COLOMBIA – A feud broke out between four Republican lawmakers and the SC Department of Veterans Affairs over a proposal to place county-level veteran service offices under state control.
State representatives Richard Yow, William Bailey, Kevin Hardee and Sandy McGarry sent a letter to the department this month demanding to know what projects the team “encouraged our members to vote for, not vote for or take any other type of legislative action on.”
The request invoked the state law on freedom of information.
All four lawmakers oppose a bill that would transform existing county-level offices to assist veterans in regional bodies overseen by the state government.
Wow, R-Chesterfield, is an Air Force veteran who led the letter. He does not want county officials and lawmakers to lose their decision-making power over locally funded offices.
“There is a difference in supervision and the ability to nominate and bring in someone who does not understand that each county is unique in South Carolina,” said Yow.
South Carolina lawmakers created an independent state department of veterans last year. It is designed to defend the needs of veterans and protect the interests of the military. The agency is led by Secretary William Grimsley, a retired Army general with more than three decades of military experience.
Grimsley’s first major policy proposal was to restructure the way veterans get help.
By state law, each of the state’s 46 counties must have a dedicated office and staff to assist veterans. They provide assistance in applying for federal and state benefits, while the director of each office is appointed by a state county delegation.
Each branch is financed at the local level. They do not provide direct medical care and are separated from the Federal Department of Veterans Affairs.
But because of the imbalance in the state’s population, some veterans in areas with smaller governments are not receiving the same level of service as larger counties, such as Charleston, Berkeley and Greenville, with a densely populated population.
Grimsley proposed what he called “an incremental plan to shift responsibility for the services of individual county veterans to the State Department,” said a statement sent to lawmakers last week.
Critics say such consolidation will reduce access for some and give local governments less control.
In an effort to thwart the proposal, the small group of representatives targeted the agency’s director of government affairs, who they said was not registered with the state’s Ethics Committee as a lobbyist before answering questions and educating lawmakers about the project. .
Candace Terry, the agency’s director of government affairs, told the Post and Courier that she was told she didn’t need to register as a lobbyist when she accepted the job.
Several days after the letter, she decided to register as a “measure of goodwill”.
Grimsley said he will provide information to lawmakers in the name of transparency and what helps the state’s 400,000 veterans.
Catch up Thomas Novelly at 843-937-5713. Follow him @TomNovelly on Twitter.