Written by Shaun Chornobroff, SC Daily Gazette.
Gov. Henry McMaster’s first veto this year struck a bill creating rules for the kind of autonomous robots already delivering food on the University of South Carolina campus.
The bill authored by House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford came a year after USC made robotic food deliveries an option on its downtown Columbia campus. The six-wheeled deliveries are a partnership between Grubhub and Starship Technologies, a California-based company that makes the robots that look like smart coolers.
The university website touts that it’s providing students a “futuristic delivery service.”
“Now you can have your favorite on-campus foods brought to you by robot!” reads a webpage for the partnership.
Rutherford, a Columbia Democrat, said the legislation was meant to set guidelines for the robots that crisscross campus and ensure their increasing popularity doesn’t lead to irresponsible copycat services.
“The group that is currently doing it has a safety record that is unmatched,” he told the SC Daily Gazette on Thursday. “But that does not prohibit … you and I starting up our own personal delivery devices and driving recklessly wherever we wanted to.”
Under his bill, co-signed by all 11 other House members who represent a piece of Richland County, the robots could be no bigger than 36-by-30 inches, weigh no more than 150 pounds, and travel a maximum of 10 mph. At night, the boxy robots must have front and back lights “visible and recognizable under normal atmospheric conditions” from 500 feet away.
The bill also requires operators to carry insurance policies covering at least $500,000 per claim, should something go wrong.
In his only veto message so far this year, McMaster said he doesn’t have a problem with the bill itself. The problem, he wrote, is that it only applies to Richland County, which flouts the state constitution’s rule against local legislation.
“I appreciate that the underlying aim … is to ensure that new technology is effectively and safely utilized for the benefit of South Carolinians,” he wrote in his letter Tuesday to the House explaining his veto.
“Even if personal delivery devices are currently confined to Richland County, I am aware of no reason why these same regulations for personal delivery could not be adopted in a general law and apply across the entire state,” he concluded.
Regardless, the Legislature could still vote to override McMaster’s veto with a two-thirds majority in each chamber. The 2025 session ended last week. But the resolution that governs the off-session allows the General Assembly to take up vetoes when the chambers return to finalize the state budget package.
But Rutherford questioned whether the chambers’ leaders would want to bother.
If not, a bill addressing the issue statewide is already in the works. It passed the House 97-0 last month and was sent to the Senate Transportation Committee, where it awaits action when the Legislature returns in January.
If the House’s vote is any indication, passage shouldn’t be a problem, Rutherford said.
He argued it made sense to start the regulations in the only county where the technology’s used.
“I can only regulate that which I’ve seen and know about in order to make it work,” he said. “Rather than do something statewide with a new technology, I think you start off as small as possible.”
Concentrating on one county was also a matter of timing.
Local legislation can get approval much faster, particularly in the upper chamber, since passage is the purview of the legislators representing that county. So, last week’s votes in the Senate that sent the bill to McMaster involved only the six senators representing a piece of Richland County.
McMaster’s only veto
Rutherford noted that McMaster did sign another bill that’s local legislation. To be consistent, he said, the governor should have also vetoed the bill regarding the boundaries of Greenville’s sanitation district.
“I am shocked at the hypocrisy of vetoing one bill because it’s local legislation and signing” the other, Rutherford said.
In a letter to the sanitation act’s lead sponsor, GOP Rep. David Vaughan of Simpsonville, McMaster acknowledged that he normally shoots down “local or special legislation that is clearly unconstitutional.”
However, in this situation, the specific law is the best way to address the situation, McMaster wrote, and “it is not readily apparent how a general law could be made applicable without being overbroad in scope.”
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: [email protected].