Category Archives: Government restructuring

City council’s strong-mayor debacle

It’s a great shame that Columbia city council voted not even to ask voters whether they would like to inject accountability into city government by moving to a strong-mayor form of government.

But it was predictable that they would do so. I feared that outcome when I saw that the council planned to vote right after a public hearing.

The proposal would have a chance put before the electorate — particularly in the fall, when a much more representative swath of the city’s voters will turn out, as compared to actual city elections.

But the kinds of people who turn up at hearings before council happens to be much the same set of people who passionately oppose such a change — even to the point, apparently, of not wanting their neighbors to have a chance to vote on it.

This is always the way. The people who are most opposed to a reform — or, to use more neutral language, a change of any kind — in the form of government are the very people most invested in the current form. And people who regularly go to council meetings tend to be people who have become comfortable with and accustomed to the current form. They’ve learned to make the existing system stand up and do what they want, so they don’t want it replaced.

I saw this on a much larger scale when we first started pressing for changing the form of state government in the early 90s. We were pushing for a more accountable system in which the will of the electorate would be more likely to be expressed in the way the executive branch of state government was run. We were seeking to replace a bewildering set of mixed-up governing arrangements that varied greatly from agency to agency (and still exists over most of state government).

The system was (and remains) far too complex and fragmented for the average citizen to understand or engage effectively. But what that meant was that the people who DID know how to make it work — experienced lawmakers, skilled bureaucrats, interest-group advocates and lobbyists — had a tremendous advantage in dealing with it. And consequently did not want it to change.

With city government, it’s more likely to be people who are very active in neighborhood associations who oppose a change that would make city administration accountable directly to one person elected citywide, rather than a hodgepodge of at-large and district representatives (with the district people having the majority).

Anyway… Columbia has missed yet another opportunity, and continues to be in the grip of a decades-long rear-guard action against progress.

A postscript… I was quite indignant that council did not wait for new members to join, since I knew that both Cameron Runyan and Moe Baddourah favored strong mayor. It seemed that anti-change incumbents were forcing a vote now to avoid losing.

But then I read in Clif LeBlanc’s report this morning, “Baddourah, who replaces Gergel, said he’s had a change of heart and would not support holding a vote this fall.”

Which really blew my mind, because I saw him on local TV news, either last night or the night before, stating his unequivocal support for strong mayor.

Clif needs to do a full, exhaustive, separate story on what in the world just happened there…

Oh, get over yourself, governor

Again, our governor seems to have been Facebooking under the influence… of something. Strong emotion, perhaps.

Did you see this in the paper today?

The Senate approved a constitutional amendment that would have gubernatorial candidates and candidates for lieutenant governor elected on the same ticket, just as the president and vice president are elected now. Voters would have to approve the change in November.

But senators made sure the change would not take effect until 2018, when Haley’s term as governor, if she is re-elected in 2014, will expire.

Haley immediately took to her Facebook page to criticize the Senate, asking voters to call lawmakers and pressure them to change the effective date.

“I’m not the one taking it personally, they are,” Haley said Thursday in an interview with The State. “This is a reform I pushed for all through the campaign. … To have it go in front of the Senate, and then have them push it through, because they know it’s the will of the people, only to say, ‘Oh, no, we don’t want the girl to have it. We want to wait until 2018’ – they are the ones taking it personally.”…

Which raises a couple of points:

First, why would she care? What possible difference could it make to her whether this goes into effect in 2014 or 2018? Did she have some sort of grand scheme in mind, and this messes it up, or what? She’s going to have enough trouble gaining re-election (if she even seeks it) without worrying about who the lieutenant governor is.
Second… “This is a reform I pushed for all through the campaign…” Well, whoop-te-do. Some of us have been pushing it a lot longer than that — like since you were in school. I’ve been pushing this for more than 20 years. (As have a lot of other people.) But you don’t see me getting bent out of shape because I’m not given credit for it.

Maybe I should. Maybe this is what one does now. Maybe I should run over the Facebook and throw a total snit…

Memo to Harvey Peeler and Senate Republicans: ‘Conservative’ means you SUPPORT status quo

This artwork came with the release.

This release from Wesley and the Senate Republicans is intriguing on a couple of levels:

From today’s Associated Press:
State treasurer, House speaker oppose restructuring bill

There have been some unfortunate developments with the Senate’s bill eliminating the Budget and Control Board, with “The state treasurer and House speaker opposing the Senate’s version of a bill restructuring state government.”

“Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler shot back that the Senate’s version is more conservative than what the House passed last year. He accused the two of supporting the status quo.”

If you support conservative governance, and real restructuring, NOW is the time to stand up to the failed status quo.

Contact the Speaker’s Office and the Treasurer’s Office TODAY, and tell them to support the Senate version of the Department of Administration bill, and to support elimination of the Budget and Control Board.

First, you have the Senate Republicans attacking the Republican House and Republican Treasurer. In a nostalgic sense that’s not weird, because historically the biggest, nastiest split in SC was not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Senate and House. But that was when senators identified themselves primarily as senators, and not as R and D. Now that they think of themselves as Republican senators first and foremost (and this is being sent by the “South Carolina Senate GOP”), it comes across as odd.

Then, there are the really strange words that Harvey chooses to express his disagreement with the House and Loftis: “Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler shot back that the Senate’s version is more conservative than what the House passed last year. He accused the two of supporting the status quo.”

Senator, to the extent that language has meaning, if you are “more conservative” than someone else, that means that you support the status quo more than the other person does. By definition. Go look it up. OK, I’ll save you the trouble. When I Google the word “conservative,” the first dictionary definition that comes up is the one at Dictionary.com, and the first sense of the word is: “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.”

(I would quibble a bit with that definition. If you want “to restore traditional ones,” you are “reactionary.” But the rest is fine.)

Sheheen proposes joint gov/gov lite ticket

This just came in from Vincent Sheheen, the most consistent and insistent advocate for government restructuring in the Senate (a body not exactly overrun with such) in recent years:

Sheheen Calls For Joint Governor-Lt. Governor Ticket

Columbia, SC – State Senator Vincent Sheheen (D-Camden) today called for change in the way SC elects its Lieutenant Governor. Under legislation that is pending in the state Senate, Governors and Lieutenant Governors would run on a ticket.

Senator Sheheen made the following comments:

“Recent events have demonstrated the critical need to modernize our government. The instability of government during the Sanford and Haley eras has highlighted the chaos that can be caused by bad leaders under our current system. Let’s put this legislation on the fast track and get it passed this year. The people deserve it.”

H. 3152 – http://scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=3152&session=&summary=B

###

It’s certainly been proposed many times before. Maybe, given recent events, the idea’s time has arrived.

Will the Budget & Control Board really go away?

