The police blockade of Assembly, at the Hampton Street end.
Right about 1 p.m. today, I was proceeding west on Washington Street downtown, when I was met by a cop on a Segway blocking me from crossing Main. He indicated I could go left or right, but not straight. A block past him, I saw police cars’ blue lights on Assembly.
As I was turning, wondering what in the world this was all about, my phone sounded (it’s been nagging at me a lot today), and WLTX told me:
BREAKING: Two suspicious packages being investigated along Columbia’s Assembly Street.
Which is one of the more timely instances I’ve encountered of the internet answering my question even as I think it.
More than an hour later, I received this:
BREAKING: New Suspicious item investigation at corner of Rosewook & Garners Ferry. Assembly St. item was no threat
Thanks for telling me.
Anyway, the national jitters have come home to Colatown.
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If only we had some sort of person to head up our local law enforcement agency…
Other than the retired guy who has decided that he doesn’t need to come to work after being rehired?
And can be on paid leave of more than two weeks so far accumulated somehow in the three months since he un-retired? What a scam…
Maybe you could give us some Amy Winehouse lyrics in honor of the chief?
From the sounds of it – the Sheriff’s daily conversations with Scott for one and the City’s silence for another – he’s run off to a treatment facility. Given that duck, I guess the City is powerless to disparage his character. But I’d be surprised that he has a job to return to, wouldn’t you?
I would like to know what are the legal ramifications if one retires, is rehired and then commits a firing offense? What a theoretical mess! Does the rehiring then place someone’s vested retirement at risk again? Seems like there ought to be re-exposure to the downsides of governmental employment if one chooses to be rehired for the same position just to milk the retirement system for all it’s worth. It would be only fair for such double-dippers; otherwise they are above the law, no?
Somebody needs to repaint the chief’s car; that thing has become the Columbia Clown car – add a big horn and give it the Bozo treatment…
Good ol’ Columbia… a major news story happens in a large metropolitan area and suddenly Columbia becomes Target B. Nobody cares enough about this place to do it any damage, if anything they sit back and see we’re doing a fine job of it ourselves.
More than likely it was someone’s McDonald’s bag, God help us if they ever find a “trucker bomb” along the road, they’ll be calling in Atlanta CSI to investigate.
Have to agree with Steven on this.
Me too — generally Steven’s comments provide the rare, non-insular snapshot of Columbia.
Maybe someone was trying our ADCO’s new slogan for Columbia? “It’s the Bomb!”
Funny! But I think you mean It’s DA Bomb.
I also wonder if when they “detonate” something (like they “detonated” the book bag they found), do they mean they blew it up, or just that they did something that would set off the bomb if they did it, but would do nothing if it wasn’t a bomb. Cause I’m feeling bad for whoever now owes the library for all those books if they blew it up.
Usually they blow it up. I’ll confirm with our EOD team tomorrow.
My EOD person said that they typically use an “explosive tool” which uses a small charge like a shotgun shell or .50 caliber shell to propel water to separate the power source from any potential explosives, basically to break the bomb apart without actually detonating the bomb. In the case of a backpack, they’d use the water device to rip open the fabric so that they can see what is inside. He said that the point is to not detonate the explosives, so you don’t want to use an actual explosive to disarm the bomb, but that the explosive tool would sound like explosive going off to a lay-person.
“If the explosive detonates, that’s a fail.”
Very interesting, Silence.
So I guess Columbia can claim a successful disarmament of the suspicious bag, seeing as there was no detonation?
Guess so!
Thanks, Silence, good to know. So maybe the books are just a little wet.
Wet, and probably ripped into pieces!
Love that slogan! Kudos to whomever at ADCO came up with it. Tax dollars well spent.
Laugh if you will, but if any one of the hundreds of people who saw the Boston bombings bags had called the police, a lot of lives and limbs would have been saved.
And would everyone who does not live in Columbia please STFU about our police chief. He has done and excellent job, and is, again, only taking advantage of what is allowed to him.
1) My primary residence and also investment properties are in Columbia.
2) I pay taxes and vote (not early, but often) in Columbia. – Ward 4, gotta represent!
3) I think the situation with Chief Scott is patently ridiculous, the city owes the residents and taxpayers and explanation.
Thus, I will NOT STFU about “our” police chief. Today there is an article on another well known local blog alledging the chief’s involvement with prostitutes. Inquiring minds want to know….
Since you do reside in Cola., I clearly was not talking to you.
I will also not STFU about the Chief Scott situation.
Everything about this situation stinks. The lack of information provided by the city manager, the fact that he can take three weeks leave after “retiring” and getting rehired three+ months ago. Nevermind the allegations of what the reasons are for his leave – which if even 10% true should see him fired immediately.
