NEWS: S.C. House approves $14 billion budget with big pay raises
NEWS BRIEFS: Lawmakers want Eckstrom to lose job after huge error
LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: OOO,OOO,OOPS!
COMMENTARY, Brack: Hoping for tipping point on House craziness
SPOTLIGHT: The Felkel Group
FEEDBACK: Eckstrom is an accountant who doesn’t count?
MYSTERY PHOTO: Neon hammer
S.C. House approves $14B budget with big pay raises
Staff reports | The S.C. House approved a $13.8 billion budget for 2023-24 that focused on big pay raises for teachers and state employees. The annual spending plan, generally considered the biggest legislative priority for each year, now goes to the Senate for consideration.
Under the budget, which was adopted Wednesday after sometimes contentious interruptions between right-wing Republicans in the S.C. Freedom Caucus, called for starting salaries for teachers and state employees to go up by $2,500 a year. Raises would help deal with hiring crises in teaching and other jobs, such as law enforcement and corrections.
The House proposal, called a “transformational budget” by House Speaker Murrell Smith, would bump pay by that amount for state employees who earn less than $83,000, while those who earn more could get a 3% raise. The amounts are different to help all deal with the costs of inflation, officials said.
All totaled, the House budget calls for $124 million in annualized raises, which The State newspaper reported was the largest in South Carolina history. Other big ticket highlights in the budget:
- $1.3 billion: Cost of tax incentives to lure Scout Motors to the state. It is expected to employ 4,000 people in Richland County.
- $380 million: Increase in academic college and workforce development scholarships.
- $200 million: Extra money to the state Department of Transportation to accelerate bridge repair work.
- $200 million: Investment in road, water and sewer infrastructure to attract new businesses.
- $261 million: Added funding for boosted teacher pay from above via the state’s aid to classrooms. The spending is expected to boost a starting teacher’s salary to $42,500.
- $196 million: Increase costs to the state’s share of Medicare and Medicaid health care spending due to higher programmatic costs.
- $121 million: Money to counterbalance an insurance premium hike so state employees don’t have to pay more for health insurance.
- $96 million: Cost of a second year of a phased-in income tax cut.
- $84 million: Cost to freeze tuition rates for students at S.C. colleges, universities and technical colleges.
- Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com
Lawmakers want Eckstrom to lose job after big error
Staff reports | State lawmakers say S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom should lose his job over a $3.5 billion accounting error after he disclosed an unintentional exaggeration of how much money the state had.
“To ensure accuracy in the state’s finances, all the duties of his office need to be transferred immediately to one or more agencies that will produce documents that we can rely on and have confidence in,” state Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, told The State newspaper.
In a Wednesday report, a Senate Finance subcommittee said Eckstrom, the state’s elected accountant, should be fired and his office’s constitutional responsibilities distributed to other agencies.
In a statement, Eckstrom said his office said it worked “tirelessly” to identify the problem’s cause and to fix it, according to the Associated Press. He said he also planned to make the office an appointed position.
Earlier this month, House members called for Eckstrom’s impeachment.
In other news this week:
Brack column named best in state. Three 2022 columns by editor and publisher Andy Brack that appeared in Statehouse Report were named “best of the best” in South Carolina at the S.C. Press Association awards banquet last week. The columns also are published in the Report’s sister publication, the Charleston City Paper, which won 25 press excellence awards, including 10 first places.
$1.3B Scout Motors incentive passes Houses, heads to McMaster. A $1.3 billion incentive package to entice Scout Motors to build a plant in the Town of Blythewood has passed the S.C. House and is now headed to Gov. Henry McMaster.
Bright new billboards celebrate trans kids, LGBTQ+ people. Seven bright yellow billboards touting “God loves trans kids” and “God loves LGBTQ+ people” are the backbone of a new statewide awareness campaign unveiled Tuesday by the Charleston nonprofit Alliance for Full Acceptance (AFFA). One of the billboards is scheduled to be on Gervais Street near the Statehouse.
McMaster nominates Shrivastava-Patel to be DHEC chair. Gov. Henry McMaster nominated Seema Shrivastava-Patel as the new chair for the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control.
S.C. Senate advances bill banning property purchases by Russians, Chinese. The primary goal of the bill sent to the Senate floor is to curtail operations by companies and individual citizens of countries the U.S. government considers a “foreign adversary” from buying or controlling land in South Carolina.
S.C. considers limits on high-interest loans. South Carolina lawmakers are weighing a proposal to cap interest rates and fees lenders can charge on loans to help people from paying what some call exorbitant fees.
Haley wants entitlement program changes for younger generations. At a campaign rally Monday night in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley proposed changes to entitlement programs for younger generations without taking away from Social Security and Medicare for seniors.
Furman advances, CofC ends season. No. 13 Furman beat No. 4 Virginia 68-67 in Thursday’s NCAA first-round game to advance to the second round Saturday against San Diego State, which beat the College of Charleston Thursday.
OOO,OOO,OOPS!
Cartoonist Robert Ariail pokes fun today at the $3.5 billion accounting error by Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom who now faces catcalls from senators to resign. Ariail often interprets things a little differently, but always has an interesting take on what’s going on. Love the cartoon? Hate it? What do you think: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Hoping for tipping point on House craziness
By Andy Brack | Maybe the week that members of the S.C. House discussed the state’s $14 billion budget will be remembered as a tipping point for traditional Republicans. Maybe they now have become so sick and tired of the uber-right S.C. Freedom Caucus that they’ll start doing more to shut down the nuttiness.
Conspiracy theories and shenanigans by 20 members of the caucus included everything from politicizing a measure to honor women who hunt and fish to trying to scuttle a major incentive for a manufacturer that wants to create 4,000 jobs. During budget week, the splinter group offered countless divisive and relatively worthless amendments that are the juvenile equivalent of saying, “Hey, look at me, look at me.”
