Category Archives: South Carolina

Red Cross says get ready, seeks volunteers

TIME magazine features Anton Gunn

Just got a heads-up that Anton Gunn — Democratic nominee for Bill Cotty’s House seat, S.C. political director for Barack Obama — has been featured in TIME magazine. A sample:

Anton Gunn is a first-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention from South Carolina, and he has never so much as watched a political convention on television before. Even Barack Obama’s famous keynote address in 2004 didn’t grab his attention (he sheepishly admits he still hasn’t listened to it). In fact, until two years ago, when Gunn ran for a state house seat in Columbia and lost by 298 votes, he’d never been involved in electoral politics.

Obama’s candidacy has brought a wave of new voters and volunteers into the Democratic Party, but even among them, Gunn, 35, stands out. In addition to being a Democratic delegate and a candidate once again for the state legislature, he now has a line on his political résumé few can match: political director for the Obama campaign in South Carolina, the state that more than any other launched the Illinois Senator’s successful candidacy.

You know, I don’t think I would have singled out Anton as one of those people brought into politics like Obama. I saw a number of such folks back in the state primaries, and some of them were real novices. Anton was relatively NEW to politics, but he was already in it before he met Obama. That doesn’t take away from his achievement helping Obama win the primary, a job for which he was quite inexperienced.

I guess this sort of exposure is kind of hard to match if you’re David Herndon, Mr. Gunn’s opponent in November. Of course, it remains to be seen to what extent TIME magazine readers are a factor.

‘Famously Hot:’ The Pitch

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This clip, which I’ll be posting on our Saturday Opinion Extra page, is from a meeting we had this week with representatives of the Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports & Tourism, which had come to talk to us about the new "Famously Hot" campaign.

Our lead editorial Sunday will be about the special challenge that faces this or any other attempt to market our capital city: The fragmentation of the local market. As you will see on this video, the marketers have decided that there’s only one way to sell the metropolitan area: as Columbia. They brush aside "Midlands" as being meaningless to potential visitors (although it’s in their name).

Can they get the other 18 municipalities, 2 counties, and multiple other jurisdictions to go along with that? They think they can. We’ll see. If they can’t, this effort won’t go far.

Today’s puzzler

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In the spirit of Click and Clack, I offer the following conundrum. Consider first this letter to the editor from today’s paper:

Stupid blue laws thwart purchase
Government is the only source of such stupidity. Or at least with the authority to enforce such ignorance.
After church, my wife, Mary, and I went to Wal-Mart for a new sports watch for her. She decided on one and told the clerk to ring it up. The clerk said, “I can’t ring it up until 1:30, and it’s only 1:15. Why don’t you shop around and come back in 15 minutes?”
We wandered around for about 10 minutes and saw folks were checking out with bananas, potato chips and, yes, even beer, but you can’t purchase a watch until 1:30. I said I’ll have a beer while I wait till 1:30 to buy the watch.
Woe unto you who think government is the answer. When are we going to vote these nitwits out?

Bruce G. Kelly
Columbia

This is an interesting letter on several levels, but the most immediate question that arises is this: Where in the Midlands do you find a jurisdiction where it would be illegal to buy the watch before 1:30, yet legal to buy beer on Sunday?

The simple answer is that there isn’t one. Poor Mr. Kelly would be hard-pressed to find the "nitwits" that he wants to "vote out," since there is no jurisdiction that has made those two decisions that he finds so maddeningly inconsistent.

Give up? I had, but then Warren proposed a potential answer — while there is no one such jurisdiction, this Wal-Mart was in an anomalous location that was both in the city of Columbia and in Lexington County. It’s not a thought that would have immediately occurred to me, but of course there are such places.

My first guess was that we’re talking about the new Wal-Mart on Bush River Road, right next to Malfunction Junction. The map on my wall in the editorial dept. shows it as in Lexington County. It does NOT show it as being in Columbia, but it’s an old map, and I have the advantage of private intelligence in this case: I recently tried to buy beer there on a Sunday, and succeeded. Ipso facto, to wit, etc….

But that’s not where this happened. When Randle, who edits our letters, got back to the office, I asked her to call Mr. Kelly and get to the bottom of the mystery.

