Another scandal involving obscure small government agencies, another promise by lawmakers to clear the symptom.
This time is the story of corruption that reporters working at The Post and the Courier’s Uncovered team discovered in a suburb of Greenville, where a handful of registered candidates managed to get elected, with less than three dozen votes each, to the committee that oversees the Clear Spring Fire and Rescue department for $ 2.1 million per year. They went on to waste on taxpayer-financed perks, make extravagant purchases for the department, get a commissioner’s husband to be promoted beyond his level of competence, get other people fired when asking questions, and bring down the firefighters’ morale .
In response, state legislators promised to inject some responsibility and scrutiny into special-purpose districts, perhaps requiring more proactive disclosure, perhaps making changes designed to improve the visibility of the elections.
Just as lawmakers pledged last month to require some special-purpose district commissioners to meet the same ethical reporting requirements as other state and local officials, after our reporters revealed overspending by part-time council members who oversee five gas utilities. public.
Just as they will undoubtedly promise to make reforms that address any discrete abuses that our reporters reveal in the next chapter of their year-long investigation into the hundreds of small special governments that normally slipped under the radar, even when South Carolina had more. newspapers and bigger than us. have today.
Like every little scandal in these small special governments, it has generated calls for change and promises of reform. For decades.
Lawmakers can indeed follow some of the reforms they have promised for these latest scandals. And they need it, because changes can be made immediately to stop the bleeding.
But the reforms inevitably target specific abuse this time – what the generals call waging the last war. So, over time, the shady little officials who run the shady little governments will find another way to abuse the public’s trust – just as the employees of our special little governments did whenever they were caught with their hands in the cookie tin.
Of course, this happens with any kind of government or business reform. The difference is that these are not necessary small governments. They are an extra layer of government, the cumulative effect of which is to increase the overall cost of government and increase opportunities to abuse taxpayers and therefore increase opportunities to undermine public confidence in government, giving us more targets on which to target. we can say: typical government abuse.
Oh, many of these special little anachronisms provide the necessary services. Most were created when there were no municipal governments to meet a need; the resident state senator brought together some supporters to provide a specific service – electricity, fire, water, recreation – in a specific area and then wrote a law to keep the program going on forever. But the legislature authorized county governments to provide services almost 50 years ago; he simply never absorbed his little special governments into them.
Or, in cases like Clear Spring Fire and Rescue, the county government actually created small special governments, rather than creating a countywide fire agency that could operate more efficiently and with county supervision.
The good thing about locally created special governments is that a county council does not need the blessing of the legislature to reform or even abolish. That is why the Greenville County Council was able to replace the Clear Spring elections – which clearly did not interest voters – with the appointment of the council.
It is the least that counties across the state should do with all the small special governments that they have created, because voters elect city councils to provide services across the county – and reasonably expect that to include all the services that some have distributed to committees. independent.
Unfortunately, counties and cities have no control over most special-purpose districts, and state law makes it extremely difficult to dismember them, unless they want to. In any case, the last time the Supreme Court of SC spoke on this issue, it said that the Legislature could not eliminate a single special-purpose district – it would have to abolish all or none of them.
Thanks to the work of Tony Bartelme, Joseph Cranney, Glenn Smith and Avery G. Wilks, it is becoming clear – and will no doubt continue to become even clearer over the months – that the right choice is to abolish them all.