The people of Columbia deserve answers. There are two groups of people in Columbia – the everyday citizens and the inner circle who play by their own rules (like the assistant city manager who got her job thru backdoor slimy actions).
You are not “the people of Columbia”….
And what assistant city manager who got her job….? Missy Gentry? She is awesome!
Is Kathryn “the people of Columbia”? I know more people who live in the city limits who want answers than stand around bragging about what a wonderful job their city leaders are doing.
Kathryn,
While this is clearly an issue close to your heart, I would like to point out that the chief is collecting retirement from the state. Therefore, I believe every taxpayer and/resident of the state has a vested interest and a voice at the table on this. I do not believe that anyone had any beef with the chief before he elected to double dip on the dole. However, it now seems pretty clear why he chose to do so. Since we cannot commend all of the responsible public employees who work hard and respect the public stewardship (thank’s anonimously to y’all for your service and dedication!), all we really can do is raise a stink about patent abuses and shine a light on the abusers.
I honestly have no problem with the chief double dipping. I think it’s reasonable for him to take advantage of all of the lawful income that he has available. I do have a problem with the legislature or whomever setting up a crummy system that allows people to TERI or double dip at my (taxpayer’s) expense.
Should it be so difficult to get a simple answer as to how much paid leave Chief Scott has accrued that he can take since being rehired in January?
That answer should be public information… as in: A person in the position of Chief of Police accrues X hours of PTO per week. There has to be some type of HR manual available to the public that describes the benefits he receives.
Until the reason for his paid leave becomes known, my only issue is with the paid part of that leave. I just want to hear someone say that how much paid leave he has available to him. Do other police officers have the same benefit?
The Family and Medial Leave Act (1993) grants employees 12 weeks off for medical reasons per calendar year. I just looked it up, although it sounds like the employer can terminate the paid part earlier (three weeks?).
I didn’t know this was a medical leave. Has that been reported?
Doug, I am just make an assumption that appears to square with the lack of transparency and reporting emminating from the City of Columbia. There is no known truth to my conclusion. On the other hand, I kind of think it is confirmed with every passing, silent day…
So your professional lawerly advice is to STFU? So where is he? Did you see FitsNews this morning? There’s a story there linking him and “your mayor” to a prostitution ring in Columbia. Do you think Fits would post something like that without some kind of evidence? If so, wouldn’t that be a lawyer’s wet dream?
How do we know what is “allowed to him”, the City of Columbia is refusing to answer any questions about how much paid time he has coming to him.
My understanding is that he is only taking the same leave that would be available to other officers in similar circumstances. He has quite a lot of service time, so might have accrued a lot more leave time than others.
I do know he worked his butt off. I know he took phone calls at any time of the day or night, weekends included. I know he did the best job we have seen done in the fifteen years I have lived here. I know his officers are fiercely loyal to him.
I thought Chief Crisp was excellent when he was here.
But surely he couldn’t have retained that leave when he retired. The normal process is to be paid for any unused leave. Or was the whole process of rehiring him (including the interviews of another candidate) just a scam?
It should be public knowledge of how much leave he has available to him.
Maximum accrual rate is 30 days of annual leave per year. Maximum accrual rate for sick leave is 15 days per year. Upon retirement, all accrued leave up to 45 days of annual leave and 0 days of sick leave are paid out. When you’re retired your balances in both accounts are 0 days. When Scott was rehired, he retained his accrual rate of 30 days of annual leave per year and 15 days of sick leave. Paid annual leave can only be paid up to the amount of your accrual, sick leave can be paid out up to 15 days. To get 15 concurrent days of sick leave, he’d likely have to provide his employer with a doctor’s excuse. At most Scott would have 20 days of total leave. Anything beyond that would need to be unpaid.
We’ll see what happens. I bet he’s out longer than four weeks and continues to get paid for taking care of personal matters and not for doing what he was hired to do.
Correction – Sick leave can be paid out up to a maximum of the balance you have accrued to a maximum of 180 days. Scott has been employed only a few months so he’s probably got 2-3 days of sick leave on the books.
Then how on earth did he find time for his parttime DJ job and what appears to be a VERY active (not to mention inappropriate) social life?
He gets to tack prior employment on, I understand, just as he was able to add his sheriff time to his police time.
I have been tacitly led to believe that there is either a personal health issue or a family health issue involved, among possible other ones.
Ruben is handling CPD just fine, and Teresa Wilson is very competent and watching this, as is the mayor. We do not know all or even many of the facts.
Prior employment doesn’t mean anything when you return from an official retirement. Other than accrual rate, you start out at 0 hours of annual and sick leave on Day 1 back at work. Once you retire you’re paid out for any time on the books.
