'Blood feud': The history of one S.C. town’s long, winding fight for water and power

McBEE - Several years ago, a newspaper writer named John Davis searched for the words to describe how toxic and hard-fought the politics in this town had become.

It was 2009, and McBee had been fighting for the better part of a decade over who should control the wells that supplied its water. Davis wrote that he saw real-world effects in the squabble; McBee's rivalries were derailing plans for a sewer project that he thought could shake rural Chesterfield County from its economic doldrums.

To describe what was happening in McBee, a crossroads town midway between Charlotte and Florence, he landed on these words:

"Blood feud."

McBee is a case study of how distrust spreads: how communities lose faith in institutions and how their public life frays once they do. It's a story of how festering suspicions tear holes in their social fabric and promote the chilling effect of fear, until a town's residents are left to do most of their talking in court. It plays out over thousands of pages of depositions, investigative files, meeting minutes and court records. The Post and Courier reviewed them as part of Uncovered, its initiative to shine light on questionable government conduct in areas that have gone unscrutinized.

The infighting Davis described in the Pageland Progressive-Journal would prove tepid compared to what came next: a saga spanning no fewer than 16 lawsuits and investigations by at least three state agencies, an inspector general and a federal grand jury. Contested elections for town council and mayor have been decided by the state Supreme Court - twice. In this town of some 760 residents, the courts and law enforcement have been asked to weigh allegations of corruption and diverted money, of election tampering, of slander and retribution.

It's not always obvious why McBee's disputes spiraled as far as they did or even where the animosity began. Some observers joke that the feuding, which has now consumed more than a tenth of the town's history, must have started with a childhood slight.

But read the long paper trail of McBee's discontent, and you'll quickly be led to a common theme: the abundant supply of water beneath it.

The town sits on the headwaters of South Carolina's two largest aquifers, which serve major users like Mount Pleasant's water system and Google's data center in Berkeley County. The water takes thousands of years to reach the coast, but in McBee, the aquifers refill in a matter of years. It's such an enticing resource that in 2016 Nestlé spent $40 million to build a bottled water factory just outside town limits.

At the center of the fighting is a man synonymous with McBee's water. Glenn Odom grew a small water company into a countywide force pumping a billion gallons a year. He has attracted suspicion ever since his utility got control of McBee's wells all those years before.

And he has long inspired distrust and reticence.

Chesterfield County's elected officials made a habit of asking to talk about Odom off the record, Davis noted in a column. Other times, they aired their thoughts cryptically and tried not to speak his name.

In the county's public life, Davis wrote, Odom was becoming "the mysterious 'he.'"

Chapter 1: Headwaters

Every town began with a reason for being: fertile land or a safe harbor, gold rushes or land prospectors. In McBee (pronounced MAK-bee), it was a rail line.

Before there was a town, there was a cotton platform on a new railroad at the turn of the 20th century, a stop in the pine trees between Columbia and Cheraw. Soon, people settled around it. In 1901, they incorporated a town, and they named it for a railroad promoter who died decades before the first rail was laid.

The town has been defined ever since by the infrastructure that flows through it.

It developed its most distinctive industry, peaches, because railroad officials were eager to boost cargo. A handful of factories popped up along the rail line, creating a corridor of industry.

Later, McBee became a crossroads of two busy thoroughfares. In one direction, on U.S. Highway 1, it has the only stoplight for miles. In the other, it was once a notorious speed trap between Charlotte and Myrtle Beach.

Most recently, it has become a nexus of water pipelines that reach out in a web across Chesterfield County. This new chapter has been written in large part by Odom, who, like McBee itself, owes his arrival to the railroad. As a teenager in the early 1960s, he moved there from Columbia because his father got a job at the local train station.

Two decades later, Odom had set roots in the sandhills, and he began to forge links to a utility that became known as Alligator Rural Water & Sewer. When the utility was still an idea, he went door to door to sign up homeowners.

When Alligator was organized in 1987, Odom was elected its first board president. It had two wells and just 150 customers. When it grew big enough to need a full-time manager in the 2000s, Odom was the pick.

