9/18 issue: Roads, abortion clinics, more

Looking at this picture might make you salivate for a mess of fresh shrimp. The state’s 60-day shrimp baiting season started last week along the South Carolina coast for anglers who can catch up to 48 quarts of whole shrimp or 29 quarts of headed shrimp per day per set of poles. A license is required. No more than 10 poles can be used per license per day or per boat. More regulations are here.

NEWS: Roads: Infrastructure Bank faces challenges
BRIEFS: Poverty is less, but still here; program note
COMMENTARY:  Haley’s ambition puts DHEC between rock, hard place
SPOTLIGHT:  The S.C. Education Association
FEEDBACK: More judicial independence merited
SCORECARD: Thumbs up on jobless rate; down on violence against women
NUMBER:  Two number ones
QUOTE:  Peace be with us
S.C. ENCYCLOPEDIA:  The Rev. John Martin Pike

Roads: Infrastructure Bank faces big challenges

By Bill Davis

SEPT. 18, 2015 | Plans are swirling in Columbia for how to improve the S.C. Transportation Infrastructure Bank, a major fiscal tool for big project that pave and fix the state’s roads and bridges

South Carolina, which has the fourth-largest roadway system in the country, is still facing a $40 billion tab to get its roadways up to a “good” level, according to the federal government.

Legislative efforts to more fully fund road projects have met with little success in recent years, even as costs continue to expand. Thanks to inflation, the state gas tax which fuels most major road projects, is bringing in about half of what it did when it was passed in 1997, according to state Department of Transportation.

Outside of a general disdain for raising taxes, another one of the main reasons for the slowed legislative response in dealing with road needs has been dissatisfaction with how the state Infrastructure Bank is, well, structured, according to several Statehouse sources.

The last time that state legislators were able to get new money for the bank was in 2013 when they approved $50 million for roads which allowed the bank to borrow $500 million. As many observe, that investment is a drop in the bucket to the state’s huge road maintenance needs.

Columbia political watchdog S.C. Policy Council complains that seniority in the legislature has too much influence in the process, and that only a few corners of the state benefit.

Also, the watchdog has barked that state Sen. Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, has too much control over the situation, as president pro tempore of the Senate and chair of the Finance Committee.

Every politician in Columbia, it seems, is worried that another district may get a bigger slice of the roads pie, and that politics will trump sanity and defined need.

Evidence: When two members of the House last year asked if the city they represented could take its own money to construct a stoplight outside an elementary school, they were loudly shouted down on the floor because it was seen as even a mild threat to the existing priority list.

In the State of the State address earlier this year, Gov. Nikki Haley called for the Infrastructure Bank to be reassigned to her cabinet with her oversight.

The argument was that since the governor represents the entire state, politics would be removed from the process of deciding which part of the state gets what roads project and when.

Those projects can bring with them needed jobs and economic activity, and serve as an additional lure to outside private investment and expansion, as has been the case in the Lowcountry with projects related to Boeing and Volvo.

As with other calls for restructuring state government and shift more current legislative power to a governor, the General Assembly is more than a little cool to the proposed shift.

The fear is that politics will become an even bigger force, not smaller, in assigning priority and scope to roads projects, as a governor may “log roll” legislators by holding roads projects over their heads in return for votes on other matters dear to the governor’s agenda.

Two alternative plans cropped up this last legislative session that will likely resurface in the coming year.

First in the state Senate, Majority Leader Harvey Peeler (R-Gaffney) came up with his solution in which running the Infrastructure Bank would be handed over to the governor, but its eight-member board would serve at the pleasure and consent of the Senate. That would mean any vote of the board that displeased the Senate could result in a quick exit of a board member or the entire board. And that could act as a breaker for any power move by a governor.

Second in the S.C. House, state Rep. Gary Simrill (R-Rock Hill) threw himself into subcommittee work looking into the morass and history of roads projects in South Carolina.

After studying what he called the “genealogy” of the current situation, Simrill traced the beginnings of the current problem to the 1920s, when state senators held considerably more political power and steered roads projects and state funding to their counties.

“I’ll tell you this: Asphalt has always been extremely political,” he said this week in an interview.

Simrill’s plan, which drew bipartisan support in the House and a cold shoulder in the Senate, would drop the state’s gas tax from 16 cents per gallon to 10-percent of gas sales.

Changing from a volume tax to a value-based, or excise, tax could begin to pay off handsomely for the state once gas prices climb closer to $3 a gallon, creating a bigger funding source for the DOT and the Infrastructure Bank, said Simrill.

