Luke Rankin’s Santee Cooper Reform Project Heard Before His SC Judicial Subcommittee

It takes a special kind of credulity to trust the chairman of the South Carolina Senate judiciary committee Luke Rankin – especially when it comes to issues involving the state public service in the state of Palmetto, Santee Cooper.

After all, this guy was the legislative architect for NukeGate – the economic command coup that saw Santee Cooper and his private sector partner SCANA I bill taxpayers of billions of dollars on a pair of incomplete nuclear reactors, which have since been abandoned.

In addition to sponsoring legislation that led directly to the comrades’ capitalist disaster, Rankin – the most tax-liberal “Republican” in the entire SC General Assembly – was one of the legislators charged with overseeing the concessionaires responsible for the project.

Clearly, he failed on all fronts … but now he wants to be in charge of cleaning up the mess?

Yea …

Typical South Carolina … rewarding failure at every step.

In any case, Rankin’s so-called “reform” bill – S. 464 – does absolutely nothing to reform, restructure, rehabilitate or in any way shape or materially resolve the underlying issues with Santee Cooper.

Most prominent among these issues? The dishonest agency’s billion-dollar debt – which continues to increase (perhaps deliberately).

Santee Cooper said that he is able to resolve a large part of that debt with the transition to greener and more efficient sources of energy … but that myth went up in smoke.

Rankin’s project also nothing to deal with that company’s failed governance structure – keeping it firmly under state control and messing around the edges of its politically appointed board of directors.

Currently, board members appointed by Santee Cooper’s policy serve seven-year terms. The most recent version of Rankin’s bill would shorten these terms to six years – and limit members to serve two consecutive terms.

Yet, that’s a dozen years in office ...

In addition, it is not immediately clear whether this 12-year term limit would apply to sitting members of the board, whose seats could be isolated from this so-called “reform”.

Rankin’s project would also add a couple of new board seats for the mix to ostensibly create a “bigger tent” – including a statewide energy cooperative representative who currently serves as a glorified “middleman” in the sale of Santee Cooper’s power.

Raise a position that shouldn’t even exist, that is …

In fact, Rankin’s committee spent nearly an hour on Monday afternoon debating whether these two new board members should be ex officio (that is, non-voting) positions – and whether they should be allowed to sit at the same table as existing board members during the agency’s monthly meetings.

Once again … Is all this edge repair really the kind of fundamental and systemic change that South Carolina taxpayers and taxpayers expect in the wake of NukeGate?

Seriously, Santee Cooper has cost the state of South Carolina billions of dollars – for which its taxpayers are getting pennies in return.

Is this really all that lawmakers are going to do about it?

Worse, Rankin’s bill would extend the government’s health benefits to all Santee Cooper board members (benefits that these members received extrajudicially). In other words, Rankin legislation rewards Santee Cooper board members for appropriating previously a taxpayer-funded benefit that they were not entitled to receive.

Unbelievable, right?

Steal from the store … get store credit.

(Click to view)

(Via: Senado de SC)

So … why Rankin (above) doing its best to reward an agency that continues to challenge the legislature, accumulate debt and generally mismanage its obsolete and environmentally damaging infrastructure?

Well, as readers of this media are aware, Rankin is negotiating with one of the dealership’s board members – and is filling his campaign war chest with contributions from the president of Santee Cooper.

(Oh, and about that campaign war chest …)

Judging by the text of this legislation, it is clear that Rankin has absolutely no interest in fixing the mess he helped create during NukeGate. He does, however, have an interest in continuing to exercise governmental authority over this company – and in fact wants to expand government authority over its operations while adding a new taxpayer-financed benefit for its results-defying leaders.

All of this, again, is absolutely unbelievable, given the circumstances …

If we have said that once, we have said it a million times: South Carolinians simply cannot trust the same people who led this state to the NukeGate disaster to get us out of it. That is why the only “real” reform is to download this utility to the private sector immediately – something that this news outlet has argued that the state should do for the past thirteen years.

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-FITSNews

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