Alligator quickly marched across Chesterfield County because of an accident of geology.

Chesterfield County is where South Carolina's terrain transitions, where rolling sandhills spill onto the flat coastal plain. Its biggest towns are built on its northern edge, where a layer of bedrock makes groundwater hard to come by.

But on the south end, the sandy soil absorbs the rain like a giant sponge. Below McBee, a reservoir of water replenishes itself with every storm.

In the early 2000s, a bad drought depleted the rivers that supplied the northern towns' drinking water. Alligator stepped in. Soon, it was pumping water across the county. By 2021, it provided 86 percent of the county's drinking water, financial disclosures show.

But in McBee, questions were swirling about how Alligator achieved that growth.

McBee itself had voted to buy water from Alligator in 1999 because the town had trouble passing state inspections. It also agreed to let Alligator control its wells. Alligator's critics later took issue with the vote: Under a new administration, McBee alleged in a court filing that half the town council worked for the utility.

Then Odom became mayor. And in 2001, McBee applied for $850,000 in grant money from the state to help another utility build a water line to the north of the county. There, the limited water supply threatened to shutter a textile factory. Alligator agreed to supply more water. After receiving the grant money, Odom and the town clerk signed the check handing over the funds.

As years passed, concerns emerged about the ties between McBee and Alligator. The utility was one of the town's biggest contractors, yet its employees were serving on town council. That didn't sit right with a textile factory owner named John Campolong, so he ran for mayor.

The core of his mission was simple: If elected, he was going to try to take the water back.

He won.

Chapter 2: Action and reaction

In office, Campolong often talked about the value of McBee's water. To control the water, he would say, is to control the town's destiny. He has called the aquifer a blessing from God.

Campolong pushed to take back control of the water system against all obstacles. He pressed forward despite the town's 40-year contract with Alligator. He was not deterred when state regulators critiqued its plan as "overly optimistic."

And the new mayor did not shy away from criticizing Odom. Two patterns emerged early in Campolong's administration: He and his allies were willing to raise serious questions about Odom in the town's name. And they came to believe that Odom was finding ways to retaliate against them.

In 2009, his first year in office, Campolong wrote a letter to the state attorney general and the State Law Enforcement Division detailing several issues about Alligator he found troubling.

Among other things, he wanted to know if Odom had made money from the 2001 textile plant grant, since it hadn't benefitted McBee in Campolong's view. And he asked if the town councilmen who hired Alligator to run McBee's water system had been given jobs improperly.

It's unclear whether the agencies acted on the letter. The Attorney General's Office has no record of it, and SLED did not respond to requests for comment.

Months after it was sent, Alligator notified Campolong that it planned to build water and sewer lines on his family's land. It threatened to use eminent domain to gash a straight line through their property. Alligator's engineer said it needed to build a new line to prevent a countywide water shortage.

Campolong didn't buy it, and his family sued Alligator to stop the seizure. He accused Alligator of political retribution: "I believe much of Alligator's actions against me are meant as harassment to hinder my work in protecting the best interests of the citizens of McBee," he wrote in an affidavit.

While his family's legal battle played out, Campolong and the town council sent the Attorney General's Office another letter. They asked again for an investigation. This time, records show, SLED opened one.

After a four-month investigation, local prosecutors decided not to bring charges. But McBee's factions were no closer to making amends.

- - -

The growing tension between Odom and Campolong had consequences beyond either man. It soon pitted McBee and Alligator against each other.

The utility had spent $1.1 million to update McBee's infrastructure and link their systems, Odom said in court papers. When Campolong became mayor, Alligator was still paying off the debt it took on to finance the project.

And as Campolong pushed to take back McBee's water system, Alligator played hardball to shut him down.

The utility told regulators concerned about McBee's ability to supply water on its own that Alligator was unwilling to be the town's backup. It said it would dig up the pipes connecting their systems if McBee went out on its own.