The answer: This incident occurred at the Harbison Wal-Mart, which is certainly in Lexington County, and — while I couldn’t find confirmation of the fact on any map readily at hand, the odds are that if it’s in that area and developed, it’s in the city.

Of course, Mr. Kelly still can’t find anyone to vote out of office for creating this situation. Even if he lives in both the city and Lexington County, it’s beyond the power of any local elected official to solve his problem. A Columbia city council member, for instance, might change the beer-sale ordinance, but could do nothing about Lexington’s blue law — and vice versa, if you follow me.

His problem is similar to one we’ve pointed out many times before, in somewhat different contexts. It’s not a matter of too MUCH government, but of too MANY governments.

He can vote against EVERY incumbent if he chooses (the Doug Ross solution), just as a sort of universal, howl-at-the-moon sort of protest, but that wouldn’t solve his problem. That is, if you consider not being able to buy a sports watch for 15 minutes a problem. And I’m sure many of you would. So commiserate with poor Mr. Kelly, a man without recourse to redress.

Nick Clyburn? or, ‘Hey, Buddy…’

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One thing jumped out at me when I read the piece about Jim Clyburn on today’s front page:

"…Then, he disappears down the restaurant’s narrow stairway, his three-man security detail in tow…."

Apparently, Rep. Clyburn is channeling the Nick Theodore of 20 years ago. This is from a Lee Bandy story of July 20, 1988:

SIX-MAN GUARD RIDICULED
A top state Republican is ridiculing Lt. Gov. Nick Theodore’s security contingent at the convention, but a Theodore spokesman said the six-person contingent is needed.

"While we don’t dispute the need for basic security even for a part-time job, Theodore needs a half-dozen bodyguards like Dolly Parton needs a body lift," State Republican Party Chairman Van Hipp said.

Four SLED agents and two state troopers are in Atlanta with Theodore, SLED Chief Robert Stewart said.

Theodore normally has two SLED agents, but "whatever is requested by the governor or lieutenant governor, we’ll send it," Stewart said.

Theodore spokesman Lyles Glenn said long hours and admission restrictions necessitated the extra manpower.

Spokesman Tucker Eskew said Gov. Carroll Campbell would have three or four bodyguards at the Republican National Convention next month in New Orleans.

Ah, those were the days. I was with Lee at that convention (did I mention that I’m not at this one?), and I well remember Nick’s "command post" in a room on the ground floor of the Days Inn there in Buckhead, from which his ongoing security operation was coordinated via radio.

Poor Nick never did quite live that down. Echoes of his armed force reverberate today through consideration of Andre Bauer’s security expenditures.

Anyway, that was the last part of Mr. Clyburn’s day that grabbed me. Somehow, I think I had more fun following Lindsey Graham around at the GOP shindig four years ago. After all, I got to meet Biff Henderson.

Mayor Bob on city finances

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Still catching up with e-mail from over the weekend, I ran into this message from Mayor Bob Coble about the city of Columbia’s finances:

I wanted to give you my perspective on the progress the City is making in getting our Finance Department in order.
The 2007 CAFRA has been given to our auditor and shows a general fund balance of $24.9 million. That is a net increase over the year before of $1.6 million. Of the $24.9 million, $11 million of that will remain as the City’s “rainy day fund.” $2 million is encumbered and about $12 million is unallocated. Some portion of the unallocated $12 million may be used in future years, if needed, to handle fund balance deficits in accounts like the risk management fund, the TN Development Corporation, the Business Improvement District, a general obligation bond debt service etc. Our accountant, Don Mobely indicated at the retreat that future revenues and transfers from other funds would handle these deficits in future years. The 2007 CAFRA showed $9 million more in revenue and $4.4 million less in expenses than was budgeted.
The City is close to correcting problems in the Finance Department. The risk management fund has been corrected for past budgets. City Council will amend the current budget on September 24, 2008 to correct the problem for 2009. Health care costs will appear in each department’s budget. City Council approved a contract in July with Sungard Bi-Tech to correct the problems with our two computer systems, IFAS and Banner that were at the core of the problems with the Finance Department. Reconciliation and financial reports will be given to City Council on a monthly basis in January. We will have income and expense statements in October. Bill Ellis has been hired as the Deputy Finance Director. Two or three more account professionals will be hired by Bill. A new permanent CFO will be hired in January. A CFO Advisory Committee of prominent local CEOs, CFOs and business men and women has been established and has met. This committee will help select the best CFO possible. The internal control weaknesses that were reported in the last management letter will show corrections in the 2009 and 2010 CAFRA. The restructured Finance Department will be responsible for risk management.
The City must reduce health care costs and budget for GASB 45, as all governmental entities must do. Towers-Perrin, a nationally recognized, health care consultant, made a presentation at our retreat last week and will make recommendations on September 3rd for changes in our health plan effective July 1, 2009. I believe those changes will bring the City’s plan more in line with other governmental plans but not be a radical departure based on the initial report from Towers-Perrin. GASB 45 will be addressed after those changes have been made because those changes will impact the future liability under GASB 45.
Clearly, these financial problems have been embarrassing. They have caused us to plan poorly and react slowly because of a lack of information. These problems are being addressed, and we look forward to having the best Finance Department possible using best practices.