It would be nice to think so. Senate Republicans are rightly touting that possibility:

Columbia, SC – February 16, 2012 – The South Carolina Senate today passed the most significant piece of restructuring legislation in the past two decades, passing a bill that completely eliminates the state Budget and Control Board.

The new bill puts most of the functions of the Board under a new, Cabinet-level Department of Administration, and devolves the rest of the Board’s functions elsewhere. The end result is a more efficient, accountable structure for the state’s administrative functions, rather than the current system of having a five-member board control those functions. The bill had been a top priority for Gov. Nikki Haley, and now goes back to the House for approval.

“There’s an old saying that when everybody is in charge, no one is in charge, and that’s been true for too long with too much of state government,” said Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler. “This bill will let the people of South Carolina hold their leaders accountable for the results of state government.”

The bill’s two primary Republican sponsors, Senators Tom Davis and Shane Massey, issued the following statements:

“This bill has been a long time coming, and it’s gratifying to now see it so close to the finish line,” Davis said. “Our government has been plagued by an unaccountable structure that breeds inefficiencies. Today, we took a significant step toward correcting that.”

“This bill strikes a good balance between giving the executive branch control and accountability over administrative functions, while requiring the legislature to perform critical oversight,” Massey said. “This bill is all about a better, more efficient government that allows voters to hold elected officials accountable.”

Of course, since it’s a party document, it conveniently ignores that the most insistent advocate of replacing the Board with a department of administration in recent years has been Democrat Vincent Sheheen.

Oh, well. It’s not like the idea was anyone’s personal property. The release says, “The bill had been a top priority for Gov. Nikki Haley.” Well, yeah. And Mark Sanford. And The State newspaper, since at least the point when I started writing about it in 1991. And Carroll Campbell. And anyone who respects the American concept of separation of powers, which the Board’s existence blatantly violates.

Perry ads amazingly trite, yet revelatory

I continue to be fascinated by Rick Perry’s TV ads, largely because they are so startlingly lacking in anything that might ordinarily fascinate an active mind.

They are so formulaic, so trite, so astoundingly lacking in originality, that it is truly remarkable.

And on top of that, they are badly executed — which is also surprising, since you would think that anyone would at least be able to present such simplistic messages without tripping over his laces. Take this bit of the script of the ad above:

The fox guarding the henhouse is like asking a Congressman to fix Washington: bad idea.

Obviously, what is meant here is, “asking a Congressman to fix Washington is like the fox guarding the henhouse.” The idea being criticized, being held up as a bad idea, is asking a congressman to fix Washington, and the universally understood cliche to which it is being compared is the fox guarding the henhouse. But the announcer gets it completely backward. Even if you told me that the script writer’s first language wasn’t English, it wouldn’t excuse this, because logic knows no language.

But, as bad as these ads are, they do reveal things about Perry, and with great economy of language.

Once again, what we learn about him (as we did back here) is that he assumes — or should I say, presumes — that the president of the United States is an absolute monarch who rules by fiat, with the other branches being completely subject to his will.

In this case, he plays on populist resentment of people who make more money than the voter (and he’s a Republican, right?) to endear the voter to his plan to emasculate and hobble the legislative branch. Elect me, he is saying, and I will wave my scepter and this thing you resent, this Congress, will become a poor, feeble thing, unable to wield any power any more (and unable to be a check on my power), too busy trying to scratch out a living back home to be an obstacle to the new King.

I say all this as someone who — as my readers well know — is a longtime champion of executive power here in South Carolina (a governor in control of the whole executive branch, a strong mayor in Columbia). But that’s because on the state and local levels here, the executive is so weak as to be unable to perform its proper function in a healthy government. That is not the case in Washington, and in any case, Perry overreaches to an extent that is shocking, and would be under any circumstance. Yes, he does so out of deep ignorance of the rule of law under our constitution, but that doesn’t make the (fortunately remote) prospect of him being president less chilling.

There’s a deeper irony here. In reality, the only way to bring about this poor shadow of the present Congress is, of course, to ask Congress to do it. No president could bring that about unilaterally. And as he says, asking Congress to “fix” Washington (according to his notion of “fixing”) is indeed like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Or the other way around. Whatever.

Column I: Cindi Scoppe puts Georgia port dredging issue into perspective

Today, I think I’ll use some columns I read in the papers this morning as conversation-starters. We’ll begin with Cindi Scoppe’s balanced, thoughtful approach to DHEC’s granting of a dredging permit to Georgia.

As is her wont, she skewers weak arguments on all sides:

To those who ask, “Did Gov. Haley pressure her appointees to the DHEC board to approve the permit?,” she explains that it doesn’t matter. The governor says she fully supports the decision. She takes ownership of it. It doesn’t matter whether she pressured anyone. And what pressure can she exert? She appointed these people, but she lacks power to remove them. Who cares? She appointed them, she in no way distances herself from the decision.
Then there’s this red herring: “Why did the DHEC commissioners put Georgia’s economic interests above the economic interests of the state of South Carolina?” It’s not DHEC’s job to decide on the basis of economic interests. It’s their job to protect the environment, which is a separate question.

Here’s the question Cindi urges lawmakers to concentrate on: Did the Corps of Engineers and Georgia grant enough concessions to meet our state’s environmental requirements?

She continues with a discussion of various aspects of that consideration.

Then, in the end, she offers this bit of simple clarity:

We probably wouldn’t have to worry so much about cozying up to our competitors if our own Sen. Jim DeMint hadn’t helped put the Port of Charleston even further behind the Savannah Port, by delaying efforts to dredge Charleston Harbor. But the sad truth is that he has done far more to damage the Port of Charleston than anything DHEC could ever do. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much the Legislature can do about that.

All around, a good, solid column on a difficult issue.

Something I changed my mind about…

Occasionally, I get asked here whether I ever change my mind about anything. I don’t know why I get asked that; probably because of the very definite manner in which I present opinions that I have examined and tested over and over again. I have a certain tone, people tell me.

Well, yes — sometimes I do change my mind. Here’s something I changed my mind about some time ago…

On an earlier post, “Tim” changed the subject and brought up Trey Walker’s departure to become a lobbyist for USC:

Wasn’t one of [Gov. Haley’s] points in the State of the State to eliminate state employee lobbyists?
http://www.thestate.com/2011/09/02/1955609/haley-deputy-taking-usc-job.html

And that reminded me… Back when we I led the “Power Failure” project at The State in 1991, I was convinced that state agency lobbyists were a bad idea. And I described the badness of the idea in the same terms the libertarians use: It was wrong for the taxpayers to have to pay someone to lobby the Legislature to spend more tax money in their area. Of course, that was a gross oversimplification of what lobbyists do, but it seemed convincing at the time. In those days, I was occasionally guilty of thinking about issues not much more deeply than Nikki Haley does.