This was alarming to McBee's biggest customer, a company called A.O. Smith with a factory north of town. It had been unhappy with the town's service, and now it doubted an independent McBee could supply all the water it needed, court records show.

It found an ally in Alligator, and the two made a deal: Alligator would build a new line to A.O. Smith, cutting out McBee entirely.

Losing A.O. Smith, one of North America's largest makers of water heaters, would be a serious problem for McBee. The factory accounted for more water sales than all its residents combined, the town said. At one point, McBee said it might have to shut down its water system if the factory cut ties.

But the town didn't know about this agreement right away. It stayed in the dark until the plan was in motion. Then, one Sunday in June 2015, someone noticed crews laying pipes to the factory.

The town filed a lawsuit before the week was out.

- - -

McBee filed its case on a Wednesday. The next afternoon, one of McBee's water mains started gushing.

The break was a mystery. There was no obvious cause like construction work in the area. There was just a round puncture in a pipe.

The break also became a sort of Rorschach test for McBee politics. Odom's critics saw hints of something nefarious. His supporters saw coincidences.

For example, Odom was already taking pictures of the scene when the town's contractor, Joey Oliver, arrived. But then, Odom usually showed up to line breaks, Oliver testified.

Alligator employees told Oliver they'd be fired if they lent a hand, he said in an affidavit. Odom denied making threats and said Alligator had previously been instructed by Campolong to stay away from the town's system.

McBee struggled to fix the leak. Crews could not find the pipe's shutoff valve. They didn't have the right part to patch the line and couldn't get it until the next morning. Water spilled out overnight, and Odom drove by "repeatedly," the contractor said. A.O. Smith called town hall complaining of low water pressure.

McBee's leaders made no secret that they thought Alligator had exacted revenge. Their distrust of Odom was about to become official town policy.

In a 2016 lawsuit, the town said it believed the line was "deliberately sabotaged," and it blamed Alligator.

And the town didn't stop there: It aired a laundry list of suspicions dating to the beginning of the water feud. It accused Odom and Alligator of diverting the town's grant money, acting deceptively in taking over its water system and pursuing a "corrupt business model" to enrich Odom.

McBee's claims were lambasted in court records as "conspiracy theories with zero factual support," and the town later dropped them.

But the town's feud was now heating up.

Chapter 3: Odom and Alligator

Alligator shares some similarities to the cooperatives that provide electricity across rural South Carolina. Its customers technically own the utility, and they pick its board.

But court records describe a utility that keeps its members at arm's length.

In a 2020 deposition, Odom said members cannot attend board meetings without permission. They can only come if they fill out a form and "state what (their) business is," he said. And unlike co-op members, they don't get a share of the utility's profits.

"Do they get anything for being owners?" an attorney asked Odom at his deposition.

"Water," Odom answered.

Like co-ops, Alligator answers only to the board its members elect, not to state regulators. But critics are suspicious of the elections, court records show. A factory owner once sued to get on the ballot, alleging Alligator changed the rules to disqualify him from running. In an affidavit, Campolong alleged that only candidates "who support the current leadership" actually win.

- - -

Meanwhile, Odom has had a particularly close relationship with Alligator. His fortunes have long been tied to the utility's.

His salary as general manager, for instance, fluctuated depending on what the utility could afford. It fell as low as $12,000 a year in lean times only to spike in more prosperous years. Court records show it reached as high as $428,000 after Alligator signed a contract to supply Nestlé, its biggest customer.

And Odom was not only an employee of Alligator before he retired in 2021, but he also owned the company that Alligator hired to handle its day-to-day operations. Their ties were so close that in a deposition he sometimes used the first person to describe Alligator.

According to its contract, Odom's company would be responsible for hiring employees, taking samples of the water and reading the meters.

In return, Odom's company could get a cut of Alligator's revenue if the utility grew large enough. Financial disclosures show that in 2022 the company was paid $1.9 million.

That fee covers many of the utility's operating costs, but Odom has acknowledged getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the management fee.