For the views of council members Kirkman Finlay III and Daniel Rickenmann, stay tuned to The Pulse, I suppose…

How SC gummint looks from the outside

What I wrote about SPDs in 1991

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Things don’t change in South Carolina; they just don’t. If you doubt me, read this piece I wrote in 1991. It was in connection with the 13th installment of the Power Failure project that I directed that year, when I was still in The State‘s newsroom. I quoted from it in my Sunday column.

For those of you who don’t remember, I spent that whole year (except for brief stints when I pulled away to help with our national desk with coverage of the Gulf War and the Soviet coup) running this project that delved very deeply into the fundamental, structural problems with government on the state and local levels in South Carolina. Before that, I had been The State’s governmental affairs editor. After, I took on other, temporary editing assignments as I awaited my chance to join the editorial board. Power Failure had pretty much ruined me for news work.

The piece I refer you to was a little invention of mine that I called the "thread." After the first installment or so of the series (there were 17), I realized that each installment threw an awful lot at people. I wanted to make sure that there was some consistent feature, from installment to installment, that linked that day’s installment with all the previous ones, making sure readers saw the themes that ran through them all. The threads were very short columns by me — about 11 inches long — that essentially answered the questions, What do I need to get out of this installment? How is it related to the rest of the series?

Anyway, I call your attention in particular to this passage. As I noted in my Sunday column, we always have to deal with supporters of SPDs acting like we’re after them personally when we criticized the continued existence of these anachronistic little governments. One of their favorite defenses is to cite the fine work they do providing needed services — as though the same services couldn’t be provided under more sensible governing arrangements. And yet, from the very start, I had anticipated and moved past such objections on their part:

Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.

There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.

The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.

That ran in our paper on Oct. 10, 1991.

Come to think of it, I’ll just make this easy for you and reproduce the whole "thread" for that day here, in case you’re at all interested:

THE STATE
HOW MANY GOVERNMENTS DO WE NEED?
Published on: 10/20/1991
Section: IMPACT
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1D
By Brad Warthen
Memo: POWER FAILURE: The Government That Answers to No One Thirteenth in a series

Do we really need this much government?
Apart from the mess at the state level — such as an executive branch split into 133 completely independent entities — South Carolina has 46 counties, 271 towns and 91 school districts.
And about 500 special-purpose districts.
Maybe we do need this much government. But do we need this many governments, separate and frequently competing?
Now before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: There are no bad guys here. Or rather, there might be a few bad guys here and there, but they’re not the problem.
There’s nothing sinister about special-purpose districts per se. They were all established with good intentions. They were set up to provide essential services to people who otherwise would have had to do without. Generally, they continue to perform those services.
The problem is that many — although not all — of them have outlived their usefulness, and their very existence means that government on the local level is more fragmented and less accountable than necessary.
These districts are part of the legacy of the Legislative State, and point to some key characteristics of that odd system:

Legislative dominance. Until "Home Rule" was passed in 1975, only legislators had the power to solve local problems, such as providing services to unincorporated areas. Rather than empower local governments, legislators did what they always did — set up separate entities that drew their power from the lawmakers, not from voters.

Our rural past. Once, most people lived in the country. Now, most people live in or around towns. In many areas, more conventional elected local governments can provide the services SPDs provide — if allowed to. Special- purpose districts deny the urban present and affirm the rural past, as does legislative government itself.

