Wilson announces transition team

South Carolina Gov.-elect Alan Wilson announced his transition team Friday, a group that will include his wife and prominent business leaders, as he prepares to follow the state’s longest-serving governor. 

Wilson, a Republican, won the highest number of votes ever for a gubernatorial candidate in state history but his race against Democrat Jermaine Johnson was the narrowest win by percentage points in any governor’s race since 2010. Wilson faced major national momentum for Democrats, including a U.S. Senate race in the state that elected a Democrat for the first time in nearly 30 years. 

Wilson, who will be inaugurated in January, announced his transition team in a press conference Friday at Reeley’s Body Shop in West Columbia, where he had his first job at 15 years old washing cars. 

“A shop like this is where you come to fix a car, repair a car, improve a car, and that’s really what this transition is about. It’s about repairing those aspects of government, reforming those aspects of government, improving those aspects of government that are broken or damaged, and that we want to make work better for the people of South Carolina,” Wilson said. 

Wilson said the team is effectively the “board of trustees” for the transition, and additional roles such as transition staff members and senior advisers will be announced in the coming days. The nine-person team, including Wilson and Lt. Gov.-elect Mike Reichenbach, was kept “relatively small” to keep focused and to avoid turning it “into a mob,” Wilson said. 

The two co-chairs of the transition team are Thad Westbrook, of Lexington, and Randy Lowell, a prominent Charleston attorney for the law firm Burr & Forman. Westbrook, also a lawyer, was the chairman of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees from 2022 through 2026, and still serves as the chair emeritus of the board. 

Wilson’s wife, Jennifer Wilson, is a member of the team. She currently works as a writer for the University of South Carolina and is a former broadcast journalist. The governor-elect said his wife had been a senior adviser to him during the campaign. Charisse Reichenbach, the wife of Mike Reichenbach who works with him at their car dealerships, is also on the transition committee.

“We said we were going to put families first, and I felt like I would start by leading by example, putting our families first on this transition team,” Wilson said. 

The three other members of the transition team are Mikee Johnson of Columbia, Robert Castellani of Greenville and Jim Brown of Florence. Johnson is the board chair and president of US Brick, a major brick and other materials manufacturing company. Castellani is the founder of North American Rescue Inc., which develops products to treat people after traumatic injuries. Brown is the CEO of BCN Management, a business that includes real estate and management consulting. 

“The men and women that are standing up here with me all come from varied backgrounds: business, law. They have even health backgrounds … So they have a full spectrum of experience that I will be relying on as we put this transition together,” Wilson said. 

The state hasn’t seen a major governor team transition since 2010, when Republican Nikki Haley was first elected. Gov. Henry McMaster, who was the lieutenant governor, became governor in 2017 after President Donald Trump appointed Haley to be the ambassador to the United Nations. McMaster was then elected to a full term in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. 

After he’s sworn in, Wilson said his administration will focus on their “families first audit initiative” to look into how state money is being spent, how money is tracked and how projects are implemented. The governor-elect also plans to advocate for the legislature to eliminate the state income tax,  lower property taxes and give the governor the authority to temporarily suspend the state gas tax when prices run high, an issue he raised on the campaign trail.