Editorial: SC Legislature has five jobs in 2025. It's time for action.
Story Date: 1/13/2025

Editorial: SC Legislature has five jobs in 2025. It's time for action.
BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF
Jan 11, 2025 
 
The S.C. General Assembly convenes on Tuesday for a new session, and lawmakers will be tempted to spend a lot of time on a lot of things that aren't really important to our state. Here are the five things they most need to accomplish.

South Carolina has no more important duty than to ensure that all kids get a decent education, if not out of concern for their welfare then so they can become productive citizens rather than a drain on our state.

Some kids are easy to educate, some are difficult, and we have to educate them all. That starts with providing early childhood education to the children who need it — which we’re doing a better job of — and then ensuring throughout the school years that we provide the most talented teachers to those students who are the most difficult to teach. The Legislature provides more money for poor and special needs kids than better off kids, and yet the Charleston County School District made headlines this year by becoming the only district in the state to actually distribute some of its money based on that same principle. That has to change.

Along with requiring districts to spend their extra state resources where they’re intended, lawmakers need to empower districts and principals to attract the best teachers and improve or get rid of the worst ones.

To do all this, we have to provide not just enough money but also better working conditions that will convince good teachers to teach in our schools. That requires an end to the attacks on teachers, and not further demoralizing them by creating separate and unequal taxpayer-funded school systems.

Legislators are determined to throw our tax dollars at private schools. That’s a bad decision, but the damage can be mitigated by holding private schools that accept our tax money to the same standards as our public schools. Lawmakers also need to rein in a charter-school program that allows financially struggling private colleges to determine how much of our tax money is diverted to charter schools they recruit and profit from.

The Legislature has been doing a good job of raising teacher salaries, and it’s paying off, but even with improvement we still have too many classrooms without teachers. By definition, that means we’re not paying enough to convince enough teachers to take the jobs we want them to take.

The same is true in our juvenile jails, where a recent audit showed we can’t keep employees on the job for more than about three months, we can’t get doctors to treat sick kids because we haven’t paid their bills, and even if we could we can’t get the kids to medical appointments because of those staffing problems. If we’re going to lock up kids — and some do need to be locked up, although not as many as we do — we have a moral and likely constitutional obligation to spend the money it takes to keep them safe. Ditto adult prisons.

And although we’ve made some progress around the edges, we have similar problems throughout state government. Yet legislative leaders are promising even more and bigger tax cuts this year.

Let’s not even talk about the fact that South Carolina is not a high-tax state. Let’s talk about this: Once you commit to providing services, you have to pay for them; if you aren’t willing to pay for them, you have to scale back what you’ve committed to doing: Decriminalize a bunch of crimes and stop locking people up. Tell businesses and individuals they have to settle their own disputes because we can’t afford to run both civil and criminal court systems. Stop providing funding for colleges and college scholarships. Stop providing child protective services.

No, these are not good ideas, and lawmakers have demonstrated for decades now that they have no intention of taking even far less radical steps. And that brings us to our point: You don’t hand out more tax cuts until you provide enough money to pay for the government you’ve committed to providing. Period.

Accounting Error
Back-to-back multibillion-dollar financial blunders have underscored the need to stop electing the state treasurer and comptroller general. Here, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, left, administers the oath of office in 2023 to state officers, from left, Secretary of State Mark Hammond, Treasurer Curtis Loftis, Attorney General Alan Wilson, Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom, Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver and Agriculture Secretary Hugh Weathers.

South Carolina’s Senate was long considered the most conservative in the nation, because it was designed to ensure that nothing changed. Likewise, the government created primarily by that Senate was designed to make sure no one — and certainly not the governor — could really be in charge. Lawmakers have done a great deal to make government more workable over the past 30 years, but there’s still a lot more to do. Two areas leap to mind.

