spent 1½ years as assistant city manager in Abbeville, then served as city administrator of Lake City for three years before joining Fountain Inn in October 2017.

Not every city can boast a city administrator and mayor with a combined age of 70, but Bell and McLeer are united in their love for Fountain Inn and their desire to find a way to balance the needs of a growing city with the intangible factors that make it a desirable place for businesses and families to locate.

One of McLeer’s goals has been to create a more transparent City Hall and government process.

“We redid our website to make everything more accessible for folks,” he said. “Immediately, we started posting recordings of our meetings, and then we had plans to livestream before Covid hit. Actually, we had ordered some equipment before Covid hit, like the week before, and ended up having to livestream. … And we also now livestream not just our council meetings, but also our boards and commissions.”

The meetings are also recorded for later viewing. This allows residents to follow the agenda and their issues of concern through each step of the process, and it helps that folks can watch the meetings even if they might have scheduling conflicts that would preclude their attending in person.

“It gives them another outlet to be informed and engaged,” Bell said.

Transparency is important in local government, McLeer said.

Zoning is another issue that is top of mind in Fountain Inn. McLeer and Bell are working to modify the zoning laws to “protect the character of Fountain Inn as we grow,” McLeer said.

The new plan will involve public input and a steering committee and will feature a new future land-use map, which is a key part of managing growth.

Eventually, McLeer said, the entirety of the city’s zoning laws will be rewritten. But zoning is a unique challenge for Fountain Inn because part of the city sits in Laurens County, which has no zoning laws.

Beyond the revision of the master plan, other changes on the horizon include the completion of the Main Street redevelopment project, the opening of a new public works and natural gas facility in the coming year, developing a parking master plan, as well as a master plan for the city’s parks.

As the city grows, Bell and McLeer have given special attention to the downtown area.

When thinking about how best to manage the city’s unprecedented growth, Bell looked at “what we most hold dear here. What is it that we want to protect? To me, it was easy … it’s our downtown. That’s what makes Fountain Inn from a physical standpoint. The people make Fountain Inn what it is, but from a physical infrastructure type of thing, it is our downtown. That’s why we’ve put this huge emphasis on protecting and preserving and enhancing our downtown.”

Over the years, the downtown business district has gone through up and down phases, times when there was 80 percent vacancy. These days, Bell said, it’s about 90 percent occupancy.

In recent years, Bell and McLeer have worked to attract businesses that could bring variety and vibrancy to downtown, with owners who look at operating their stores as a business – with evening and weekend hours – rather than as a hobby, Bell said.

Fountain Inn’s Main Street Grants Program has helped to beautify and improve the downtown area, and it’s been a boon for the city, Bell said.

“That was the impetus for the community to really start to understand that the growth is happening,” Bell said. “We cannot stop people from moving here. … I think it’s a compliment that people want to move to the community I manage.”

McLeer said, “The growth in Fountain Inn is a challenge not just on paper, but also for residents.”

“There absolutely has been some pushback, and I get it. There’s a lot of change happening,” Bell said.

Some people are taken aback by the rate of growth. “This is more change than they’ve ever seen in a short period of time,” Bell said.

Managing the growth brings together disparate elements, from zoning to property rights to infrastructure, McLeer said.

“Large tracts of land are being sold by families to developers,” McLeer said. “We always have to ask the question, ‘What is the appropriate role that local government can and should play in that conversation?’ We don’t want to impede the rights of property owners, regardless of who owns that piece of property. We don’t want to impede a family’s right to sell their property to whom they like at a price that the market allows them to sell it at. But at the same time, when something is developed, we want to be sure it reflects the character of the community, and that’s where zoning comes into play.”

If the city couldn’t envision the rate of growth when drafting the 2017 comprehensive plan, it’s no surprise that residents weren’t expecting it.

“I think folks rightfully have questions about the pace at which Fountain Inn’s growth has occurred and what are we trying to do to wrestle with it,” McLeer said.

The city’s demographics have changed in recent years. In addition to lifelong residents, Fountain Inn has welcomed transplants from other places, a diverse mix of people, many of them with young families.

And with the rate of manufacturing and business growth in both Greenville and Laurens counties, the residential growth is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. As Bell sees it, the city’s four exits off of Interstate 385 and the concentration of industry in the vicinity of those exits have contributed to the growth.

As companies move into the Upstate, transplants are looking at where they want to live.

“They’re choosing places like Fountain Inn because they can still have that hometown feel but maybe the land is a little bit cheaper, maybe they don’t have to deal with the traffic of downtown Greenville,” Bell said. “Whatever their reason, they feel like they can get the best of both worlds.”

FOUNTAIN INN — A 20-acre land donation will more than triple the size of a park planned around the historic Jones Mill near Fountain Inn.

The additional property, which sits on the opposite side of Durbin Creek from the more than century-old grist mill, will allow the Jones Mill Restoration Committee to build a pedestrian bridge across the waterway and create footpaths modeled on the Conestee Nature Preserve, according to committee chairman Buddy Gray.