Speaking of which… most of the actual good ideas that Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley espouse — and they have advocated some good one — can be found in a reprint of the “Power Failure” project. In fact, in Sanford’s case, a lot of them seem to have come directly from just such a reprint that I sent him when he was first starting to run for governor. Then, for some time, I heard my own words out on the stump and then coming from the governor’s office (and some of you still wonder why I endorsed the guy in 2002).

Anyway, back to the topic…

Over time, I changed my mind about the state agency lobbyists. About lobbyists in general, but especially state agency ones. I changed my mind about a number of things after I moved from news to editorial. I thought I was a pretty thoughtful guy when I was in news. But after I had to write opinions every day that would be read by more than 100,000 people, people who would challenge every word, every concept, who would tear into any weakness in my thinking, I thought about things on a deeper level than I had before, taking more factors into consideration than I ever had before.

One of the factors was that, as I observed the Legislature more and more, I came to value more the input that only someone with intimate knowledge of an agency could offer to the legislative process. Let’s just say that the more I knew about our lawmakers, and the harder I looked into issues before taking a position, the less impressed I was with our solons’ understanding of what was going on. Having someone there who could say, “Here’s how this works” before they make a change affecting an agency is immensely valuable. And folks, it’s not always about spending. Often, it’s about whether the policies put into law help or hurt the agency’s ability to deliver its assigned service to the people of South Carolina.

Those guys over in the State House need all the relevant, well-informed input they can get. And if the lobbyists are any good, they are worth their salaries and then some.

Even Nikki Haley thinks so, since she said about Trey’s move, “He’s a talented, loyal and committed guy — and the University of South Carolina is lucky to have him.” Which I take to mean that she agrees with me that he’ll be worth his $135,000 salary there.

Once Trey gets on board, maybe when he makes his visits to the State House, he can drop by his former boss’s office and fill her in on what USC is all about, and how important it is to this state.

If he could do that, he’d be worth twice the pay.

We can go where we like, but Haley BFF Eleanor Kitzman is going to Texas

The best historical marker in the world is on the Madison County courthouse square in Jackson, TN. It tells what Davy Crockett told a group of voters, standing in that spot, after being defeated for re-election to Congress:

You can go to hell, but I am going to Texas!

Today, we have a similar case in South Carolina. Eleanor Kitzman, head of the Budget and Control board and the most passionate, emotional defender of Gov. Nikki Haley I’ve run across yet, is leaving us to go work for Rick Perry:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The director of the South Carolina agency that oversees much of state government operations has resigned, six months after Gov. Nikki Haley picked her for the job, to take a role in government in her home state of Texas.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office announced Wednesday that Eleanor Kitzman will start her job as that state’s insurance commissioner on Aug. 15. Her term there is set to expire in February 2013.

“I’m confident that Eleanor’s expertise in the insurance industry will make her a strong advocate for insurance customers in Texas,” Perry said in a release.

Kitzman, a 54-year-old Houston native, did not immediately return messages Wednesday evening.

In case you didn’t notice, the Legislature is NOT in session today…

Having a busy workday today, and don’t really have time a lot of time to dwell on the SC Supreme Court’s sensible decision in stopping Nikki Haley from violating the separation of powers. The salient part:

Chief Justice Jean Toal and justices Donald Beatty and Kaye Hearn voted to block Haley’s order to call lawmakers back at 10 a.m. Tuesday, writing that the General Assembly “has not adjourned … and, therefore, is still in its annual session. Under these specific facts, respondent (Gov. Nikki Haley) cannot convene an ‘extra’ session of the General Assembly since it is currently in session. To do so would interrupt the annual session and would violate the General Assembly’s authority to set its calendar and agenda and would constitute a violation of the separation of powers provision.”

That was the thing. My good friend Kevin Hall (the governor’s attorney) had stated rather forcefully that the governor has the authority to call back lawmakers. Yeah. But she can’t call them BACK when they’re still in session (although in recess), and already have a defined agenda, and tell them have a whole other session in the middle of this one, and use it to do what I want. As I’ve said before, I am for having a much stronger governor in South Carolina (which is why I agree with the gov on three of the four things she wants). But I want a chief executive with more power to run the executive branch, not dictate legislative matters to a coequal branch.

A perceptive friend who doesn’t follow this stuff as obsessively as I do said, after reading The State‘s story, that Glenn McConnell doesn’t seem to think much of the governor. Well, to be fair, Glenn McConnell doesn’t think much of any governor, although they’re all right in his book as long as they know their place.

After saying in his courtly way that he would be happy to support amending the agenda when lawmakers come back as planned so as to allow them to take up the matters that concern the governor, he said this:

“I support the bills, and we’ll vote (on whether) to put them in the sine die,” McConnell said Monday, referring to the resolution that lays out the bills that senators can consider when they return. “But I’m only one of 46 senators. If (Haley) will use as much energy to get votes as she did to run over the Constitution, she’ll make it. She needs to get out and get the votes. The ball is in her court.”

I was busy laughing at the Senate president pro tem’s statement that “I’m only one of 46 senators” (he is such a wacky cutup) but when I got to the next sentence, I was like, “Whoa! Sen. McConnell is not amused…”

Talk about being Ms. Bossypants…

One of the women in my household took it back to the library, so I didn’t get far enough in Tina Fey’s Bossypants to find out what happened after she hit puberty, but that’s cool. The part I did read was pretty funny.

What is not funny is the Gov. Bossypants we have over at the State House, who did this today:

Gov. Nikki Haley ordered lawmakers back to Columbia next week after they failed to pass a key piece of her legislative agenda on the legislative session’s last day, sparking dissention among legislative Republicans and howls from Democrats.

Haley wants lawmakers to return at 10 a.m. Tuesday to consider bills creating a Department of Administration, allowing the governor and lieutenant governor to run as a ticket, allow the governor to appoint the secretary of education and a bill merging the Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole into the Department of Corrections.

“Pick any two,” Haley said, asking lawmakers to voluntarily forfeit the $250 daily pay they are due, a total of $42,500 a day….

In other words, Do my will, and don’t get paid for doing it.

What a supreme mix of autocratic egoism and faux populism. The perfect Tea Party mix, steeped so as to make the maximum Palin-style impression.

Of course, she did allow them to pick two out of four, which I suppose Her Bossiness would consider to be magnanimity.

Here’s the problem with that: I would gladly vote for three out of the four (if her Bossiness could deign to condescend to do so, I would, were I a lawmaker, have to ask her to explain the virtues of combining the D of PP&P with Corrections). You know why? Because I am one of South Carolina’s most monotonously persistent advocates of giving the executive branch the ability to effectively administer the executive branch and be accountable for it.

But this kind of presumption of dictating to the legislative branch plays straight into the hands of those lawmakers who want to mischaracterize such proposals as a case of executive overreaching: See? She’s trying to FORCE lawmakers to pass the laws she wants. She should advocate strenuously for her positions, but there is a world of difference between advocating that a coequal branch of government do something, and using the power of one’s own branch to FORCE an issue that is the prerogative of that other branch.