Five separate state agencies provide various health services, largely to the same people, yet they communicate badly and sometimes work at odds. That means South Carolina residents get lower quality of care and taxpayers spend more to provide it than in most states. The governor and most legislators agreed last year to merge those agencies and put them directly under the governor’s control, but a handful of disruptors manipulated legislative rules to kill the legislation at the last minute. The objections were based on deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. This isn’t rocket science, it shouldn’t be controversial, and merging those agencies can and should be done quickly.

Meantime, we’ve discovered multibillion-dollar financial blunders two years in a row, and the Legislature has failed to take the obvious steps to greatly improve the odds that we have a competent comptroller general and treasurer and ensure that they can be fired if they aren’t competent and that our state auditor can serve as an early warning system of incompetence: Change the treasurer and comptroller from elected to appointed offices (or eliminate the comptroller’s office altogether) and empower the governor to fire them for cause. The governor should also be able to hire and fire the auditor, so he doesn’t have to worry about angering the treasurer and comptroller.

Similar problems at the local level could be addressed by making county courthouse officials appointed rather than elected. And we are increasingly seeing the need for the state to provide auditing and technical assistance to both elected and appointed local officials.

Make government ethical
The Legislature needs to change the way magistrates are selected, and improve other ethics provisions in state law.

It would be easy to make government more efficient. We’d eliminate competitive bidding and conflict-of-interest laws and other protections that take entire agencies to enforce and that get in the way of making quick decisions. We’d eliminate campaign finance requirements — and probably even elections. We’d make government more like a business, with a CEO who runs things and a board to rubber-stamp his decisions.

But we want our government to represent the voters, to be fair and to make decisions based on the rule of law rather than what benefits the people making those decisions, and all of that makes government less efficient. Worse, if you don’t focus constantly on ensuring that officials look out for the public’s interests instead of their own, you’ll get both self-dealing and the inefficiency that’s supposed to guard against it.

This past year, the Legislature took some tentative steps to free our judges from real or perceived pressure from the lawyer-legislators who practice before them, and our new chief justice took additional steps. But plenty remain. At the top of the list for creating government that serves the public instead of itself is changing how magistrates are selected. Today the governor appoints whomever the local state senator tells him to. If the nominees are competent, that’s great; if not, too bad. And senators are able to transform them into at-will employees simply by not reappointing or removing them when their four-year terms end.

The House and some senators want to prohibit keeping magistrates in holdover purgatory and require nominees to be vetted publicly. Those changes are long overdue. And we still need to remove lawyer-legislators — and preferably all legislators, and legislative appointees — from the screening commission that vets higher-court judges.

We also need a stronger Freedom of Information Act with less room for government to act in secret and serious penalties if it does. We need clearer and stronger reporting requirements for campaign spending and officials who have control over public funds. We need tougher punishments and more empowered ethics enforcers to make officials less willing to risk getting caught serving themselves instead of us. We need a lot of other ethics reforms, but those would be a good start.

Protecting our environment always demands legislative attention, and this year is no different. But one aspect rises above all others: meeting our state’s growing energy needs in a way that doesn’t needlessly harm our environment or consumers.

There’s no question that South Carolina’s explosive population growth means we’ll need more electricity, and lawmakers need to push our state toward more renewables and energy efficiency to help meet that need.

There’s also no question — because the chiefs of our electric utilities have told us so — that our needs would be slow and manageable if not for the voracious appetite of the new computer data centers that are rushing in. And there's no universe in which it's just to force consumers to pay for the electricity needs of the AI data centers that — contrary to what you’d think if you listen only to our legislators — a lot of people aren’t asking for and don’t want.

We can’t say for sure that those data centers wouldn’t come rushing in without state and local tax incentives and special low rates for their electricity, but we expect they wouldn’t. 

Before legislators take the first step to reduce the environmental and consumer protections they enacted after the criminal scheme we’re still paying for at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant, they need to prohibit state and local officials and utilities from providing incentives to lure data centers. If those centers want to come here, we can't very well stop them. But we can let them do it on their own dime — without subsidies from taxpayers or utility customers, who have no choice about where to purchase our electricity.