The deal between the committee, which is a subsidiary of the Fountain Inn Museum, and developer Mark Cothran, has been in the works for months but officially went through last week.

As part of the deal, the park will be accessible from one of Cothran’s residential developments on a property bordering the site.

The land transfer comes as the committee prepares to begin the restoration of Jones Mill itself, using $1.6 million in state funds allocated earlier this year.

The committee has enlisted Preservation South to deconstruct, refurbish and rebuild the mill, which rose in that spot in the mid-1800s, on the site just north of Fountain Inn.

For decades, the mill has gone unused and has gradually fallen into a state of disrepair. Its previous owners donated the building and surrounding 9 acres to the museum in early 2021. Gray said the coming project will transform it into an educational and recreational asset for the community.

Along with the restored mill building, the committee intends to install an outdoor classroom, gazebos, a creek overlook, restrooms, paved parking spaces and walking trails on the land surrounding the mill.

The additional 20 acres the committee recently received will allow it to connect the paths planned around the mill to a larger network of walking trails, which Gray said will function as a passive park and wildlife preserve.

“It’s a very significant contribution to our size and it gives us a buffer on both sides of the creek,” Gray said. “It allows us to put a bridge across Durbin Creek. ... That was something that we really wanted.”

Now that the park will be roughly 30 acres, Gray said, the committee is also exploring ways to add more amenities, including additional observation decks and trails.

Gray said Jones Mill Park is set to be complete and open to the public by early 2025 at the latest. Once it’s up and running, the museum hopes to eventually donate it to Greenville County.

“The best move for the museum and for everybody would be to let the county take it over once we get it built,” he said. “They’ve got the people, they’ve got the skills, they have the cleanup crews and the grass mowers. It would be a lot better for them to take that over.”

Gray said he envisions a park that will serve as a regular field trip destination for schools in the area. He hopes to partner with the nearby Fountain Inn High School to create signage about the area plant and wildlife, and the mill itself will serve as a testament to the area’s history.

The Farehouse, a dining concept based in Taylors Mill, will open a second storefront in the former J Peters space on Main Street in Fountain Inn.

This location will be franchised by Upstate businessman Yogi Patel, who is also Bohemian Bull’s Upstate franchisee. Patel will work with The Farehouse owners in Taylors to bring the same concept to the Golden Strip, said Dustin Tenney of Reedy River Retail at SVN Blackstream, one-half of the brokerage team that helped to lease the space.

According to Tenney, The Farehouse in Fountain Inn will undergo renovations and is expected to open in late summer or early fall.

Once open, the eatery will offer a variety of:

Location: 111 N. Main St., Fountain Inn

Website: thefarehouse.com

Today’s Fountain Inn calls itself a city – the name’s right there on City Hall. Everyone agrees Fountain Inn is on its way to becoming a full-fledged city. But even as Fountain Inn grows into its city moniker, its leadership stresses that the city will never lose its small-town charm.

“I think Fountain Inn has always been rooted in small-town charm, and I think that will never leave Fountain Inn – if we work hard on all the things that make small-town charm possible,” said Mayor G.P. McLeer Jr., who was elected in 2019. “So I think how Fountain Inn feels in terms of folks when they are visiting, living here, working here, playing here – that small-town charm will continue to live on for as long as possible.”

The spot that is now Fountain Inn was well known to Native Americans as a crossroads; the town itself was established in 1886, according to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and first served as a stagecoach stop between Columbia, in the Midlands, and Asheville, in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

In the mid-20th century, Fountain Inn thrived as it rode the textiles-manufacturing wave that swept through the Upstate. Despite the textiles wave’s crashing in the 1970s, which saw most mills throughout the region shuttered, future development pays homage to that mill-town manufacturing history, including Woodside Village, an expansive multiuse development that takes its name from the former Woodside Mill; and the Mill at Fountain Inn, which will be a unique dining and entertainment destination housed in a former flour mill.

Blending past and future

Now the city is once again experiencing boom times: population has grown by almost 6 percent between the 2000 census and the 2020 census, from 6,017 residents to 10,416; the first new high school to open in Greenville County in 50 years is Fountain Inn High, which opened in 2021; and the Fountain Inn Chamber of Commerce reports that 57 businesses have joined just this year.

Marnie Schwartz-Hanley, president and CEO of the Fountain Inn Chamber of Commerce, noted that growth is a reality outside of the Upstate, also.

“It’s not just us; it’s the entire state,” Schwartz-Handley said. “We’re seeing enormous growth in this area; some of it was anticipated as we saw demographics changing – people getting squeezed out of big cities, wanting a slower pace of life – and I think the pandemic really amplified that. People in other places said, ‘I can’t even run my business right now,’ and South Carolina, we never really shut down. We were not shut down for business like a lot of states were.”

She praised City Council for taking a pragmatic approach to growth.

