Sprague wins city council seat

By Charles Sowell  

NOVEMBER 5, 2009 3:20 a.m. (0)

Her 500-vote victory Tuesday over Republican Joyce Smart in the race for the at-large seat of Diane Smock on Greenville City Council is a testament to her toughness and devotion. It will also keep the current narrow Republican majority on council steady at 4 to 3.

“Part of the reason I ran for council was as a tribute to Ben,” she said during a post election interview with the Journal.

Her youngest son died while a freshman at Clemson University two years ago. He was 18.

“A lot of Ben’s friends helped out in the campaign,” she said. “I think that tragedy helped generate a lot of interest among young people that normally wouldn’t have been there for a local election.”

Her campaign issues in running for council were basic. She wanted to bring her analytical background as an engineer to bear on the issues facing the city.

“Potholes are not partisan,” Sprague said. “We all have to pull together on council to continue the success Greenville has enjoyed in the past.”

She and husband Joel are civil engineers, partners in Sprague and Sprague Consulting Engineers and graduates of Clemson University.

“I met Joel while working on my master’s degree,” she said. “In a way I was robbing the cradle since he was still an undergrad.”

The couple married 11 months later after a whirlwind romance similar to the courtship of her father, longtime legislator Ed Garrison and mom Juanita.

Garrison was running Denver Downs, the family farm in Anderson County, when he met Juanita, then a reporter for the Seneca Journal. Gaye is the oldest of the couple’s six children.

When she looked out over the crowd during her victory celebration Sprague said she was impressed by the quality of her volunteers. That spirit of volunteerism that she sees as so prevalent in Greenville is also part of what she also sees as the solution to the city’s problems.

Chief among the issues Sprague sees facing the city is a decline in revenue from licenses and fees.

“Nearly half the money the city takes in is generated by fees and licenses,” she said. “The economic downturn has put a dent in those sources of funding and will continue to do so in the coming year.”

Sprague will take her seat on council Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day.

“I hope that’s not an omen,” she said.

Sprague and Smart were sharply divided on making the downtown youth curfew permanent.

“There’s no doubt we need a curfew,” Sprague said. “But I would like to have seen it implemented with a sunset provision that would give the city a measure of stability while working on the underlying issues behind the disturbances.”

Sprague’s other son, Jay, works out of the same office as his mom and dad as a sales representative for Pennington Seed.

“I really like having him there in the office, yet not having to supervise him as an employee,” she said.

Jay is engaged to marry Molly Hardaway. The couple met while attending Clemson.

Sprague credits the “work from can see to can’t see” ethic she learned at Denver Downs and the pluckiness learned over generations of running a family business with her success as a consulting engineer and neophyte politician.

Certainly, among the Garrisons, there is a long running thread of continuity. The family has run Denver Downs since 1872 and her father served in the Legislature for 30 years.

Sprague plans to encourage more public/private partnerships to keep the city growing as the economic situation improves.

“I remember visiting downtown Greenville in the middle 1970s,” she said. “Downtown was well into a long slide.”

What’s been accomplished downtown since then is amazing, Sprague said.

“Most of what we see today has come about through public/private partnerships,” she said. “I’d like to see us continue that and expand it to other parts of the city.”

One of the things Sprague would like to see more of in the western part of town and around downtown are grocery stores.

“I think that’s one of the things we could stand to work on,” she said. “I surely understand there is a business side to running a grocery near a depressed part of town that is prohibitive.”

She thinks there is no reason why the city can’t use some of the same public/private tools it has used to make the downtown stellar and to leverage redevelopment monies around town to help bring food stores to those who need them.

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