Home » Hotlist: January 12, 2026

Hotlist: January 12, 2026

Hey friends!

I hope your new year is off to a great start. At CVSC, things begin in earnest this week.

The South Carolina General Assembly gavels in tomorrow, launching the 2026 Legislative Session—and a new opportunity to defend South Carolina’s air, land, and water.

If we haven’t met, I’m John Brooker, Senior Vice President of Policy and Government Relations at CVSC. I’ll be keeping you updated each week as the session unfolds.

A few notes before we get started: This is the second year of the two-year legislative cycle. Lawmakers will focus on unfinished business from 2025, including several CVSC priorities that remain active. It’s also a House election year, which shortens the practical window for action and shapes decision-making. On top of that, the agenda already includes a range of issues, such as transportation reform, judicial elections, the state budget, and social policy debates.

This is where you come in. With your engagement, we can keep conservation front and center—and move pro-conservation policy across the finish line before the session ends in May. 

Let’s dive in to see what’s on the agenda.

2026: Adapting to Growth

If there’s one common theme to our policy priorities this year, it’s adapting to growth. Population growth and development are reshaping South Carolina’s natural landscapes, driving congestion, and overburdening our infrastructure. We see this all over the state, and the concern over growth is clearly reflected in recent polling from the Governor’s Office. 

At the same time, historic growth in electricity demand is driving proposals for expensive new gas plants and other infrastructure that will further inflate power bills for South Carolina families and businesses. How we meet these challenges will have a lasting impact on our environment, household budgets, and overall quality of life.

To meet these challenges, CVSC has identified the priorities below for the 2026 Legislative Session:

Land & Water Priorities

CVSC introduced the SC Prosper & Preserve initiative in 2025 to provide local governments with new tools to better manage growth and incentivize sustainable development. CVSC worked with conservation champions in 2025 to introduce bills in both chambers:

  • Concurrent Infrastructure Requirements (CIR), H.4050 and  S.227, ensure growth pays for growth by requiring developers to demonstrate that infrastructure (such as roads, schools, and utilities) is in place prior to project approval, or they will contribute to improvements. This protects local budgets, limits sprawl, and encourages smarter infill development.
  • Transferable Development Rights (TDRs), H.4146 and S.288, allow development rights from sensitive “sending” zones that warrant protection to be voluntarily sold on the free market and used in designated “receiving” zones that can accommodate additional density, therefore passively facilitating large-scale land protection. TDRs support landowner rights, local choice, preservation of rural character, and sustainable urban development.

Both proposals are gaining real momentum, thanks to strong legislative interest and the work of a broad coalition of partners. The Senate version of Transferable Development Rights (S.288) is already on the Senate floor and could receive an early vote this session—now is a great time to urge your Senator to support it through our Action Center. Concurrency is also attracting bipartisan support and positive media attention, and while both bills are still moving through committee, progress is well underway.

Alongside local planning tools, state-level incentives for land protection remain essential to CVSC’s mission and to advancing Governor McMaster’s goal of conserving 10 million acres of land and water. 

  • Updating the Conservation Easement Tax Credit, H.3409 and S.252, would expand options for landowners by making conservation easements more practical and competitive in today’s marketplace. 
  • The credit has not been updated in nearly 20 years, even as costs have risen significantly. This straightforward update has been proposed before but is now gaining renewed attention, and with a coordinated effort, we have an opportunity to see it enacted.
  • This may not grab headlines, but it can make a real difference in our communities. It can help landowners keep land in the family and undeveloped, instead of feeling forced to sell for large-scale development.

Beyond traditional land conservation, CVSC is partnering with local Rosenwald school groups, the General Assembly, and South Carolina Parks, Recreation, and Tourism to protect historic Rosenwald schools built in the early 1900s to educate Black students across the South. Preserving these schools and surrounding lands connects cultural heritage with land conservation. In June 2025, a General Assembly-funded study on creating a South Carolina Rosenwald School Trail was completed, and now CVSC and partners are excited to move forward with implementing its recommendations and bringing this vision to life.

Energy Priorities

CVSC’s energy work this session will focus on affordability and consumer protections. Much of this effort centers on unfinished business—advancing critical safeguards that were left out of the 2025 energy bill, now law as Act 41. We’re actively working with legislators to ensure early movement on these crucial reforms, including:

  • Data Center Reforms ensuring data centers pay their fair share of electric costs and that other customers are protected from undue costs for new power plants and other infrastructure, that large power users like data centers have options to meet their own energy needs with clean energy sources, and that we have transparent reporting on water usage. 
  • Energy Efficiency Advancements, including a minimum energy savings target to ensure utilities are working with customers to save energy and lower bills, reducing the need for expensive power plants, and improving South Carolina’s rank as one of the least energy efficient states in the country. 
  • Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE), H.3812 and S.256, provide new financing tools to advance energy efficiency for commercial properties in South Carolina.  
  • Landowner Protections to ensure landowners are notified early if their land could be seized using eminent domain for new energy infrastructure. With the tide of proposals for new gas plants, transmission lines, and pipelines threatening land seizures, it’s essential that South Carolina landowners are treated fairly in the eminent domain process. 

We’ll need your help to ensure that legislators on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers make energy affordability and consumer protection a non-negotiable this session. 
Keep reading to sign up to join CVSC and a broad range of partners at the Statehouse on Tuesday, January 27th, for the Energy Affordability Advocacy Day, and use our Action Center to contact your elected representatives over email or phone to ensure they hear from their constituents that electric bills are too high, and we deserve better! 

Action Center

Here’s a round-up of current actions you can take to help us advance conservation policy during this legislative session.If you’ve already taken these actions, thank you! We’ll add more actions and provide updates as progress unfolds.

CVSC’s New Environmental Advocacy Handbook

As a South Carolinian, you can use your voice in a multitude of ways to foster change at the state and local levels. If you’re new to advocacy or don’t know how to get started, we created this SC Environmental Advocacy Handbook as a reference guide to provide actionable steps, best practices, and valuable tips to take your environmental advocacy to the next level! We recommend keeping this tool on hand as we encounter various opportunities and challenges to advancing conservation in 2026.

In the News

The Legislative Hotlist is a weekly update from CVSC’s Senior Vice President of Policy & Government Relations, John Brooker. Sign up for emails to get the Hotlist delivered directly to your inbox!

Back to all News