The latter is not cool. Which, to turn full circle, brings us back to Tina Fey — a standing prop of her comedy is that she is not cool, not by a long shot.

But when Gov. Haley does the Bossypants routine, it’s just not as funny.

Interesting letter from Eleanor Kitzman today

I don’t read the letters to the editor as closely as I used to. OK, to be perfectly honest, I hardly read them at ALL now that I’m not paid to do so, unless someone brings one to my attention.

Today was an exception, though. As my eye ran over the page, something in the last letter jumped out at me. I saw the words, “As a former Democratic candidate for state superintendent of education,” and scanned to the bottom to see the writer’s name was “Carlos W. Gibbons.” Hmmm. I do not know a Carlos W. Gibbons, which made me curious, and I sent out an e-mail to someone who knows stuff I don’t know, and learned that apparently he is a veteran educator who ran for the office in the early 1970s — and the father of Leeza Gibbons of TV fame.

In any case, he was right to advocate that the state superintendent post be appointed by the governor.

But it turns out that, until a few minutes ago, I had missed today’s really interesting letter — the one at the top of the stack. Alert reader “Tim” brought it to my attention moments ago. I’m just going to go ahead and put the whole thing here, and hope I don’t run afoul of Fair Use. Because this was an unusual letter:

Keep ignoring reality, governor

I have known Gov. Haley for many years, and she is one of my five bosses on the Budget and Control Board. If the governor is ignoring reality as Roger Hawkins contends (“Haley can’t continue to ignore realities,” March 3), my advice to her is to keep it up; it has served her well.

Moreover, I’d suggest that others follow her excellent example. Rather than ignoring reality, however, I believe Gov. Haley has wisely rejected the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority.

There’s never any shortage of people telling you that you can’t do something.

Perhaps more insidious are those who maintain that we need their “help” to overcome adversity because not everyone has the governor’s abilities to plow through the impediments of life or navigate around diversity issues. I couldn’t disagree more and would ask why not.

We may not all become governors, but we can achieve our goals if we stop seeing ourselves as victims.

We must be fearless and willing to work hard, make good choices and, most importantly, never give up in pursuit of a dream. (Don’t even get me started on yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works to an ethnic woman.)

Eleanor Kitzman

Columbia

Now, the thing that was unusual about this may not be immediately apparent to you. But if you had known any of Ms. Kitzman’s predecessors as chief of the Budget and Control Board, you’d know. It’s sort of hard to imagine — actually, impossible to imagine — Frank Fusco, or Fred Carter, writing (or even thinking) words that would be anything like those that Ms. Kitzman put in that letter. Whether you think of them as faceless bureaucrats, or as the very models of professional discretion that they were, it’s difficult to imagine them expressing their views in such a manner.

If you don’t know those guys, and don’t have that background, my reaction to Ms. Kitzman’s letter probably won’t make much sense to you.

Under those guys, the B&C Board (which should not exist at all, but you know that once I get started on that subject I can be all day) was a lot of things, but one thing it was not was a forum for expressing personal sentiments about particular politicians — the governor, or anyone else. There was a reason for that — the director worked for five bosses with five different egos and agendas. What was the point of being too closely identified with any of them?

I mean, forgive me for sounding like “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works,” but gee whiz, folks… (I thought, as exclamations do, that “gee whiz” sounded appropriately whitebread and old fashioned, didn’t you? I’m trying to play my assigned part as well as I can, and these small touches mean so much.)

The letter was so… emotional. So indignant. So partisan, in the sense of taking one person’s side against another. There are other terms I could use, but you know what? I just keep coming back to emotional — which I suppose will just expose me to, um, passionate condemnation for gender stereotyping, but hey, leave gender out of it (isn’t that what the brutes always say — “leave gender out of it?” the cads…). Think that I’m saying it the way Lee Marvin said it to Robert Ryan, “I owe you an apology, Colonel. I always thought that you were a cold, unimaginative, tight lipped officer. But you’re really … quite emotional. Aren’t you?” (The way I look at it, you can’t get any further away from gender politics than by quoting “The Dirty Dozen.” Am I right or am I right?)

I read something like that, and I think, what possessed her to write that? Yes, she owes her $174,000-a-year position to the governor as a matter of political fact, but why call attention to that in such a dramatic way? Did the governor know she was writing that letter? Does the governor approve of her having written that letter? She certainly didn’t need such a defense; she would have been fine without it.

For my part, I hadn’t even read the piece she was referring to (remember, I’m no longer paid to), but I can bet you I went and read it after seeing that letter. It was… unremarkable, really. Kind of unfocused. Seemed like the writer was trying to make some strong points, but trying to be kind and gentle with it, and swinging back and forth between commending the governor for being a determined “don’t let anything stand in your way” type and admonishing her for engaging in “magical thinking.”

Was the op-ed from this Hawkins fella somehow an example of White Male Oppressor insensitivity? Did he show a lack of appreciation for the governor’s inspiring story of ethnic pluck that we’ve heard so… much… about…? Was he trying to brutally impose on her “the so-called reality that others saw for her as a disadvantaged minority?” Hardly. He had, on his own initiative, shown due deference to the obligatory talking points in that regard. In fact, he went on about it as much as Ms. Kitzman did:

Haley’s success to this point in her life has been built around navigating diversity, not letting it get in her way or positioning herself as just a diversity hire. She was born into Sikhism, an Indian religion that adopts elements from both Hinduism and Islam, and later converted to the Methodist faith.

Haley earned a degree in accounting — a profession dominated by men — and began her career at a waste-management and recycling company. Throughout her formative years, she never interacted with large numbers of people who looked like her. Her political career is also based on being an outsider. She recently told an audience that Sanford told her the state wasn’t ready for a female governor.

OK, wait a minute; here’s the trouble. Seems Mr. Hawkins was, rather than being too indifferent, a bit too CONCERNED about matters of Identity Politics, for he had just said:

What Haley has done that is troubling is appoint nine white men, three white women and one African-American woman to her Cabinet. None of her 16 executive staff members is African-American.

Hey, you know what I think about all that I.D. stuff — if you wanted a “diverse” Cabinet and staff in the superficial demographic sense, you should have elected the White Guy. (And if you ARE someone who cares deeply about such things, you probably DID vote for the White Guy, and Nikki Haley knows that, so quit your bellyaching. Whoops, I’m being insensitive again…) But this guy apparently DID care about it, and said so. And for this, he’s condemned as… what was it again… “yet another middle-aged white man explaining how the real world works….” Yeah, that was it — no wait, I forgot the part about “to an ethnic woman.” Mustn’t leave that off.

Anyway, it just wasn’t the kind of letter I’m used to reading from B&C Board chiefs. This is going to be interesting going forward, folks.