But Alligator hasn't always been able to afford the fee, so it racked up debt. In 2018, Alligator paid off part of it by signing over more than 400 acres of land to Odom's company, property records show. The company, in turn, has made money harvesting pine straw from the property, according to court records.

The arrangement can make it hard to tell where Alligator ends and Odom's company begins.

In a 2020 deposition, Odom said Alligator's vehicles were used for utility work "95 percent of the time." But at times they were used to haul trash for him, he said.

To avoid the appearance of impropriety, he said, he supplied the gasoline.

Chapter 4: Counterattack

The suspicion surrounding Odom and Alligator caused them legal problems that went well beyond McBee's lawsuit in 2016.

Odom has said that in addition to three SLED investigations, he has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. (A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for South Carolina confirmed it opened an investigation related to Alligator in 2015.) He said he and Alligator have twice been investigated by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which lends money to the utility.

Odom has said that none of the investigations found any wrongdoing.

The S.C. Public Employee Benefit Authority also investigated Odom personally. Court records show that it received an "anonymous package" about him in 2017. As a result, the agency denied him a state pension that his attorneys contend would have been worth at least $100,000 a year.

At a trial contesting that decision, Odom complained of "10 years of this constant harassment" by critics. He has said that all the investigations took a toll. Beyond his legal bills, he said he started taking medicine to stay grounded.

"You get a subpoena to go to the grand jury of the federal government, you don't sleep well," Odom said in a deposition. "I mean, when you're being investigated by the federal government, it was a lot of 3 in the mornings that you don't sleep. And that went on for years and years and years."

So Odom went on the offensive.

- - -

In 2018, Odom enlisted one of South Carolina's top defamation lawyers, Johnny Parker, to sue two of his detractors. He alleged that they'd tarnished his reputation.

Odom brought the lawsuit against Campolong and Kemp McLeod, a fourth-generation farmer. His family is best known for growing Mac's Pride peaches on hundreds of acres that explode with pink blossoms each spring.

Odom and McLeod, then a town councilman, had clashed before. Alligator sued McLeod Farms, claiming that pesticides it used until the 1970s was polluting McBee's water. The case was eventually settled.

Now, Odom claimed the mayor and the councilman had spread lies about him. He alleged they told people he had stolen McBee's grant money all those years earlier and that he'd punctured the water line. In a deposition, he said those allegations cost him opportunities to hold public office, and they drove away regulars at the Huddle House restaurant he owned.

In a deposition, he said he wanted millions of dollars in damages because "your name is irreplaceable."

What followed was an excruciatingly detailed examination of McBee's public life. One by one, the town's elected officials and Odom's critics were brought in for depositions. Many were held back-to-back at town hall.

They were questioned about how they knew each other. ("I'm from McBee" was a common refrain.) And they were pressed on the contents of their campaign flyers, personal conversations and town council discussions.

One former town councilman, Marion Stephens III, said that whenever water came up at town council, talk of Odom followed.

"It starts going back to whenever Alligator Water took over the water for the town. … And it goes from that to, you know, he's a crook," Stephens said in a deposition.

Years later, the case is still pending, even after a judge concluded that Campolong and McLeod couldn't be held responsible for what they said at town hall.

Now, if the case goes to trial, it will center on just two conversations McLeod had years ago.

Jurors would be asked to consider whether he harmed Odom's reputation when he allegedly asked a customer at his peach stand why she supported a man who stole money from McBee, court records show. And the jury would evaluate whether he defamed Odom when he and a friend talked about the grant money over breakfast at Huddle House.

McLeod's attorneys have argued those conversations should be exempted, too. By then, they argue, Odom had thrown himself into town politics, and McLeod had every right to say his opinion.

"However distasteful Mr. Odom may find the opinions of the citizens of McBee about his actions," the attorneys wrote, "his remedy is at the ballot box - not in the courts."

But as with so many McBee controversies, the ballot box led straight back to the courts.

Chapter 5: Disputed elections

McLeod's peach stand conversation happened during a particularly tense moment in McBee.

It was 2016, and as American politics spiraled toward acrimony and tribalism, the town was preparing for its own divisive election: Odom was running for mayor again.

