How about a round of applause for the Chamber of Deputies of SC.
Not only did the House vote on Tuesday to approve the first serious effort to reform Santee Cooper – almost four years after the nuclear construction project VC Summer went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers with a $ 4 billion bill. It also gave the governor the power to dismiss board members for “poor performance”.
This is the first indication that lawmakers are willing to give up a 2005 law that was passed because the legislature was furious with then Gov. Mark Sanford. It is also the first indication that they recognize that if Santee Cooper’s board members had known that the governor could fire them, they would almost certainly have warned their boss when things started to get worse at VC Summer – and the governor could have warned the public, or at least the Public Service Commission, so that it could have stopped stamping SCE & G’s rate hikes until the concessionaire turned off the plug or started exercising some supervision to get the project out of control back to the tracks.
Whether or not it goes with the part of H.3194 that authorizes a new round of bids on the state concessionaire – and we don’t think it would do very well, but it probably won’t hurt either – we hope the Senate will approve the project and improve it .
Although the “poor performance” language is an encouraging first step, it is not a perfect solution.
“Poor performance”, which is not defined in H.3194, can be a good way to describe a supermarket cashier who makes customers wait in line while she reads your texts, or even a CEO who does not meet revenue targets . It is a strange, and perhaps ineffective, way of addressing what the governor needed to be able to do to prevent our nuclear fiasco: removing board members who make terrible decisions, especially while hiding information from the public, regulators and the governor, who would have demonstrated the how bad the situation was.
And when the House added “poor performance” language to the bill, it left the following sentence of the law intact, which says the governor “should not ask a director of the South Carolina Public Service Authority to resign unless there is reason for removal, as established by this subsection, exists. “Yes, it really means that the governor would break the law if he called a board member and said,” I know I don’t have the legal authority to remove you, but I would like you to step down. “
Legislators also left the sentence intact after This one, who declares the removal of an absent board member for one of the strictly defined causes as “an irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy in law”. In other words, it gives board members reasons to sue the governor for removing them from the board.
What lawmakers need to do is remove the “no solicitation” language and the invitation to sue and return to pre-Sanford law, which said that Santee Cooper board members could be removed by the governor “at his discretion by an Executive Order. removing the officer. ”Simply that.
If that sounds like a little too much power for a governor, consider that most Southern Carolinians work in similar positions “at ease” – meaning that their bosses can fire them for any reason.
Or that the pre-2005 law was not special for Santee Cooper. It has applied (and still applies) to dozens of state councils and commissions whose members are appointed and can be dismissed by the governor.
Or that the governor had the power to fire Santee Cooper board members for more than two decades – and that previous governors used that power to dismiss Santee Cooper board members just because they wanted to, in one case removing a highly respected board chairman , without any negative effects for Santee Cooper.
Or consider that the reason the Legislature changed the law in 2005 was because Mr. Sanford replaced some members of the Santee Cooper board with new people who sold some land, stopped distributing treats for senators’ favorite causes, contributed $ Extra 13 million for the general fund state, and began to explore the sale of the utility. Yes, that last one was quite shocking at the time, but it was never clear whether the council had the authority to sell, and in any case, the legislature could easily have passed a law saying that the council could not exploit the sale of the utility, instead than castrating rulers.
In 2005, the law was just one more in a long list of examples of the Legislative’s refusal to recognize the governor as an equal partner in government. We have since learned that it was a $ 4 billion mistake. It’s time to fix this.