OK, so maybe he IS just 32

A friend this morning alerted me to the fact that on his LinkedIn page, Christian Soura — the governor’s mysterious dollar-a-year man — does look young enough to be 32. (His job, on that same profile, is listed as “Executive Director at South Carolina Center for Transforming Government.” The governor’s office is not mentioned. Hey, if the gov were only paying me a buck a year, I wouldn’t mention her, either.)

OK, so that still leaves us wondering how he was receiving a state pension from Pennsylvania.

Yes, I know they’re much more into what our governor would term Big Government in Pennsylvania. The taxes are higher, and they have taxes yet unthought-of in SC. Pause for an anecdote…

Fred Mott used to be publisher at The State. He’s the publisher who made me the editorial page editor, which tells you that he’s a great guy to work for, and a splendid judge of character. But boy, did we used to have some arguments over politics at editorial board meetings. And a constant course of disagreement was Fred’s insistence that taxes were relatively high in South Carolina. I’d give him stats to the contrary, and he’d just give his patented dismissive wave and keep on believing what he believed. (The “emotional center” — to use a favorite phrase of an editor I once worked with — of this for Fred, I believe, was that he had previously lived in Florida and there was no state income tax in Florida, and there was one in SC, so taxes in SC were therefore higher…)

Then Fred left here and went to work in Philadelphia. He lived in the ‘burbs, but worked in the city. I will always cherish the first phone conversation I had with Fred after he moved up there. He said, “I’ll never again say that taxes are high in South Carolina.” The emotional center of this change of mind was that he was required to pay a tax for living outside the city but working inside it, which really rankled.

Anyway, they have more and higher taxes, and they provide services that we don’t even think about here. (They are also proud — and this is hard to take in for a South Carolinian — of having been in the forefront of the public-employee union movement that the governor of Wisconsin is trying to roll back.) So maybe they do have retirement benefits so awesome that you can start getting them at 32.

But this still seems a little unlikely. There’s still a puzzle here. I look forward to learning more.

Yep, I was right — half right, anyway

Did y’all see the followup this morning in The State about Nikki Haley’s dollar-a-year guy?

An efficiency adviser for Gov. Nikki Haley has set up a nonprofit group to research and advocate the best ways for government to operate.

Christian Soura, a former secretary of administration for the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, quietly agreed to work for Haley for $1 a year in January. Soura said Thursday he was living off his Pennsylvania pension and the sale of his Harrisburg home while making that $1 salary.

However, Soura, 32, said Friday that he also plans to raise money for — and be paid by — the newly minted South Carolina Center for Transforming Government.

Critics of the governor responded by charging her with yet more hypocrisy, saying she wants to know where legislators earn their money but is not forthcoming about her own staff’s income and its sources.

Soura said his organization has no donors or commitments yet. It would act as a think tank for ideas about reducing state government’s administrative and operating costs. The paperwork creating the non-profit was filed with the S.C. secretary of state on Feb. 24…

So it turns out I was right in my initial guess, that this guy was actually going to be paid by some sort of ideological advocacy group allied with the Mark Sanfords of the world (a category that includes our current governor).

And OK, so it wasn’t a national group (so far as we know — it will still be interesting to see where its money comes from), which makes me only half right. And it wasn’t an existing group, as he had to set it up himself. (Enterprising young man — very New Normal.)

But half right isn’t bad for total conjecture.

Also, you’ll note that this guy being a 32-year-old who had been living on a PA state pension (plus money from selling his house in Harrisburg) is still the operative story. So the weirdest part of the tale is still the official version.

Our young governor’s presumption apparently knows no bounds (and it’s kinda freaking me out)

Been feeling the need to write this ever since I read the paper early this morning. I haven’t had time before now…

Nikki Haley kind of blew my mind on three fronts this morning, which caused me to go on a bit of a rant at breakfast (Wesley isn’t the only ranter in Columbia), along these lines:

“Haley to grade legislators.” Did you see that headline this morning? I normally eschew text-speak, but WTF? None of the lawmakers quite came out and said this, but I’ll tell you what they were thinking: “This little girl couldn’t even get called on when she raised her hand at the back of the class a year ago, and now she’s going to grade US?” This would be followed by the aforementioned “WTF?” Yep, lawmakers really think like that, the insensitive brutes. Now, before you think this is just a question of whom you like — with reactions divided between Haley fans who cheer, “Go get ’em, Nikki!” and the harrumphers who do not and never will be Haley fans — allow me to point something out to you. It would be presumptuous for anyone to do this. Back when I worked in Tennessee, some writers at one of the Nashville papers would grade all the legislators at the end of the session each year. I thought it presumptuous as all get-out, but… it was still within the bounds of acceptable commentary. And it would certainly be permissible for me to do something like that on my blog, although you would be equally free to tell me to what extent I was full of it. Just an exchange of views among citizens. But here’s the problem with Nikki doing it, in case you didn’t make it through Civics 101: She’s the governor, which means she’s the closest thing to a head of the executive branch that we’ve got (in another state, she’d be the head of the executive branch, but this is South Carolina). For the chief executive to use whatever political influence she has to harass and bully and threaten lawmakers, even in as silly a manner as this (do my will, or I’ll give you a bad grade!), smacks of bossism. Ben Tillman would have loved a device like that for keeping lawmakers in line, and Boss Crump as well. Folks, the best virtue Nikki Haley has going for her is that she advocates restructuring that would make the executive branch more accountable to the governor (and in fact, it’s their positions on reforms like that that she plans to “grade” lawmakers on). But this kind of behavior gives executive power a bad name, and gives lawmakers — who don’t want to give the governor power anyway — an excuse to blow her off, just as Mark Sanford did with his defecating piglets. And that’s what takes this beyond silly, practically to the realm of outrage. The very modest restructuring legislation that just passed the House will have tough-enough sledding in the Senate (where all such reforms go to die) without this nonsense.
“Governor takes aim at state employee benefits.” Wow. Poor Nikki. Last year, she was the darling of the national media (which is how she won the election), making the cover of Newsweek twice. Now, she feels forgotten. Through the lens of this story, you can see the little wheels turning in her head: Look at all the attention that governor in Wisconsin is getting! That’s so unfair? What’s he doing? Oh, he’s trying to take away state employees collective bargaining power. What an awesome idea! I’ll do that too, and then I can get some attention? What? Oh, drat! We don’t HAVE public employee unions in South Carolina, so I can’t strike dramatic poses fighting against them! That’s really, REALLY unfair! What, oh what am I going to do? There must be SOMETHING I can do to state employees here that will draw attention… but what? I know! I’ll go after their BENEFITS…
“The mystery man on Haley’s staff.” THIS one is so weird, that I suspect there’s a typo in it somewhere. So… Nikki has a guy on her staff who supposedly is only being paid $1 a year. He’s supposedly a government-efficiency expert who’s gonna help the gov straighten out waste and inefficiency in our gummint. He uprooted his family and moved here from Pennsylvania for the job — for the $1-a-year job. OK, this causes a lot of people to suspect there’s something else going on, and speculate that he’s waiting around for a real job that could come open soon. This he denies, or at least says he hasn’t been promised anything. But that wouldn’t be my theory anyway, given those facts. MY theory is that he’s being paid by one of those national ideological groups that flock around the Mark Sanfords of the world. Howie Rich, or Grover Norquist or some such. But he says no, that he’s living off his state employee pension from Pennsylvania. Got that? OK… The story also says he’s 32 years old. Twice. In the main body of the story, and in a graphic. After someone suggested it was a double-typo, I Tweeted John O’Connor to ask him. He Tweeted back that “No, that’s his age according to the governor’s office.” So maybe the governor’s office is wrong about his age. But if not — this guy’s able to live on a state pension (and I went back to look again, and yes, the only jobs listed in the published summary of his resume sound like state jobs) at the age of 32 — and he’s here as an expert on government efficiency? That ought to make state employees breath a sigh of relief. No way he’ll have the nerve to urge the governor to reduce their pensions, huh? Unless he’s the nerviest guy in two states. Somewhere, there’s gotta be something inaccurate in this picture, because the “facts” we have definitely don’t add up.