In the same year that the town accused Alligator of sabotage, Campolong printed flyers that accused Odom of depleting McBee's bank accounts and using its grant money "without any benefit to our town."

The flyer alleged Odom was suing to keep McBee from producing its own water and to "take away" its biggest customer. It said Campolong was fighting for the water "so our citizens, not Alligator, will control our destiny."

But Odom's supporters were mobilizing, according to an attorney for Campolong and other candidates. At an election commission hearing, the attorney said an Alligator employee named Sydney Baker gathered absentee ballots and turned them in.

Odom beat Campolong by eight votes, 200-192.

But as was often the case in McBee, the real fight was just beginning. The case was bound for review by the town's Municipal Election Commission and, later, the courts.

After a hearing, the commission decided it was uncomfortable with the way the election was conducted. Nearly a third of the ballots were cast absentee, and Odom carried 88 percent of them, it said in a written order.

"The Commission is convinced that … Odom manipulated and abused the political process in McBee," its members wrote in September 2016.

The commission ordered a new election. This time, Campolong won.

In 2018, Odom ran for office again. The initial results showed he lost by one vote, 209-208. This time, Odom pushed back, arguing that some of his supporters' ballots were incorrectly rejected.

Some of the disputed ballots came from residents of Odom's 40-odd rental properties. They had moved into Odom's properties weeks before the election, which fed his opponents' suspicions. At an election hearing, the voters were questioned about whether they actually paid rent and whether their new homes were even livable.

The fight went to the courts. Finally, the state Supreme Court sided with Odom, clearing the way for his return to office.

- - -

McBee's election commission is staffed by part-time volunteers who have limited legal training and a fraught job: They preside over cases that bring the town's tensions to the surface.

The panel's former chairwoman, Linda Sterling, wrote to town council in 2019 that she'd been harassed around the time of the hearings. Rocks were thrown at her windows, her car was scratched and bottles were smashed in her driveway. At times, commissioners were escorted into town hall by a sheriff's deputy, she said in an interview.

McBee's election commission was asked to adjudicate challenges to every election between 2014 and 2020, and a legal arms race followed.

Candidates for town office have secured heavy-hitting lawyers to try cases before the commission, including an attorney who was hired to defend President Donald Trump against impeachment. They have hired a private investigator to check voters' residency and a handwriting expert to analyze their signatures.

Meanwhile, the constant disputes created instability in town government.

Commissioners voted to overturn results in four straight election cycles. On three occasions, courts reversed their rulings. Twice, the disputes reached the state Supreme Court.

The appeals left the town in limbo for months at a time.

Consider the 2020 election, when Odom again ran for mayor. Baker helped residents request mail-in ballots, going door-to-door with an iPad and a printer. Odom again won the absentee vote overwhelmingly. And as it had before, the election commission took issue with the disparity, accusing Odom and Baker of "blatant violations of state election laws."

The issue reached the Supreme Court, which didn't hear the case for a year and took nearly as long to render a decision once it did.

As McBee waited, the existing administration stayed in place. Campolong, who was in his 90s and had not run for reelection, continued on as mayor.

The town council was stuck, too, and frustration mounted, town records show. One member, Beulah Bolton, railed against the appeals as a waste of time. She called it a child-like game and a waste of time. She said the losing candidates must not care about the town.

Bolton had been a voice of conciliation in the past. When she sat for a deposition in Odom's defamation case, she said she did so reluctantly. She didn't want anyone to think she was taking sides.

After all, she said she'd heard people talk about how Odom and McLeod had both helped them out and how they wished they'd just get along.

"Maybe we could have a better town. I've heard that comment a lot," Bolton said at the deposition.But the fight was dragging on all the same. The wait was so long that one candidate caught up in the appeal ran for and won a different seat before the first one was decided.

Finally, in February, the Supreme Court confirmed the result: Odom was the new mayor. He took office almost two and a half years into a four-year term.

The justices were split 3-2. McBee's feud had divided the Supreme Court, too.