That "personal" touch. Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.

The bottom line is that, on the local level as well as on the state, policymaking and service delivery are fragmented, and we’re paying for more administration than we need. No one is in charge.
Only the Legislature can solve this problem. It can start by setting up a procedure for dissolving SPDs, when and where warranted.
Then, if it can stop listening to the interests who profit from fragmentation, it can do what voters said 19 years they wanted it to do — allow local government to be consolidated and simplified.
According to the main lobbyist for the SPDs, "It appears that proponents of consolidation just want power." He’s right; they do. And so do the opponents.
And so do the people, who have waited for it long enough.
All content © THE STATE and may not be republished without permission.
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Oh, one thing that has changed, slightly. The Legislature did, after this series, finally pass enabling legislation to allow for consolidation of governments. Not that we’ve seen that happen much since.

And we still have more than 500 SPDs. And still, no one knows the exact number.

Forget business. In S.C., it’s always personal

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
“Forget about business; it’s personal.”
— what Michael Corleone would have said in “The Godfather,” had he been a South Carolinian

EVERY WORD of the following paragraph, which I wrote in 1991 about our state government, remains true today:
Government by personal political connection is a hallmark of the Legislative State, and it finds expression here. Individual legislators protect and support special-purpose districts, and those interested in preserving the districts support the legislators.
Special purpose districts are difficult to talk about to anyone who is not personally involved with them. A quick primer:
Until 1975, county councils did not exist in South Carolina. State legislators ran everything; lawmakers from a given county made all the local decisions that in most other parts of the country would be made by local government. They provided local services such as recreation, sewerage and fire protection with tiny, ad hoc mini-governments called “special purpose districts.” The districts generally did not follow county lines; often there were several for the same purpose within a county.
Even after county councils were formed in the ’70s, lawmakers refused to do away with SPDs, leading in many cases to conflict and duplication, and to confused lines of responsibility (confusing to the average voter, that is; insiders knew how things worked). There are more than 500 SPDs in the state today. No one knows the exact number, not even the S.C. Association of Special Purpose Districts.
The continued existence of these extra little governments, which derive their power from the Legislature, is one of the ways that state lawmakers keep county government weak and ineffective.
If SPDs ceased to exist today (not likely, by the way), some would and should quickly be reconstituted because they address purposes that go beyond the reach of a single county — such as the body that governs the Columbia airport, or Riverbanks Zoo. But most need to be eliminated, and their duties absorbed by elected city and county governments.
Whenever we on this editorial board say this, folks who work for or derive some measure of power from SPDs get very upset with us. They take it very personally. But for us, it’s not personal; it’s strictly business — the business of good government.
In America, we like to say that we have a government of laws and not of men (or of women, either, if you want to be pedantic about it). But our small state’s Byzantine governing arrangements militate in the opposite direction.
I was reminded of this when the head of the state association of SPDs, Mike Hancock, came to visit us last week. His purpose was to let us know that the folks who run SPDs weren’t monsters; his goal was easily achievable because we’ve never thought anything of the kind — we just disagree with them. But while he knew he wasn’t a monster — in point of fact, he seems a very nice man — he apparently wasn’t so sure about us. He admitted to being uneasy, apparently because he did not have a personal relationship with us. To address that, he had brought along his attorney, Jay Bender, who just happens to be this newspaper’s longtime attorney. Personal.
Mr. Hancock did try to establish something of a bond at the start of our conversation, reminding us that several years back when my colleague Cindi Scoppe and I spoke to the SPD association, he moderated, and did his best to prevent us from being ridden on a rail. I had not remembered his being there. The only person I clearly remember by name from that confab was a lady who asked us to do that gig — an old and dear friend of my longtime friend and colleague Lee Bandy. Personal.
At one point in the conversation, we were talking about the fact that under current law, it’s impossible to eliminate one SPD; you’d have to disband them all (which, once again, isn’t about to happen). Cindi noted that this will continue to be the case unless Chief Justice Jean Toal gets another ally on the Supreme Court who believes the state constitution allows the SPDs’ individual dissolution. Personal.
A moment later, Mr. Hancock was expressing uncertainty about his association’s legislative strategy (chief goal: protecting SPDs), noting that with Bill Cotty retiring, he didn’t even know who his own state representative was going to be, which put him at a disadvantage. Personal.
But in South Carolina, Mr. Hancock and his association truly have the advantage in their campaign to preserve SPDs.
It’s like with the adjutant general. Every other state in the union holds to the principle that military officers should be apolitical. But in South Carolina, we elect the head of our National Guard. That is unlikely to change because lawmakers defer to the preferences of Guard members, and Guard members generally tend to be closely tied to their current commanding officer (which is how it works in banana republics; the U.S. military avoids this by transferring officers frequently), who is always totally invested in the system “that brung him” — popular election. Personal.
Similarly, with more than 500 SPDs, there are thousands of people personally invested in their continued existence. This makes for a huge constituency for the status quo. There are, after all, only 46 counties.
Mr. Hancock has nothing to worry about, no matter what we busybodies on the editorial page may say about SPDs. He seems to be a very nice guy, and he’s allied with a lot of other nice folks. And over at our State House, it’s always personal.

