2025 SCAC Awards Ceremony Honors Collaboration in Times of Crisis, Ingenuity to Serve Community

2025 SCAC Awards Ceremony Honors Collaboration in Times of Crisis, Ingenuity to Serve Community 

This year’s SCAC Awards entries featured projects from 11 counties, highlighting creative problem-solving and collaborative efforts to improve the lives of residents.  

The winner of this year’s J. Mitchell Graham Award was Spartanburg County’s “CERT as the First Responder” project. Launched in 2024, Spartanburg County’s CERT91 program uses trained volunteers as a dedicated 911 response team for lower-acuity calls like lift assists and welfare checks. This allows EMS, fire and law enforcement to focus on life-threatening emergencies. Since its inception, the county’s CERT91 team has responded to more than 2,100 calls and contributed more than 11,000 volunteer hours, reducing system congestion and improving response times.  

“Just being able to lift someone off the floor, get them back in their bed, make their day a little bit better, and to see that cumulatively over thousands of different calls, that’s just extraordinarily rewarding,” said Spartanburg County CERT91 Director Tyler Golbus. 

The winner of this year’s Barrett Lawrimore Award was the collaborative effort between Greenville and Pickens counties for the “Table Rock Wildfire Incident: A Multiagency Coordination Effort.” The Table Rock Complex Fire in March was the largest recent wildfire in Upstate South Carolina. It began with the fire at Table Rock State Park and was joined by the Persimmon Ridge Fire near Caesars Head State Park.  

Fueled by dry weather, steep terrain, strong winds and debris from Hurricane Helene months earlier, the combined fires burned nearly 16,000 acres across Greenville and Pickens counties, eventually crossing state lines into North Carolina. A coordinated multiagency response, involving more than 1,000 personnel from county, state and federal agencies, was able to contain the blaze with no fatalities or structural losses. 

“I’m so pleased and so proud to see everyone pull together like that. It was very heartening,” said Pickens County Administrator Ken Roper. “I hope we don’t face anything like Helene again. I hope we don’t face anything like Table Rock fire again. I hope that no one in the state does. But if they do, we can pull together and solve that problem. We’ve proved it again and again.” 

The J. Mitchell Graham Memorial Award, which recognizes counties that address community challenges by implementing operational improvements or enhancing residents’ quality of life in a unique way, received entries from Chester, Dorchester, Edgefield, Georgetown, Richland and Spartanburg counties. 

The Barrett Lawrimore Regional Cooperation Memorial Award received four entries, featuring collaborative projects from Fairfield County; Georgetown County; Pickens and Greenville counties; and Charleston, Berkeley and Dorchester counties. 

Honorable Mentions for the J. Mitchell Graham Award: 

• Edgefield County (population less than 50,000) – Edgefield County Law Enforcement Center 

• Georgetown County (population between 50,000-150,000) – Georgetown Outdoor Adventure Trails 

• Dorchester County (population greater than 150,000) – 2025 Hurricane Preparedness Campaign 

Honorable Mention for the Barrett Lawrimore Award: 

• Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties – Tri-County Biological Science Center 

See summaries of all 2025 projects.