By Bill Davis, senior editor | Digging into this year’s legislative session was like sitting down to eat your favorite hoagie and noticing the cooks skimped on a few key ingredients.
The three biggest issues on this year’s legislative agenda – ethics, roads, and schools – were skimmed by lawmakers, but didn’t get the full treatment. And nothing was done to increase the state gas tax, other than expend a lot of hot air.
Heck, ethics reform is still in the kitchen. As of the end of the general legislative session Thursday, legislators still hadn’t completed promised ethics reforms, such as an independent review of ethics allegations and more income disclosure by candidates. Legislators will have to deal with it yet again when they return in two weeks for a special session when they also tackle gubernatorial vetoes.
More funding for roads was advertised in January to be the Big Kahuna burger on this year’s legislative menu, but what has emerged is more akin to a single slider than massive double-decker.
And funding for schools, while receiving a huge influx of cash over the last two sessions, was still more of an appetizer than an entrée.
Hit and miss
Yes, the legislature had some wins this year:
S.C. State. It “saved” S.C. State University, forgiving a state debt of $12 million. This maneuver, far from being just a symbolic sparing of the knife, should allow the ailing school to retain its accreditation, which means the state skirts bigger debts because without accreditation, federal grant money, the backbone of many students’ financial aids packages there, disappears.
Farm aid. Legislators agreed to pump $40 million into flood relief for farmers after last fall’s deluge, but the amount will fall far short of the amount of uninsured damage left in the wake of storms associated with the devastation from the Midlands to the Pee Dee.
Raises. Most state employees will receive a 3.25-percent raise, the first of any kind in three years and the largest in a decade, thanks in part to a $1.2 billion surplus this year.
Local funding. The Local Government Fund got an $10 million increase, but still fell almost $90 million short of what is required by state law.
For all of the legislature’s successes, it left a lot on the table when it came to major issues.
ETHICS: Reform is real, real close
State Sen. Wes Hayes (R-Rock Hill) is confident leaders in the House and Senate will come together on ethics reform when both chambers return June 15 for a handful of days. Hayes has chaired an ethics subcommittee for several years and has provided one of the biggest pushes toward reform.
“We are closer than we’ve ever been,” said Hayes Friday morning, cognizant that the House passed ethics reform for the past few years only to have it die in the Senate.
“The Senate has agreed to outside oversight; the disagreement is over when or how soon an allegation becomes public,” he said.
Hayes said the major sticking point in the ethics debate at this point is the House just having attached a change to its package that would require so-called “dark money” contributions to share donors’ names.
Hayes said the dark money issue is one that will take a full session to work out, and not just a shortened special session. “I support it, but a handful of senators [want to protect dark money contributions] and would likely filibuster,” irreparably damaging the effectiveness of the shortened session, he said.
Hayes stressed that if leaders from both chambers can set aside that issue, then ethics will pass.
ROADS: More work to be done
While the legislature passed a special roads funding bill, it still left a taste in many mouths that politicians kicked the can down the road, again. The bill, cooked up in the House, would set aside $200 million to be bonded out at a 20-to-1 rate through the State Infrastructure Bank.
That would result in $2.2 billion in new money for roads. But bonding, many feel, is really just borrowing and not a real solution.
And it sidesteps addressing the state’s gas tax. Now at 16.8 cents a gallon, it is one of the lowest in the region and nation, and hasn’t been adjusted for inflation, population or conditions since the late 1980s.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Larry Martin (R-Pickens) said that he “gets the disappointment” many feel about the legislature once again not setting up a more robust and permanent funding source for state roads projects.
Those projects are estimated to top $40 billion in repairs to get the state’s infrastructure up to merely a “good” rating over the next several decades. But Martin finds a silver lining in the appetizer-sized money.
“Literally, I don’t know how you get enough contractors from South Carolina to do $3.6 to $4 billion of work” over the next five years, said Martin. “It would be nice if the issue had been resolved on a permanent basis, and we wouldn’t have to go back and redo it in the coming years, but we’re heading in the right direction.”
SCHOOLS: Still underfunded, Abbeville looms
The good news this year is that the General Assembly increased its per-pupil annual funding to $2,350. That represents more than an additional $500 per student added to base funding by the legislature over the last two sessions.
The bad news is that it still falls short of the state mandated $2,700 per pupil.
When the special session ends, so will Sen. Joel Lourie’s tenure in state government. The Columbia Democrat served 18 years in the legislature.
Lourie said he saw a connection between the unattended gas tax and education funding. He said the legislature must not continue to raid the General Fund for roads dollars.
Increasing the gas tax, said Lourie, would “take pressure away from funding other state priorities, like health care and education.” Additionally, it could free up dollars for other agencies he also considers to be underfunded, like Juvenile Justice, which saw residents of a state facility take over for a few hours last year.
Shorting education, like the local government fund, means worse services for voters, not better governance, according to Lourie.
Lourie’s Democratic colleague in the Senate, Gerald Malloy of Hartsville, expressed disappointment Friday morning about the chamber’s inaction on a series of House bills that dealt with further resolving issues related to the still-lurking Abbeville education fairness lawsuit.
Earlier this year, a package of bills emerged from a specially-called House subcommittee that dealt directly with an order by the state Supreme Court for the legislature to hurry up and spend more time and money on mostly rural and poor schools in the state.
House Speaker Jay Lucas, a Republican from Malloy’s hometown, called the special subcommittee. All of those bills withered in the Senate.
“Once again, South Carolina turned its back on educating all of its citizens,” said Malloy, who serves on the Senate Education Committee. He added that the legislature, as a whole, continues to place politicking above the “suffering” of under-supported students.
Malloy said court-imposed deadlines, which have been regularly pushed back, because of constitutional separation of powers.
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