Private clubs in Columbia TODAY

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Remember that I told you last week that Clif LeBlanc was going to have a follow-up story on the Cap City Club anniversary, a piece that would tell us to what extent local private clubs have become less "exclusive" in the bad old sense over the past 20 years?

Well, he did, and I meant to ask y’all for your thoughts on it. Here’s a link to his story. Short version — most clubs are more open. At least one still has no black members.

If you go read Clif’s piece, and you’re so inclined, please come back here to discuss it.

Name that test (nice words only, now…)

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Ohboyohboyohboy, but that Jim Rex is a glutton for punishment. The day after he and Jim Foster came to see us, I got this release from Jim (Foster, that is):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

South Carolinians to select name of state’s new testing system; deadline to vote is Labor Day

EDITOR’S NOTE – The direct link to the online ballot is
http://ed.sc.gov/tools/NameThatTest/

COLUMBIA – State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex announced today that South Carolinians will name the state’s new standardized testing system, which will replace PACT tests that have been administered statewide since 1999.

Voters can visit the South Carolina Department of Education’s web site and cast their ballots on line. The deadline to vote is Labor Day, Sept. 1, at 5 p.m., and Rex will announce the winning name on Wednesday, Sept. 3.

I replied to Jim (Foster, that is) with three words: Don’t tempt me!

Given the wild unpopularity of this test, offering the public the chance to name it seemed to me like what Huck Finn said about telling the truth:

… it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.

But then I followed the link, and saw that Jim (Rex) wasn’t taking near the chance that I thought. It’s multiple choice, not essay. The public won’t get to express itself fully with this "choice," to say the least.

We wuz robbed! Pass me the potato chips…

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Can’t South Carolina be first at anything? Now I see that we’re only fifth in the country when it comes to obesity,something I could have sworn we could do better than anybody:

Washington, D.C. August 19, 2008 – South Carolina was named the 5th most obese state in America according to the fifth annual F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2008 report from the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The state’s adult obesity rate is 29.2 percent, an increase for the third year in a row.
Nationally, adult obesity rates rose in 37 states in the past year. Rates rose for a second consecutive year in 24 states and for a third consecutive year in 19 states. No state saw a decrease. Though many promising policies have emerged to promote physical activity and good nutrition in communities, the report concludes that they are not being adopted or implemented at levels needed to turn around this health crisis….

Now I suppose we could get all petulant about this and demand a recount, but that would show a poor attitude. There’s nothing to do but to pass the potato chips and try harder…

OK, yes, I know — this is a deadly serious manner. It’s just that we hear so much bad news, and we seem to do so little to make things better, even when we know better, that one lapses into irony out of sheer frustration, to keep from going mad. Or from going madder, anyway.

Jim Rex on public school choice

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Obviously, this was not a good day to leave my camera at home. First the interesting James Smith speech, then Jim Rex visited us to report on his first year in office.

He talked for some length about his initiatives pushing public school choice. He had a lot to say about it, some of which I captured on my phone above (sorry again about the quality).

I haven’t really had time to go through all my notes yet from this meeting. When I do, maybe I’ll find the beginnings of a column; I don’t know. But in the meantime, I’ll share his response to my expressing one of my big reservations about school "choice," whether it’s public or private.