His plan would also expand the bank’s number of board members from eight to 13, making sure that rural areas would be more represented in road-building decisions going forward.

Simrill allowed that of late, the Infrastructure Bank hasn’t been dominated by seniority, pointing to a lone I-85  Interstate 95  widening project in Leatherman’s district atop the bank’s project priority list.

But, Simrill said, that’s no reason not to do what would be even better for the state.

“We need to make the system a needs-based system, and not a political turf system,” he said.

Bill Davis is senior editor of Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com

We’re not as poor, but there’s still a lot of poverty

The South isn’t as mired in poverty as it once was, according to a new report, and South Carolina is no exception. But in many places in the Palmetto State, things still aren’t that great.

Before President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty campaign, the South was home to 49 percent of the nation’s poor, according to Pew Research. Today, the region is home to 41 percent of the nation’s poor. But what’s striking is how poverty overall is far different throughout the South.

Back in 1960, some 35.6 percent of Southerners lived in poverty, compared to 16.4 percent today, the report said. South Carolina is no different. In 1960, 45.4 percent of South Carolinians lived in poverty, according to census information. Today, 18.5 percent of people in the Palmetto State live at or below the poverty level.

Nationally, poverty has shifted from a more rural occurrence to a more urban one, the Pew report said. But that’s not the case in South Carolina. The chart below of selected counties illustrates how poverty fell across the board in South Carolina’s counties, but rates tend to be much lower in urban counties or in neighboring suburban counties.

Case in point: Calhoun County, once a rural mainstay that now more of a suburban county wedged between larger communities of Columbia and Orangeburg. Back in 1960, Calhoun County had a 70.6 percent poverty rate. Today? It’s still high, but is19.7 percent.

Coastal counties that have gotten huge influxes of tourism and growth also had big drops — 51.9 percent (1960) to 19.1 percent (2013) for Horry County. Beaufort County went from 49.5 percent poverty in 1960 to 14.1 percent in 2013.

But the story hasn’t changed much in places like Allendale County. In 1960, two in three people lived in poverty. In 2013, 42.4 percent of its residents lived below the poverty level. Today, it’s one of the most impoverished counties in the nation.

Across the state, some 35 of 46 counties today have poverty rates above South Carolina’s already higher-than-national poverty rate of 18.5 percent. The eleven counties with the lowest rates: All urban or suburban.

• Sources: 1960 Census information |  2013 Census data

“America After Charleston” to air Monday, Thursday

SCETV is co-producer of this national program, a town hall meeting being recorded Saturday in Charleston, that explores the many issues propelled into public discourse after the tragic June shooting of nine worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The News Hour’s Gwen Ifill is moderator.

The show airs Sept. 21 at 9 p.m. in ETV and is repeated at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 24 on the South Carolina Channel.

Haley’s ambition puts DHEC between rock and hard place

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher

SEPT. 18, 2015 | It’s the seven-minute gap that is most telling.

On September 11 at 2:27 p.m., the state Department of Health and Environmental Control announced actions against three abortion clinics after an investigation pushed by Gov. Nikki Haley.

Seven minutes later, the governor, traveling overseas, released a seven-paragraph statement that had to take more than seven minutes to write, an indication of how our ambitious governor wanted to put the clinics under klieg lights. Recall how Haley recently told Washington reporters that she wouldn’t turn down discussions of being a vice presidential candidate.

Bottom line: This brouhaha over abortion clinics is pure political theater with DHEC serving as the pawn for a governor who wanted to twist a national issue.

But that’s not surprising when you consider how Haley needs to be viewed as more conservative by GOP presidential hopefuls. Her conservative credentials suffered after rightly dumping the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds. In fact, that pushed up her poll numbers among Democrats and blacks.

It’s all about perception, not reality. And DHEC was caught between a rock, the law, and a hard place, the governor.

Earlier this summer, the continuing national debate over abortion flared again after actors hired by an anti-abortion group secretly taped videos with Planned Parenthood staff members involving possible purchase of tissue samples of aborted fetuses. The organization, which has denied wrongdoing, became a flash point, leading to congressional investigations and a media frenzy.

On August 18, Haley, obviously trying to keep the story alive in South Carolina, called on DHEC to investigate the state’s abortion clinics, with special focus on two operated by Planned Parenthood.

Between August 31 and September 4, DHEC sent inspectors to clinics in Greenville, Columbia and Charleston that had passed inspections with flying colors in recent years. This time, though, inspectors were under the gun to find something. At the Columbia clinic, for example, they documented 21 minor violations, mostly involving paperwork. Only one of the cited violations carried a fine of $1,000. Most were a $250 slap on the wrist for things like failing to have proper employee background documentation, orientation records, job descriptions or training records. Our favorite: The water in three sinks was too hot (ever heard of the cold tap?)