How do you know this information, Kathryn, but it is not known to the general public?
What would his service time have to do with accruing PTO if it was reset to zero in January.
I don’t think there’s any service time level that would accumulate three weeks of PTO in
three months.
The best way to combat the PERCEPTION of something shady going on is to be forthcoming with factual evidence.
But it may be none of our business. Just because one is a public employee, one does not have to make all ones personal details known. The appropriate people know. Inquiring minds will just have to wait and see.
Those “appropriate people” are also the people trying to cover for him. How many people can take extended leave after a couple months on the job. Because his time prior to retirement means nothing… he’s considered the same as any other new employee.
Doug,
If it is what we all seem to be assuming it is, then the City can’t really comment on the absence; not unless they determine it has become burdensome and impractical.
They probably have judged his litigation risk weighting to be sky high…
January: The month of coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Sorry, but they don’t have to speak about the Chief specifically to inform the public of what the policies are regarding leave accrual and use. Those should be available in a Human Resources manual.
We don’t have to know the WHY, but we should know the HOW of the leave. As in “What policy does Chief Scott’s leave fall under? How much paid leave can he take? ” That doesn’t infringe on his privacy in any way.
I’m with Doug on this one. We don’t need to know all the details but given the bizarre secrecy and the very long duration of Scott’s leave the taxpayers are entitled to some general outline of what’s going on.
And now three weeks later we learn that the city paid $52k to buy service time for Scott when he “retired”. No other employee ever got this benefit. Payment was authorized by Steve Gantry and now his replacement and all other parties are playing dumb or not commenting. Just another sign of how tax dollars can be found whenever the insiders want to.
Also learner that Scott had 120 hours PTO and 120 hours sick time for the year when he was tenured. He has about three weeks left. So if he somehow manages to return, want to bet they find creative ways to take more time off?
This is a scam. A waste of tax dollars. And another data point in the evidence that Columbia has a serious issue with ethics across the leadership of the city.
Oh and the information was released on Friday after a FOIA request (which never should have been required). That’s the typical m.o. of an entity that has something to hide.
FYI, typos above are a result of autocorrect from my Kindle. Sorry. Gantry = Gantt. Tenured = Rehired.
It’s an issue of accountability. Anyone still wonder why a strong mayor system is essential to the City of Columbia? No one should be now.
Here you have a guy who has already done the retire and rehire thing himself, granting extraordinary “benefits” – let me guess, the City also is on the hook for all the taxes related to this gift to Chief Scott as well (I think the new administrator ought to have disclosed that little factoid as well when she decided to release this info, if true)? – in the final days of his management of the City.
Not only do we have bad actors here, we have a system of governmental administration which is rotten at it’s very core. And the voters in the City of Columbia have no real say in it.
Strong mayors make plenty of mistakes, too, but they have their day of reckoning every four years; and they always must be mindful of that and their legacy. Steve Gantt? He doesn’t care. And he didn’t when he should have. And neither have the voters who tolerate this shady system.
And there is this: By authorizing the credits purchased on behalf of Chief Scott in September 2012, the City of Columbia made a mockery of every State and Federal pension and labor law statute. It is one thing to buy credits to let an employee sail off into the sunset of retirement (likely to be rid of them and the problems they create for the taxpayer/citizens), but it is another ball of wax altogether for a agency of government to blatantly ignore the law. The City of Columbia, through it’s payments in September, has acknowledged that no actual “retirement” or “rehiring” actually occurred. There was not even the pretense of meeting the letter of the law, the City just used those words and banked on everyone accepting that they had some actual basis in law.
I would argue that Chief Scott did not in fact meet the requirements of retirement and that the City also did not meet the requirements of hiring him back according to government agency requirements. The taxpayers of the State of South Carolina should not be on the hook for this sham pension. I do not say this often as I do not find them constructive generally, but this situation is not just a scandal, it is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
But if we, the people of Columbia, appreciate the excellent job Randy is doing, and we would pay a lot to search for and hire the next guy, who might well not work out, if history is any guide, why not spend the money to keep Randy?
Are you kidding? Since when does a government agency buy the retirement time required for a short-term employee to retire only to be rehired? Where was Scott going? Did he have other jobs lined up? This is going to get interesting, I doubt Scott will be back and someone is going to lose their job over this. And when it’s all said and done Kathryn will still be bragging about the fine job the Columbia leaders are doing.
If the people of Columbia are so thrilled about the job he’s doing, why was this buyout kept secret from the people?
Kept secret? They don’t normally reveal any personnel information.
Especially when it would be questioned by the public. The hiring of Theresa Wilson had similar sneaky actions.
I don’t mind when a city finds an elliptical path (and a position rewrite) that gets them through to the best job applicant. I think we all need to go on the assumption that Columbia did find a great candidate to be city manager – until proven otherwise.