And then there was a new level of crazy that hit the fan with news reports about one caucus member’s bill to punish S.C. women who get abortions with the death penalty. Yes, you read that right.
“The bill is absolutely bonkers,” said state Rep. Spencer Wetmore, D-Charleston. “The good news is that most Republicans seem to agree that it’s bananas. I can’t believe it took proposing the death penalty to bring some common sense to the state House on abortion.”
Republican S.C. Rep. Micah Caskey, R-Lexington, has been a primary thorn in the side of the Freedom Caucus.
“I think elected Republicans in South Carolina are at inflection point. They need to decide if they support gold coins, nullification and the death penalty for women who have abortions,” he said. “And if they are on the side of common sense, it’s time they find a backbone and call out this insanity.”
Mainstream Republicans essentially need to stand up for common sense in governance to snuff the embers that make the rabble-rousers dance.
“The Freedom Caucus has a never-ending stream of culture war bumper stickers to scare people,” Caskey said. “Unless leaders start calling out how insidious their charade is, we may wake up and find ourselves next fighting to save core parts of constitutional governance, like jury trials or the presumption of innocence.”
The bill that made everything come to a head is (H. 3549) by S.C. Rep. Rob Harris, R-Spartanburg. It currently has 14 GOP co-sponsors, almost all of whom are in the caucus. Nine other conservatives dropped off the bill when its extremist nature came to light.
“I have no desire to go after women for any reason regarding abortion,” said GOP Rep. Matt Leber, another conservative freshman from Johns Island who pulled his name from the bill when he said he realized it couldn’t be amended. He said he remains pro-life.
One of the bill’s supporters, freshman S.C. Rep. Jordan Pace, R-Berkeley, makes textbook anti-abortion arguments from the predictable script that maintains unborn fetuses are babies and “deserve a right to not have their life taken without due process or conviction under the law.”
But opening up the possibility of the death penalty for women who have abortions? Really?
“This bill shows the true colors of the anti-abortion extremists in the state legislature, and we all need to pay attention and take this seriously,” said Planned Parenthood’s Vicki Ringer. “Advocates and community members have long warned that the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement is to criminalize women who have abortions. This means putting people in jail — and potentially to death — for ending a pregnancy.
“A person should never be punished or charged with a crime for seeking health care. And yet we have already seen a woman in Greenville arrested for allegedly ending her own pregnancy.”
Ann Warner, CEO of the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network, said the Harris bill was a new low in South Carolina.
“There is no limit to their extremism or their hypocrisy. The legislators who drafted and signed onto this bill are making a mockery of our legislative body and no South Carolinian should fall for their ‘pro-life’ lies ever again,” she said. “People on all sides of the political aisle need to pick up the phone and demand that every single legislator take their name off of this dangerous bill immediately.”
Has the tipping point arrived for the GOP? Let’s hope so. Continuing the insanity is, well, insane.
Andy Brack, recognized as the state’s best columnist in 2022 by the S.C. Press Association, is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com.
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Eckstrom is an accountant who doesn’t count?
To the editor:
“Wrong Way Corrigan” filed a flight plan to go to Long Beach in1938, took off and landed in Ireland. Pilot errors are irrefutable. Accountants who don’t count reveal a fatal professional error where removal is the only recourse.
We continue to look the other way at the minimum requirements for the state education superintendent as irrelevant this year even if it was written into state law – for South Carolina education minimum competence does not matter if your uniform is the preferred color.
No doubt the legislature will find a way to silence the state level fiscal office with a tad too much independence rather that confront what S.C. is missing in so many areas: genuine competence.
The standard legislative trick play is to suppress brighter stars so their own dimness is unrevealed. Feign progress by movement. It will turn the comptroller’s office into a bookkeeping operation.
The legislature exonerates its own decade of asset management errors saying it does not use State Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom’s net worth report of South Carolina, revealing another instance of legislative incompetence. Silliness that is untrue.
Our entire local government treasury is unprotected. Local officials are unaccountable as most of us, like the legislature, are in a fog when it comes to understanding this accounting stuff. Local citizens as the guardians of taxpayers is another fiction letting thieving or incompetent state and local officials reign. Interstate 526 in Charleston County is the next bomb the taxpayers will inherit.
Erkstrom revels just how difficult it will be to achieve the “competence state.” Correcting the fundamental errors and learning is still too difficult for the S.C. legislature. Instead, they will be reaching into the suppression bag of tricks that constitutes S.C. policy-making.
Erkstrom is an individual competence failure. It should not be converted into the institutional failure by our wrong-way legislature.
– Fred Palm, Edisto Island
Send us your thoughts
We encourage you to send in your thoughts about policy and politics impacting South Carolina. We’ve gotten some letters in the last few weeks – some positive, others nasty. We print non-defamatory comments, but unless you provide your contact information – name and hometown, plus a phone number used only by us for verification – we can’t publish your thoughts.
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Neon hammer
A reader sent in this photo of a hammer that’s lit by neon and located somewhere in South Carolina. What is it and where is it located? Send us your guess – as well as your name and hometown – to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Last week’s photo, “In the spotlight,” is a painting in the Gibbes Museum in Charleston that shows a scene from the first run of Porgy and Bess. It’s a painting by set designer Serge Soudeikine called “The Hurricane Scene, from Porgy and Bess” (1935).
The image proved to be a stumper for most of our regular sleuths. So hats off to the three readers who correctly identified the painting: Dana Smith of Dillon; Pat Keadle of Wagener; and Willie Jackson, who didn’t give a hometown.
>> Send us a mystery picture. If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
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