On September 9, according to DHEC spokesman Jim Beasley, the agency notified Haley’s office of inspection results and the pending enforcement actions. Two days later, around 1:45 p.m., DHEC phoned people at the clinics as a courtesy to let them know emails were on the way about enforcement actions. All calls apparently weren’t completed before the emails went out.

At 2:27 p.m., DHEC alerted the media, which soon started calling clinics. Some apparently had not opened emails and learned about actions from the press. At 2:34 p.m., Haley, traveling in Europe on business, released a triumphant statement attempting to make the findings sound bigger than they were — all to feather her political nest.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic this week said the organization, which focuses 97 percent of its work on women’s health care (not abortions), took DHEC’s findings seriously and was taking immediate actions to come into compliance with the law.

“These matters will be addressed and it will be a blip on the screen, serving primarily not women’s health but the political ambitions of the governor,” said one longtime Statehouse player.

Yes, to get headlines, Haley used DHEC, whose board she appoints. But it didn’t turn out exactly how she wanted. Instead of a big press conference about the findings, DHEC quietly released the information at one of the slowest times of the week for the media — Friday afternoon, when most reporters are finishing stories they’ve worked on for a week.

What’s important to take away are three things:

• None of the violations cited by DHEC directly put any women or their health at risk. But anything not up to snuff — even minor paperwork problems — need to be brought into compliance. The law is the law.
• Thousands of dedicated DHEC employees have been embarrassed because the agency was dragged through the muck because of politics.
• This incident is a prime example of how the passions of South Carolinians are being manipulated by a hyper-ambitious governor who wants to score points in a much larger political game.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report. Send feedback to: feedback@statehousereport.com.

The S.C. Education Association

The public spiritedness of our underwriters allows us to bring Statehouse Report to you at no cost. This week’s spotlighted underwriter is The South Carolina Education Association(The SCEA), the professional association for educators in South Carolina. Educators from pre-K to 12th grade comprise The SCEA. The SCEA is the leading advocate for educational change in South Carolina. Educators in South Carolina look to The SCEA for assistance in every aspect of their professional life. From career planning as a student to retirement assessment as a career teacher, The SCEA offers assistance, guidance, and inspiration for educators.

State judicial section process is seriously flawed

To the editor:

I would like to commend Cecilia Brown on her recent observations regarding the selection of circuit and Supreme Court judges in South Carolina. As pointed out in her article, the process is SERIOUSLY flawed.

Yet, the selection of magistrates is an even more deplorable process. I would like to request that she invest a little more of her time reviewing how magistrates are supposed to be nominated by the senator who serves the nominees’ respective senatorial district, approved by the local legislative delegation (and by) the Senate Judicial Committee and finally appointed by the governor.

The entire process is a joke.

–Jacquetta Jones, Ravenel, S.C.

Send us a letter. We love hearing from our readers and encourage you to share your opinions. Letters to the editor are published weekly. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. We generally publish all comments about South Carolina politics or policy issues, unless they are libelous or unnecessarily inflammatory. One submission is allowed per month. Submission of a comment grants permission to us to reprint. Comments are limited to 250 words or less. Please include your name and contact information.

• Send your letters to: feedback@statehousereport.com

On jobless rate, no drilling, violence against women, more

Thumbs up

Unemployment rate. It’s great news that the state’s August unemployment rate dropped to 6 percent, down 0.4 points from July. As Gov. Nikki Haley notes, more South Carolinians are working in the state than ever before.

No drilling. Opposition continues to grow, as noted in a recent editorial by The Post and Courier, against oil drilling off of the coast of South Carolina, as a dozen coastal communities are in opposition as well as U.S. Reps. Mark Sanford and Jim Clyburn. More.

Ethics Commission: Hats off to the State Ethics Commission for not dismissing a complaint against Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster of allegations that he took $72,000 in illegal campaign donations after his 2010 gubernatorial race. McMaster’s attorney has said the lieutenant governor unintentionally took over-the-limit contributions to retire debt and hopes to settle the matter.   It’s good the commission appears to be seeing the matter through, not letting politics get in the way. More.

Jackson. S.C. native Jesse Jackson says his Rainbow PUSH Coalition will expand advocacy efforts in the Palmetto State — which can’t be a bad thing and might shake up things a bit in Columbia, especially with so many people hurting in the state. More.