“Fountain Inn (leadership) – they see what’s coming, they do not approve every project that comes before council,” she said. “They really put some thought into it. It’s amazing to see the growth and to watch the city be mindful of that.”

At the intersection of the two trends – growth and property divestment -- is the city, and the mayor said it’s the city’s responsibility to encourage responsible growth.

“I’ve always wanted to do it in a way that is objective as possible, is as clear and transparent as possible, and respects the rights of the property owner, whether that be a person or a company or a business, that doesn’t try to impede the free market but also that takes into account the responsible role of government,” McLeer said.

“Where all of those intersect with government is zoning,” he continued. “That’s the best tool we have at our disposal to make it clear to those who wish to do something with the property that is allowed, that makes it clear to the community about the restrictions that are put in place. It goes to, I think, the appropriate role of government.”

A downtown renaissance

Things that won’t change, McLeer said, include a wide range of annual events and festivals the city has become known for, such as the Christmas “Inn” Our Town festival, including the Christmas Tree lighting and Christmas parade; the Mac Arnold Cornbread and Collard Greens Blues Festival; the Sounds of Summer concert series; the Aunt Het Festival, which celebrates a fictional character created by Robert Quillen, a humorist and journalist who founded the Fountain Inn Tribune newspaper; and many others.

“You’ll still see some of the markers of what our community has created as anchors,” McLeer said. “you’ll still see those anchors in the community. I think you’ll see our downtown area continue its second renaissance – which is starting right now – and you’ll also see an expansion of parks in the area, not just close to downtown but on the Laurens County side of town, across I-385. I think you’re going to see more of what makes Fountain Inn great.”

Many of those anchors are part of Fountain Inn’s core – its downtown business district which runs along Main Street.

The mayor quickly ticked off a list of projects that are either underway in Fountain Inn or are at some stage of consideration, including:

More commercial offerings downtown

Completion of the Main Street Streetscape

Connect existing Swamp Rabbit Trail segments to downtown Fountain Inn, Simpsonville, and Laurens County.

Sewer-line rehabilitation

Renovation of the Sanctified Hill Park in Laurens County

Infrastructure planning

Schwartz-Hanley said she appreciates the city’s efforts to preserve the city’s small-town charm, and she believes it will be successful.

“I think what Fountain Inn is doing well is they are focusing on keeping Fountain Inn cozy,” she said. “When you come to downtown Fountain Inn, you have that historic, downtown feel, right here on Main Street. You may not have that everywhere in Fountain Inn, but you’ll be able to go to the center of town and always feel like you’re in a small town.”

Satisfy your craving for Italian cuisine at Gio’s Pastry Shop, Caffee, and Italian Market in Fountain Inn, SC! Gio’s offers a large selection of homemade and imported Italian and Italian American goods, including homemade pastries, cookies, and cakes. Their shop also sells a multitude of Italian groceries, sandwiches, salads, and even serves fresh coffee. There is no better way to experience a culture than through food, and Gio’s will bring a little slice of Italy into your life.

Homemade Baked Goods, The Italian Way

Gio’s has one of the most diverse selections of Italian baked goods in Greenville, thanks to owner Maria Natale. Her pursuit to fulfill her customer’s cravings for Italian desserts ignited Gio’s popularity in the Fountain Inn community. From homemade cannolis, mini cannoli cheesecakes, Italian rainbow cookies, and Sfogliatelle (Clamshell) pastries, no wonder Gio’s has quickly become a go-to bakery. They even have gluten-free options!

Gio’s also produces homemade bread that has a delicious crunchy outside encasing a soft and fluffy inside. Kidding Around’s Maria says that Gio’s bread is the closest to NYC’s Italian bread that she has found in the south. Walking into Gio’s will transport your senses straight to an Italian kitchen. Paired with the vibe of Gio’s, you will feel like you coming home to your Nonna baking in the kitchen (even if you’re not Italian).

Groceries and Goods Found at Gio’s

Along with Gio’s staple pastries and baked goods, they sell a wide selection of Italian groceries and premade meals. Many of their grocery items are imported directly from Italy, so nothing gets more authentic than that. You can also purchase from a selection of premade foods, such as Pasta Fagioli and Italian Wedding Soup. They even have several varieties of fresh-made pasta and sauce to purchase for your next Italian-inspired meal. Don’t forget to grab some delicious mozzarella to top it off.

So, grab the family and go explore the culture of Italy through the pastries and meals you can find at Gio’s, without ever having to leave Greenville!

You can also pick up some awesome coloring books from local artist Brandi Grover at Gio’s. Try a sample of her coloring pages featuring KAG mascot, Golly.

Gio’s Pastry Shop 218 South Main Street – Unit A, Fountain Inn | 864.724.2058

Hours of OperationWednesday 8:30 am – 6:00 pmThursday 8:30 am – 6:00 pmFriday 8:30 am – 6:00 pmSaturday 8:30 am – 5:00 pmClosed Sunday-Tuesday

Festival alert: Don’t miss the Italian American Heritage Festival in Fountain Inn, SC!