On the other hand, I would not call what was done to “retain” Chief Scott elliptical; that is an entirely different matter altogether. That story has not yet fully broken open. “Personnel matters” is starting to look like a smokescreen; that is never an image that a government should want to shore up. Why he is out, at this point, is the chief’s and the city manager’s business I think. That’s fair. But hiding the arrangement that got the Chief into the State retirement system under the wire before the benefit change is an issue that should be open to public inspection. More than that, it ought to be open to review and comment by other divisions of government.
An “elliptical” process is very unfair to the other candidates for the job. They never had a fair chance when the fix was in. And then the big raise was added on top of it was just a final message of “we do whatever we want to do”
They do when public funds are used to purchase things such as retirement time.
Look, it is human nature, and not necessarily irrational, to hire the person you know. Teresa was a known good quantity. They got no applications when the first RFP went out. Only when they revised it, did they get applicants. Apparently none of the past city managers would have qualified under the first RFP. For one thing, it required a longer tenure in the top job than most city managers enjoy.
I agree that more transparency was appropriate when his retirement was paid for. I do not know why it wasn’t. I do trust Steve Ganttt, who took the city from deep in the hole to a surplus, without drastic service cuts or tax increases. I never heard of anything he did, up to this, that he did not have a very good explanation for.
This whole thing with the $52,000 retirement “help” payout stinks to high heaven.
http://www.thestate.com/2013/04/19/2733249/columbia-paid-51861-to-help-police.html
While it may be legal, it’s an affront to those of us in Columbia who work hard, pay our taxes on time and in full, and play by the rules.
I hear that if they had dumbed down the qualifications for Teresa Williams one more time that Lillian McBride would have been in the running.
Kathryn – I like Steve Gantt too, but the supposed “surplus” is made up of increased general obligation bond borrowing. Take a look at how much Columbia’s borrowing has increased in the last 5 years or so. Basically, they just stopped draining reserves, and increased how much they borrowed. This way they could say that the budget was “in balance.”
Columbia General Obligation Bond Debt:
2003 $ 22,550,000
2004 $21,380,000
2005 $20,110,000
2006 $18,830,000
2007 $17,430,000
2008 $28,155,000
2009 $25,695,000
2010 $23,125,000
2011 $30,055,000
2012 $32,434,426
Columbia Total Primary Gov’t Debt:
2003 $ 195,099,774
2004 $ 183,288,144
2005 $ 281,858,405
2006 $ 303,185,746
2007 $ 298,977,370
2008 $ 289,170,504
2009 $ 271,938,020
2010 $ 448,092,563
2011 $ 436,926,668
2012 $ 525,567,685
Columbia Total per Capita Gov’t Debt:
2003 $ 1,662
2004 $ 1,561
2005 $ 2,401
2006 $ 2,583
2007 $ 2,571
2008 $ 2,276
2009 $ 2,141
2010 $ 3,465
2011 $ 3,380
2012 $ 4,025
Source: 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
There’s a million ways to spend other people’s money. The trick is to keep them from understanding what you are doing.
Looks like Chief Scott ain’t coming back.
He still neess to be stripped of his “retirement”.
And taxed on the benefit he received. If his base salary was about $110K, he should be paying at least a few thousand in state taxes and about $10K in federal.
And please tell me this isn’t the same person… there was a link to this site off WIS-TV:
http://www.partytimesc.com/djs.htm
PTSD. Uh huh.
Does he give back the $52K or is that a going away present?
If I were a betting man, I’d say this money is gone… if I were a city employee, I’d be asking for my buyout of 2 years and 10 months of retirement time too.
City Hall’s got its hustlers
Transition’s got its bums
but Columbia’s got little Chief Randy Scott
he’s a retirin’ son of a gun
well he’s small and plump as a man can come
but he’s chief of the city police
and when the council all get together to meet
you know the taxpayer’s gonna get fleeced
(oh puhleeze …)
(they say …)
you don’t investigate Benjamin’s wreck
you don’t bust people with pot
you don’t run hookers from the Sheraton hotel
and you don’t mess around with Scott
I don’t think the city can “strip” him of his retirement. I think what’s done is done, and to try to unring that bell is not a winning argument.
How about the $52K which I would expect wasn’t awarded with the intent that Chief Scott would resign four months later?
Ha! He never retired according to the pension requirements did he?
The City of Columbia willfully violated the pension rules to squeeze him in under the old rules, ones the legislature wanted to end. Of course it is possible to strip him of the retirement that he never earned – he is not entitled to it; or more accurately, the City of Columbia broke the rules when they validated this sham.
Here’s the post about Chief Scott’s resignation…