Harbor deepening. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has approved deepening of Charleston’s shipping channel to make it the deepest port on the east coast — and the last hurdle in the way of projected big growth. A new report indicated state ports generate $53 billion for the state’s economy. More.

Thumbs down

Violence against women. South Carolina needs to get off the list of having the top rate in the country for women murdered by men. We hope this year’s action by the General Assembly to toughen domestic violence rules will make a dent … but lawmakers should look at doing even more.  More.

Greenville. It’s a crying shame that Greenville’s GE may not get 400 jobs because of national dickering and gridlock over the Export-Import Bank. More.

Two number ones

1: Violence.

As a state, we’ve returned to our old spot of having the nation’s top rate of women killed by men, an indicator of violence against women and, in particular, the domestic violence that exists in the state. According to a new report by the Violence Policy Center using 2013 homicide data, South Carolina had the highest per capita murder rate of women killed by men at 2.32 deaths per 100,000 people. The report said 57 women were killed by men in that year, the most recent for which data is available. Read the report.

For the record, South Carolina’s legislature toughened domestic violence laws during its 2015 session following a Pulitzer-Prize-winning series by The Post and Courier. It will be three years before any impact of those law changes potentially would be reflected in VPC data.

1: Foreign investment.

A national report this week ranked South Carolina to be the top state in attracting jobs through foreign investment per million in habitants. The state has topped the list in “Global Location Trends,” an annual report by IBM-Plant Location International, for three of the last four years, according to a news release.

“In addition to ranking first in foreign investment job creation per capita in this year’s report, the Palmetto State also holds the spot for job creation through both foreign and out-of-state domestic investment per capita,” the release said. “Furthermore, South Carolina ranks third in total absolute jobs created through foreign investment.” More: www.ibm.com/gbs/pli.

Peace be with us

“We embrace the idea of moving forward with the Nobel Peace Prize, because it’s not one that is sought by just a few. It’s an acknowledgment that only God could have moved in such a miraculous way to allow us to stand on solid ground.”

— The Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, presiding elder of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. An Illinois group wants the church and city of Charleston to win the Nobel Peace Prize to recognize its faith, dignity and respect following the June tragedy in which nine church-goers were slain. The group wants 1 million signatures on a petition. More.

John Martin Pike

The Rev. John Martin Pike, a clergyman, editor and publisher, was born in Newfoundland, Canada, in June 1840, the son and brother of Arctic explorers. Educated in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, he graduated from Mount Allison Wesleyan College and Seminary in Sackville, Nova Scotia. Ordained in 1868, Pike served Wesleyan Methodist and Methodist Church of Canada parishes in the Maritime Provinces. About 1873, he married Marry S. Pike, a Nova Scotia native. The couple had seven children.

In the mid-1880s the Methodist bishop of South Carolina invited Pike to preach at the Washington Street Methodist Episcopal Church, South in Columbia. Pike subsequently moved to the state and spent most of the rest of his life in South Carolina. He pastored Methodist Episcopal Church, South congregations in Lynchburg, Sumter, Summerville, and Charleston. For health reasons, he moved briefly to Florida, where he served several churches and also edited the Florida Sunbeam in Ocala.

Pike returned to Columbia in 1890 at the invitation of Methodist minister Robert C. Oliver, who was starting a periodical, The Way of Faith, in addition to his work at what became the Oliver Gospel Mission. Pike became assistant editor of the weekly publication, assuming responsibilities as editor when Oliver died in 1893. Pike remained as editor for twenty-five years and wrote occasional articles for the weekly for another five years after retiring. The Way of Faith ceased publication in 1931.

Through this periodical and his involvement with the Oliver Gospel Mission, Pike exercised pivotal influence on the planting of Holiness and Pentecostal strains of Protestantism in South Carolina. The Way of Faith carried reports of revivals led by Pentecostal Holiness Church founder A. B. Crumpler. The Christian and Missionary Alliance credits Pike with facilitating that organization’s entry into the state, and Pike also made it possible for Nickels John Holmes’s Bible Institute to use the Oliver Gospel Mission facilities for its classes between 1903 and 1905.

In his later years, Pike added a significant social component to his work in Columbia, founding the Door of Hope, a ministry to women victimized by sexual predators, poverty and domestic violence. Pike was a tireless fund-raiser for the agency, which was headed for many years by Anna Finnstrom. Pike died in Columbia on May 16, 1932.

– Excerpted from the entry by Nancy A. Hardesty. To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia by USC Press. (Information used by permission.)

Editor and Publisher: Andy Brack
Senior Editor: Bill Davis
Contributing Photographers: Michael Kaynard, Linda W. Brown

Phone: 843.670.3996

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