Specifically, I worry that there’s no way to administer choice so that everybody has access to it (which is why I’m always preaching that we need to improve ALL the schools). In a state where the Legislature won’t even come up with enough money to pay for the gasoline for buses to go where they go NOW, how are kids who don’t have middle-class Moms with a minivan to run them to a program 20 miles away supposed to avail themselves of these opportunities.

Rex had a fairly decent reply to that. He said that if you start a good program — say, single-gender programs — in a few schools, parents across the state will demand the same opportunities, and soon you’ll see it in every corner of the state. In the case of single-gender, the program started in a handful of schools, and this year is in 250. Of course, single-gender is a low-cost kind of "choice" to offer. It’s a little harder to ramp up such programs as Montessori.

But he’s committed to this course.

Again, sorry about the video quality. You know where my usual camera (which by the way is my own personal camera, not the newspaper’s) was? I’d left it at home where I’d taken some pictures of my twin grandbabies, who are — no offense intended here — WAY more photogenic than Jim Rex and James Smith. For proof, see below. (And that’s just ONE of them. I could have shown both, but I didn’t think y’all could stand that much cute.)

Tiptoes

Capt. Smith speaks to Rotary

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Capt. (Rep.) James Smith spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club about his experiences in Afghanistan. Some highlights:

Before the speech, the club recognized my colleague Chuck Crumbo for the job he did reporting, in country, on the exploits of the 218th Brigade. Chuck accepted the well-deserved honor with typical modesty.
Capt. Smith told the story again of how he, at age 37, bucked the system by insisting that he be allowed to quit the JAG Corps and join the infantry — after being inspired by a visit to Ground Zero in NYC. The system bucked back, and in fact finally told him that he would have to resign his commission and start over as an enlisted man in basic training, keeping up with the 18-year-olds. Obviously, they expected him to say, "Never Mind." But he accepted the challenge, went through basic, worked his way back up to captain, and ended up leading a team that fought the Taliban alongside Afghan national police forces. (The poor-quality video below, from my phone, is the part when he was telling the story of going to Basic again.)
Yes, he did say the phrase, "If I run for governor." Interestingly, the subject was brought up by arch-Republican Rusty DePass. Rusty’s son served with Capt. Smith in Afghanistan, and he has warned his Dad that if the captain runs, he’s going to support him.
Also in the audience was Joe Wilson, and this provided another example of how military service bridges partisan gaps. (It’s a pet theory of mine that the partisan bitterness of this generation results from politics now being dominated by the post-draft — and especially post WWII — generation, and they lack that shared experience to teach them that we’re all Americans first, not Democrats or Republicans.) Anyway, Rep. Smith made a point of mentioning that Joe was his C.O. back in his JAG days.
As in his e-mailed reports you read on this blog, James exhibited his characteristic optimism about the future of Afghanistan, based on his experience with the children of the country. Whenever they’d roll into a village, he’d send his second-in-command to talk to the village elder, then go question a 10- or 11-year-old himself. The elder, trying to walk a tightrope between the Coalition and the Taliban, would blow smoke, such as "We last saw about a dozen Taliban a couple of weeks ago." The kid would give the straight intel, along the lines of "There were two dozen, and they rolled out of here the moment they saw you coming, just minutes ago."

It was a compelling presentation (particularly the part about how his team tracked down a Taliban leader who had been terrorizing the region), and I wish I’d had the resources at hand to have gotten the whole thing on video — good-quality video. Sorry about the lousy quality of this below…

Tom Davis on the Jasper Port deal

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Tom Davis dropped by to see Cindi and me Tuesday morning — his first visit since the one I wrote about back here and here — and we talked about a number of things.

Tom, you will recall, is the governor’s former chief of staff who is now the GOP nominee for what is for the moment Catherine Ceips’ Senate seat.

Anyway, one thing Tom talked about was progress that’s been made on the Jasper Port deal. Tom continues to believe that his ex-boss, Mark Sanford, doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the deal with Georgia along to this point (even though my former colleague Mike Fitts did a column awhile back pretty much covering Tom’s talking points on the subject).

But Tom expects that years from now, when some of the more southern Corridor of Shame counties have benefited greatly from the economic development the projected port will bring, Mr. Sanford will get the credit, and deservedly so. This, he says, will be Mark Sanford’s legacy.