OK, I got all that off my chest. Now, to shift gears on you, and praise our governor for her pushiness — in that same story about state employee benefits, she promised to present lawmakers with a comprehensive tax reform plan. THAT’S the kind of presumption I can cheer for. But I’m going to hold my applause until I see whether it’s comprehensive, and whether it’s reform. The first sign will be whether she steps up and proposes to undo the execrable Act 388.

And… now that I’m cooled down a bit… I’ll go further in that backtracking direction: I still haven’t made up my mind about what I think of the bill I wrote about earlier that would do essentially what Nikki’s saying with state pensions. (Mainly because I haven’t yet seen enough about it — on something that complex and that financial, I sort of need some broad input to make up my mind.) But the truth is, I read items 2 and 3 right after reading item 1 this morning, so it all looked bad while I was in that mood.

And now that I’m looking at them again before hitting “Publish,” I’m still kinda freaked out…

Breathtaking euphemism: Cutting health care payments in SC

Catching up on my e-mail, I ran across this release from our friend Wesley over with the Senate Republicans:

Senate passes bill giving DHHS budget flexibility

The state Department of Health and Human Services needs to crawl out of a $228 million hole for this fiscal year, alone. Next year, deficit estimates top $500 million. But, it doesn’t have to stay this way. That’s why Senate Republicans led the fight today to pass S. 434 — it removes budgetary constraints on the actions of agency director Tony Keck and gives him and his department more flexibility as it comes to this fiscal crisis.

The legislation, chief sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler and cosponsored by Senators Kevin Bryant and Lee Bright, requires the ability to purchase generic drugs instead of more expensive name brands. Most importantly, it repeals part of a proviso that stopped any DHHS director from modifying the schedule by which doctors and hospitals were paid through the state’s administration of Medicaid.

“This bill is all about untying Mr. Keck’s hands and allowing him to do his job as effectively as he can,” Peeler said following the vote. “That doesn’t mean he has to cut programs, it means he can cut. With such a huge deficit, we need Keck to be running his own agency, not micromanaged by the legislature.”

The bill’s passage is also seen as a win for Gov. Nikki Haley. It both invests more power to an executive branch agency and hands those reigns over to one of her recent appointments. The budgetary problems within DHHS — and Medicaid in particular — have been high on issues to address for both the governor and the legislature as they entered this session.

Keck has said that he’s looking at making health care providers modify their staffing ratios, increasing patient co-pays and taking a hard line in favor medical tort reform. Senate Republicans are ready to help him in any way possible fix the agency’s financial problems.

“Flexibility.” I like that. It reminds me of when people who want to increase taxes call what they’re doing “revenue enhancements.” When conservatives in SC want to cut spending on life-and-death essentials, they call it “flexibility.” As euphemisms go, it’s sort of breathtaking.

I especially liked this part, so I’ll repeat it:

“This bill is all about untying Mr. Keck’s hands and allowing him to do his job as effectively as he can,” Peeler said following the vote. “That doesn’t mean he has to cut programs, it means he can cut. With such a huge deficit, we need Keck to be running his own agency, not micromanaged by the legislature.”

Translation: We’re going to flat make these cuts, but we are not going to take the responsibility. That’s what the governor hired Mr. Keck to do. Interesting how sometimes, the Senate sees granting power to the executive as a good thing. Take note, boys and girls. Take pictures, and remember so you can tell your own children, because this doesn’t happen often. Normally, as Cindi wrote on Wednesday, or Legislature is “fixated… on micromanaging the most mundane minutiae of state government…”

But flexibility — that’s a good thing, right? Sounds good, anyway.

Here’s the way what the Senate did was described by a neutral party (which is why we have the MSM):

The S.C. Senate gave key approval Thursday to a bill allowing immediate cuts in state payments to doctors and hospitals that treat patients in the state-run health care program for the poor and disabled.

Gov. Nikki Haley and the Department of Health and Human Services have sought to cut those payments in order to make up part of a $225 million deficit at the state’s Medicaid agency. Agency director Tony Keck said the state could save $2.4 million between now and June 30 for every percentage point that it cuts those payments.

The bill also requires HIV, AIDS, cancer and mental-health patients to use generic drugs or get prior approval from the state’s health agency to use more expensive, non-generic drugs.

So you’ve seen it described two ways — by the perpetrators and by the news media. Now, here’s the assessment of someone at the other end of the spectrum. Samuel Tenenbaum, the head of Palmetto Health Foundation, came to my table at breakfast to make sure I knew what was going on from the perspective of health care providers. He said it’s not a fiscal issue, but a moral issue, for this reason: Cut back on payments for care, and “people will die.”

This, of course, will be dismissed by folks at the first end of the spectrum who will describe Samuel as a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat whose ox is being gored. They’ll tell him to get out there and work harder raising money for the hospital, if he’s so concerned. But you know, I don’t distrust the judgments of people who are actually involved in the complex business of paying for health care. I tend to think that they, the involved parties, more than anyone else, may actually understand the situation. Call me crazy.

Later in the day, Samuel sent me this set of more formal talking points, elaborating on his stark assessment at breakfast:

• The Problem

Former Governor Mark Sanford originally requested $659 million to fund the Medicaid program for fiscal year 2011-12. Governor Nikki Haley and her Medicaid director Tony Keck reduced that request by over $200 million. More than half of that reduction would be made up by reducing Medicaid payments to hospitals, physicians and other healthcare

providers.

• South Carolina Hospital Association Proposal

SCHA member hospitals support a temporary increase in the $264 million hospital contribution to the state’s Medicaid fund as opposed to a cut in hospital provider rates.

