During my time as Gov. Mark Sanford’s chief of staff, I got an up-close look at how South Carolina’s state government “works.”
One of many disheartening eye-openers for me was watching as state lawmakers who campaigned on cutting taxes and eliminating wasteful spending turned around once they were elected and supported dozens of wasteful projects costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Government spending in South Carolina skyrocketed by more than 40% over the previous four years, a rate twice as fast as the national average and more than twice as fast as our taxpayers’ ability to pay for it. But despite warnings from the governor and many other political leaders, nothing was set aside for a “rainy day.” During my campaign for the S.C. Senate, the people of Beaufort County made it clear that they expect lawmakers to spend tax dollars on core government functions – like adequately funding law enforcement, upgrading our infrastructure and providing an excellent system of education for our children. And should there be any money left over, they want it put into a “rainy day” fund or, better still, returned to them. But South Carolina lawmakers failed them on both fronts. Not only did they choose to spend everything we sent them, they also failed to prioritize their spending in accordance with real needs. And now the price of those two failures is beginning to be felt. The budget lawmakers passed just last June has now been slashed by almost $1 billion – an unprecedented cut of over 14 percent. Worse still, two rounds of across-the-board cuts have led to layoffs and furloughs of law enforcement officers and teachers and to continued neglect of our crumbling roads and bridges. The people are furious – and they should be. They know they have spent billions of dollars to fund what they believed were necessary services, and they cannot understand why teachers are being cut and their roads are still in such bad shape. They thought they elected fiscally responsible legislators, and they don’t know how they ended up with big government in the Statehouse. Today they want to hold those officials accountable for their actions. That is, after all, the way a democracy is supposed to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t in our state. According to the South Carolina Policy Council, during the last legislative session the S.C. Senate only recorded their votes on 1% of the bills it passed, and the S.C. House of Representatives record only 8%. And there is no record whatsoever of the scores of procedural votes made during budget construction in the legislature. Simply put, the public can’t hold their elected officials accountable for wildly irresponsible budgets because there is no way for the public to know how those officials voted. For that reason, my first action as Beaufort County’s new state senator was to co-sponsor a bill, the “Spending Accountability Act,” to require legislators to vote on the record when they pass a law, and also to vote on every section of the budget. The public deserves for their lawmakers to account for every agency budget and every program in those budgets, and not just to vote on a monster bill that is hammered out by a few powerful legislators behind closed doors. You might think such a proposal would be relatively non-controversial, especially in a year in which citizens’ trust in their government institutions has hit an all-time low. But you would be wrong. In fact, some of the most powerful lawmakers in Columbia have publicly opposed the Spending Accountability Act on the grounds that it is “too expensive,” even though they had no problem protecting an $18.5 million legislative slush fund that paid for such trivial items as:
* Lexington County “Doo-Da” Festival
* Gaston, S.C. “Collard Festival”
* Anderson County “Great Southeast Balloon Fest”
* A thirty-minute TV documentary promoting Jazz to young viewers
* An Elvis impersonator for Ridgeville, S.C.
* A new “deep fryer” for Kingstree, S.C.
For the record, I have nothing against Elvis or fried food, but eliminating just a few of these wasteful expenditures would easily cover the cost of providing the public with a record of how their elected officials are voting. With economic realities such as they are, we simply cannot afford to waste even one dime of the taxpayers’ money. Opening up our voting for public inspection is the first step in ensuring that we don’t.
The author has lived in Beaufort since 1985 and currently represents Beaufort County in the S.C. Senate. He previously served as chief of staff to Gov. Mark Sanford and is a partner at the Beaufort law firm of Harvey and Battey.
Margaret Evans is the Editor of Lowcountry Weekly. She has been writing her regular column "Rants & Raves" for the better part of a decade, which is a lot of bloviating for someone who's not an expert. On anything.Read More >>