It will also be, if it turns out as hoped, Tom Davis’ legacy. He was, near as I could tell, the most ardent advocate for the Jasper Port in the Sanford administration, and the one who worked hardest to make it happen. I think you can probably see some of Tom’s passion about the subject in the above video.

What? Only $25 more per month for smokers?

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Yes, of course smokers covered by the state health plan should pay more, because they cost more.

But $25 a month? What is that, a joke? That’s not enough either to cover the added cost of their filthy habit, or to encourage them to quit. It’s desultory. As the story said:

State health insurance system officials said an extra $25 a month would
not cover the full cost of smoking-related expenses. It is more
effective, they said, to encourage smokers to quit.

And $25 a month won’t do that.

Who even notices a $25-a-month increase in insurance premiums, the way they go up these days? That’s less than the increase most of us deal with in most years, without engaging in stupid and harmful behavior.

Two cheers to the governor for supporting the increase, pathetic though it is.

footnote: I have a shorter answer to the question posed in the sidebar with this morning’s story, QUESTION: I’m a state employee. How will the state know I’m a smoker? Answer: By the smell.

Good call by DHEC on Lexington Medical’s revote request

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The DHEC board was right to grant Lexington Medical’s request for a revote on a previous action by an advisory committee before proceeding with the much, much larger issue of whether LexMed’s umpty-umpth request for reconsideration of its quest for an open-heart center:

Do it over.

Those are the marching orders passed down
Thursday by the DHEC board on a committee vote cast six weeks ago that
seemed to end Lexington Medical Center’s four-year pursuit of a new
open-heart surgery unit.

The decision, reached after complaints
lodged by Lexington Medical over how the State Health Planning
Committee conducted its June vote, breathes temporary new life into the
issue.

Of course, in the end, DHEC must stick to its guns and say no yet again on the open-heart center, as we said again editorially on Thursday. DHEC shouldn’t have approved the Palmetto Richland expansion request several years ago; it must not compound the problem by approving a third program. That would quite likely take us in short order from the enviable position of having had one truly exceptional, excellent open-heart center (Providence) to having three mediocre ones. As we’ve explained time and again, you’ve got to do a lot of these to be good at it, and there won’t be enough bypasses done in the Midlands to keep three separate operations at the top level of excellence and competence (and remember, it’s less about the surgeons that it’s about the impossibility of keeping that many full surgical teams at razor sharpness).

But that final decision must be made against a backdrop in which nobody has an excuse to say that it was dealt with unfairly at any step of the way.

So by all means, have the advisory committee redo its vote. And then, deny the CON request, again.

What the Capital City Club did for Columbia (column version)

My remarks to the Capital City Club

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You may have read Clif LeBlanc’s story today about the Capital City Club’s 20th anniversary, and why that’s of some importance to our community.

As, in Hunter Howard’s words, "the unofficial chairman of the ‘Breakfast Club’" — and yes, I eat there most mornings, as Doug can attest from having been my guest — I was asked to comment on what I thought the club meant to the community. That meant showing up at 7:30 this morning (WAY before my usual time) to address the rather large crowd gathered there to mark the anniversary.

Some folks asked for copies of my remarks. In keeping with my standard policy of not wanting to spend time writing anything that doesn’t get shared with readers, I reproduce the speech below:

So much has been said here this morning, but I suppose as usual it falls to the newspaper guy to bring the bad news:
The Capital City Club is an exclusive club. By the very nature of being a club, of being a private entity, it is exclusive.
There are those who are members, and those who are not. And even if you are a member, there are expectations that you meet certain standards. Just try being seated in the dining room without a jacket. And folks, in a country in which a recent poll found that only 6 percent of American men still wear a tie to work every day, a standard like that is pretty exclusive.
But it is the glory of the Capital City Club that it changed, and changed for the better, what the word “exclusive” meant in Columbia, South Carolina.
Once upon a time — and not all that long ago — “exclusive” had another meaning. It was a meaning that in one sense was fuzzy and ill-defined, but the net effect of that meaning was stark and obvious. And it was a meaning by no means confined to Columbia or to South Carolina.
Its effect was that private clubs — the kinds of private clubs that were the gathering places for people who ran things, or decided how things would be run — did not have black members, or Jewish members, or women as members. Not that the clubs necessarily had any rules defining that sense of “exclusive.” It was as often as not what was called a “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” which was the title of a 1947 film about the phenomenon.
Forty years after that film was released, good people in Columbia were distressed to look around them and see the effects of such agreements in our community. A black executive originally from Orangeburg, who thought he was going home when his company sent him here, was unable to do his job because he could not get into a private club. It was noticed that for the first time in recent history, a commanding general at Fort Jackson was not extended a courtesy membership by a local club. He was Jewish. More and more such facts were reported in the pages of The Columbia Record in the mid-’80s. The clips I’ve read were written by my colleague Clif LeBlanc, who is here this morning.
These stories mostly ran before I came home to South Carolina to work at The State in April 1987, so I can claim no credit for them.
As editorial page editor of The State, I can tell you that the unstated policies of private clubs are an unusual, and even uncomfortable, topic for journalists. The reason we write about government and politics so much is that we feel completely entitled and empowered to hold them fully accountable, and we have no problem saying they must do this, or they must not do that. But whether a private club votes to admit a particular private citizen or not is something else altogether. You can’t pass a state law or a local ordinance to address the problem, not in a country that enshrines freedom of association in its constitution. (I hope the attorneys present will back me up on that — we seem to have several in attendance.)
But the Record did everything a newspaper could and should do — it shone a light on the problem. What happened next depended upon the private consciences of individuals.
A group of such individuals decided that the only thing to do was to change the dynamic, by starting a new kind of club. One of those individuals was my predecessor at the newspaper, Tom McLean, who would be known to that new club as member number 13.
I spoke to Tom just yesterday about what happened 20 years ago, and Tom was still Tom. He didn’t want anybody setting him up as some sort of plaster saint, or hero, or revolutionary.
He wanted to make sure that he was not portrayed as some sort of crusader against the existing private clubs at the time. As he noted, he and other founders were members of some of those clubs.
What he and the other founders did oppose — and he said this more than once, and I notice the statement made its way into Clif’s story this morning — was, and I quote:
“Arbitrary, categorical exclusion based on race, religion or gender.”
Yes, there was a moral imperative involved, but it was also common sense. It was also a matter of that hallowed value of the private club, personal preference. Tom, and Carl Brazell, and Shelvie Belser, and I.S. Leevy Johnson and Don Fowler and the rest all chose to be members of a club that did not practice the kind of arbitrary exclusion that they abhorred.
And here’s the wonderful thing about that, what Tom wanted to make sure I understood was the main thing: By making this private, personal decision for themselves, they changed their community.
Once one club became inclusive, other clubs quickly followed suit. Something that no law could have accomplished happened with amazing rapidity.
The measure of the Capital City Club’s success is that the thing that initially set it apart became the norm.
I’m like Tom in that I’m not here to say anything against those other clubs today, now that they are also inclusive. But the reason I was asked to speak to you this morning was to share with you the reason that if I’m going to belong to a club, this one will always be my choice:
It’s the club that exists for the purpose of being inclusive, the club that changed our community for the better.
I’m proud to be a member of the first club to look like South Carolina — like an unusually well dressed South Carolina, but South Carolina nevertheless.

What a written speech doesn’t communicate is my efforts to punch up the recurring joke about the club’s dress code, such as my lame attempt to do the David Letterman shtick where he pulls on his lapels to make his tie wiggle. I did that when citing the Gallup poll. Then, on that last line, I looked around at the assembled audience, which was VERY well dressed. It was a way of saying, "Don’t y’all look nice," while at the same time gently teasing them about it.

After all, those of you who are in the 94 percent who have put the anachronistic practice of wearing neckties behind you probably think the whole thing is pretty silly — a bunch of suits getting together to congratulate themselves on how broadminded they are.

But you’re wrong to think that, because of the following: Such clubs exist. They existed in the past, and they will exist in the future. People who exercise political and economic power in the community gather there to make decisions. They have in the past, and will in the future. Until the Capital City Club came into being, blacks and Jews and women were not admitted to those gatherings. Now, thanks to what my former boss Tom and the others did, they are — at Cap City, and at other such clubs.

And that’s important.

… and what about Aquaman?