• Why contribute rather than cut?

• A 10 percent reduction in the rate paid to hospitals will “save” $47 million in state funds but “cost” the state almost $170 million in federal matching funds. As Mr. Beaman has stated, a 10 percent cut for Palmetto Health will result in a $22 million loss to our system.

• Over 2600 South Carolina hospital jobs will be put in jeopardy.

So there you have it, a sort of Three Bears approach — perspectives on the issue from both ends and the middle. See what you think.

More encouraging evidence that local leaders GET the need for regional approach

Mayors Bailey, Benjamin, Halfacre and Partin.

To me, the most memorable thing about Columbia Regional Business Report’s “Power Breakfast” this morning at Embassy Suites, where a cross-section of the business community heard a panel of Midlands mayors (Columbia’s Steve Benjamin, Lexington’s Randy Halfacre, Cayce’s Elise Partin, and Blythewood’s Keith Bailey) talk about our community’s future, was this tidbit:

Steve Benjamin said a study has determined that the city of Columbia has 400 more employees than it should have for its size and what it does. Maybe this has been widely reported (perhaps while I was in England) and everyone but me knew it. Anyway, the mayor said the city is trying to reduce payroll by carefully examining every open position, and not filling any that it can possibly do without. The exceptions to this reduction strategy are police, fire and economic development, where he envisions the city spending more, not less.

Of course, that wasn’t the only important thing said, by far. A wide range of critical issues were covered. But the one overall impression I came away with was this: Local elected leadership is more committed to regional approaches — to growth, services, and everything else of importance — than ever. I didn’t just gain that impression this morning, of course. It’s been forming for some time, and it’s very encouraging. Its what the actual economic community of Columbia (as opposed to the much smaller political entity of that name) has needed, more than anything else, for at least a generation. As I was telling restaurateur Bill Dukes afterward, that’s why, the whole time I was heading The State‘s editorial board, we always grilled candidates for local office about their commitment to regional cooperation. With the kind of governmental fragmentation that afflicts us, bridge-building is essential to community improvement. So this trend we’re seeing is extremely gratifying, and bodes well.

What reinforced that impression today? Not so much any one thing they said, but the way they said almost everything, combined with their confident ease in each other’s company (a small thing, but something you might not have seen very often in the past).

Now rather than try to tell you everything else that was said, I’m going to share this excerpt from Mike Fitts’ report. Why should I do all the reporting myself? I have a long-established habit of delegating things to Mike, who once served on my quarterdeck as ably as Tom Pullings or anyone else you care to name (and I can’t say fairer than that), and I see no reason to stop now:

… Two other mayors emphasized that handling current growth is among their current concerns. Lexington Mayor Randy Halfacre said the town is launching a major program to deal with “a huge problem with traffic congestion” downtown. Phase 1 of the project will cost $12 million, more than half of which will be spent to buy right of way easements, Halfacre said.

Blythewood has prepared a master plan to handle what looks like major growth in the next 20 years, Mayor Keith Bailey said. That includes beautification of the main exit off Interstate 77, which he called “a front door” for the Midlands.

This kind of growth needs to be planned for, Halfacre said.

“If we don’t get a handle on it now, it’s going to slip away from us,” he said.

Cayce Mayor Elise Partin said her town has a different challenge: getting the word out about the community and its opportunities. Its many longtime residents love it, she said, but others don’t know about amenities such as the riverwalk, she said.

“Pride in our area and our city is strong,” she said.

The loss of Southwest Airlines to two other in-state markets showed the need for regionalism, Halfacre said. At a recent meeting with Southwest, Columbia Metro Airport Executive Director Dan Mann was told, “We did not see your region, your area, working together.”

Two new groups are seeking to remedy that, Halfacre said. He has helped put together an alliance of midstate chambers of commerce, and West Columbia Mayor Bobby Horton is chairman of a new group of Midlands mayors. These groups should help build teamwork and draw legislative attention when necessary, Halfacre said.

Benjamin said the community needs to work on the big picture — a regional master plan. He recounted some of the area’s assets but said that the vision to tie all these things together has been lacking.

“We need to start moving aggressively forward,” Benjamin said.

Overall, it was a good session, like the others I’ve attended under CRBR’s auspices.

Also, there’s the fundamental issue of accountability

I’ve always been in favor of charter schools, and so has the editorial board at The State. (Some would think those two points are redundant, and some of my former colleagues would say the same, but I continue to insist that the board under my leadership operated by consensus and was not an autocracy. So my opinion and the board’s during that period were not the same thing. And that’s the way it was, because I say so, speaking ex cathedra. None may say me nay.)

Today’s editorial explaining why local districts shouldn’t fund state-chartered schools made me go “huh?” for a second, because I hadn’t really thought about that aspect of it (and I guess I missed when the issue came up).

But only for a second. Once I thought about whether such funding should come from DISTRICTS, I could think of all sorts of reasons why that was a bad approach to an otherwise good idea.

And many of those reasons were set out ably in the editorial. An excerpt:

What’s not reasonable is the plan before the House to force school districts to take local property tax money away from the schools they are responsible for and give it to charter schools that are completely independent of the districts. Unlike district-sponsored charter schools, many state-sponsored schools were set up over the objections of the local districts, and they do not receive local property tax funding.

The idea of forcing local schools to subsidize the state charters is particularly unreasonable today, when we are calling on districts to make difficult choices to reduce their costs. Consider what happened last week: The day after Lexington 2 Superintendent Venus Holland recommended closing one of the district’s 10 elementary schools to save money, the House Education Committee voted to make her district — and the rest of the state’s districts — spend money to keep the doors opened at a dozen schools over which it has no control. Although the timing isn’t so dramatic, the situation is even more absurd in Abbeville, where the legislation would force the district to pay for a school that opened in a high school that the district had shut down to save money.

In addition to the districts’ need to make these sorts of difficult decisions, there’s this very practical problem: Property taxes are set based on the number of students the districts expect to have in the schools they operate — not in the schools over which they have no say and whose enrollment they have no way of guessing.

In defending the plan to make local districts fund state-chartered schools, House Education Chairman Phil Owens claimed it “creates parity and equality.” But it does no such thing: To the contrary, it highlights the “parity and equality” problem we have throughout our public schools, because it requires each district to contribute whatever amount of money it spends per student for each local student who attends one of these schools. That varies widely from district to district, based on how wealthy each is and how much the people who live there value public education…

But the one main, critical, essential, fundamental reason why it was a bad idea was left out, or only implied, and it is this: As stewards of taxpayers’ money, districts shouldn’t have to fund something that they can’t hold accountable.

The districts run the schools under their jurisdiction, holding them accountable — with varying degrees of success — for the appropriations provided. That’s the essence of responsible government: You elect people to make decisions about raising and spending tax money (as well as other essentials of government). Taxes are levied on the local level specifically for the purpose of running those schools.

The whole idea behind charter schools is that they are free from being held accountable by that local district structure. There’s no way that local districts should be allocating any portion of the finite, limited funds (a demagogue would throw in, “taxpayers’ hard-earned money”) to any entity that is not answerable to that body for what it does.

The state charters these schools, and should be responsible for any funding that comes from public sources.

To elaborate… the editorial also made the very important point that ultimately, school funding is a state responsibility. And it is. And eventually, we need to get to the point where schools are not dependent on taxes raised locally — a practice that only exacerbates the gross inequities in quality of education available statewide.

This issue — the local funding and governance of schools — is one on which my opinion has changed over time. As one who believes in the principle of subsidiarity, my general tendency is toward pushing governmental responsibilities down to the smallest, most local level (the federal government should do far less than it does, and states should leave more up to local governments — in South Carolina, that means the Legislature getting off the necks of local governments and letting them serve their citizens unhampered).

That’s in general. But subsidiarity holds that functions should be performed by the smallest possible entity competent to perform them. And increasingly, I’ve started to think in recent years that the state (or at the very least, the county) is about as small an entity that can both fund and administer schools competently. Mind you, I think the SCHOOLS should enjoy more autonomy than they do, in terms of principals being more free to run them — particularly in terms of freedom to hire and fire. But to the extent that there has to be administration above the school level, that doesn’t have to be nearly as local as it is, and there are a number of reasons why it shouldn’t be (including the fact that while school boards are elected, the overwhelming majority of voters don’t have the slightest idea who’s running for school board, or which would do a better job, and you often get the kind of governance you would expect from that — and there is NO WAY these little-known entities should be levying taxes, as they do in some districts). A good start in making that less local is what I’ve advocated strenuously for 20 years: Consolidate school districts. But the ultimate goal, perhaps (I’m not 100 percent on this yet), should be statewide administration.

But I’m getting off the subject. Bottom line: Charter schools are a state creation (and it’s a good thing the state has created them, I continue to think). The state should pay for them, to the extent that they should be publicly funded. Legislators should deal with that, rather than trying to dump the problem on the overstressed districts.

Cindi’s column on our epic struggle for accountable, rational government in SC

“It don’t make no difference how foolish it is, it’s the RIGHT way — and it’s the regular way. And there ain’t no OTHER way, that ever I heard of, and I’ve read all the books that gives any information about these things. They always dig out with a case-knife — and not through dirt, mind you; generly it’s through solid rock. And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever. Why, look at one of them prisoners in the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in the harbor of Marseilles, that dug himself out that way; how long was HE at it, you reckon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, guess.”

“I don’t know. A month and a half.”

“THIRTY-SEVEN YEAR — and he come out in China. THAT’S the kind. I wish the bottom of THIS fortress was solid rock.”

For some reason, I thought of that exchange between Tom Sawyer (the first speaker) and Huck Finn when I read Cindi Scoppe’s column Sunday about our long, Sisyphean struggle to get our state to adopt a more rational, accountable form of government.

Actually, it wasn’t a column exactly, but a repurposing of remarks she delivered upon accepting Governing magazine’s Hal Hovey-Peter Harkness Award for public service journalism. Remember, I mentioned this the other day.

Whatever you call the piece, it summarized our TWENTY-YEAR effort to change South Carolina government — one in which we’ve made some progress, although it would be pretty fair to say it’s the kind of progress you’d expect to make, digging your way out of a stone dungeon with a case-knife.

One thing I liked about the piece was that Cindi took the trouble to list the bad craziness that was going on in that summer of 1990, when it all started:

Twenty years ago, I had been out of college less than five years, and covering the S.C. Legislature as a reporter for less than two years, when my colleagues and I realized that we were in the midst of a governmental crisis:

• A tenth of the Legislature was or soon would be under indictment on federal corruption charges.

• Among the dozen other officials under investigation was the governor’s closest political ally.

• A separate FBI investigation was looking into bid-rigging at the Highway Department.

• The director of that agency had forced underlings to cover up a wreck he had in his state vehicle — and his bosses gave him only a gentle reprimand.

• That same director had himself refused to fire the Highway Patrol commander for personally intervening to get the top FBI official in the state out of a DUI charge.

• The larger-than-life president of the state’s flagship university had used public funds to secretly purchase lavish gifts for legislators for years while university trustees looked the other way.

I was the governmental affairs editor at the time, and I’ve told the story of what led us to do Power Failure over and over, but I always have trouble remembering all that stuff that was going on. All of those scandals were on my team’s turf, and we were doing a great job of staying ahead of the competition on all of them that summer (going nuts doing it, but still doing it), when one day Gil Thelen, doing his management-by-walking-around thing, plopped into a chair next to my desk and asked a blue-sky question about what it all meant? Was there a way to explain it all to readers, and give them some hope that the underlying problems could be reached. I said I didn’t know, but I’d think about it.

The result was the Power Failure series. The central insight was that NO ONE was in charge. And the thing that caused me to pull it all together was a series of three op-ed pieces written by Walter Edgar and Blease Graham. After reading that, I could see the direction we would need to take in explaining it to readers — something that eventually took well over 100 stories split into 17 installments in 1991.

Of all the reporters I had working with me on that opus, Cindi was the one who took it most to heart and was most dedicated to the ideas the project set out. Which was a large reason why I brought her up to editorial in 1997 — so we could continue the mission.

Cindi’s boiled-down version of the project’s conclusions:

• Consolidate agencies, and let the governor control them.

• Write real ethics laws.

• Dismantle the special purpose districts, and empower local governments.

• Release the judiciary from its legislative stranglehold.

• Adopt a rational budgeting process.

• And make the government more open to the public.

I enjoyed Cindi’s ending, which to me was reminiscent of the last graf of the introductory piece I wrote for the project. Here’s Cindi’s ending:

There’s a little state down South where we’re experts at putting the “dys” into dysfunctional government, and there’s an editorial writer down there who’s been struggling for practically her entire career to get people to buy into a few simple and obvious reforms. And she’s not gonna stop until they do it.

And here’s mine, from the spring of 1991:

South Carolina is becoming less like its old self. An increasingly wary public is tired of being ripped off. Things that weren’t expected to happen under the old way of doing things — such as judges and senators getting indicted — are happening, because law enforcement agencies won’t play ball anymore.

And neither will the newspapers.

What makes them alike? That braggadocio, that personal statement of “I’m on your case now, and I’m not backing down.” (in my mind, I wanted something that would sound to the readers’ ear like the schwing! of a sword being drawn from a scabbard.) Some of the old hands at The State took exception to that language, and other stuff I wrote at about that time, seeing it as too “arrogant.” Yeah, well — I felt like it was time somebody got out of their comfort zone. I felt like it was going to take a lot to blast the state loose from the deathgrip of the status quo.

And I was right.

bradwarthen.com

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