Editorial roundup: April 19, 2019

Recent editorials from South Carolina newspapers:

The Post and Courier

April 15

S.C. could pull same trick it did with local government fund

State legislators have never thought voters were smart enough to decide how to run their own local governments. For decades, senators ran the counties. They eventually allowed county councils to do this, with significant restrictions. Ditto cities.

Even today, legislators are constantly threatening (and too often following through) to strip city and county councils of the power state law gives them to make decisions about what happens in the communities they were elected to run. Look no further than this year's proposed ban on plastic bag bans. Or the proposed ban on local bans on selling tobacco products that are targeted at minors.

But legislators' incessant efforts to treat duly elected governments like unruly children don't stop at the governmental equivalent of taking away their driving privileges. They also send them to bed without any dinner. Night after night after night.

For decades, local governments had to send money from several of their local taxes to Columbia, where the Legislature skimmed money off the top. In 1991, the Legislature passed a law that sent the money from seven of those local taxes directly to the state, in return for creating the local government fund, which promised cities and counties the equivalent of 4.5 percent of the previous year's state budget. Local officials agreed, hoping they'd stop getting cheated. A quaint idea.

In 2010, in the middle of a recession, the Legislature cut that local government fund, even though state law said it couldn't be cut. Then it was cut some more, and then more, and then more. Finally, in 2013 the Legislature stopped cutting the fund, but it never made up the difference and never went back to increasing funding every year, as the law required. (Lawmakers just suspend that law every year to make it legal to ignore it.) This year, cities and counties are receiving $223 million, which is just 65 percent of the $341 million state law requires.

The good news is that cities and counties are on track to receive an additional $11 million next year, which would give them $234 million, or 64 percent of the money state law requires. The bad news is that this is because they finally accepted the ugly reality - that the Legislature holds them in utter contempt and has no intention of keeping its promises - and agreed to a plan to change the law and lock in the underfunding.

H.3137 sets this year's underfunding as the new baseline and promises to increase that amount each year by the same proportion that the state budget grows, up to 5 percent.

We're not sure what makes cities and counties believe they can trust the Legislature to keep its word this time, although we do understand why they'd be willing to take what they could get. It's not like the Legislature was feeling any political heat to follow the law.

It's bad enough to cheat cities and counties out of the money they need to run their governments, while systematically stripping them of the authority to decide how to do that. But this "solution" raises the frightening specter of lawmakers trying to pull a similar trick with the other big mandatory funding requirement they have consistently ignored: public education.

If that happens, it will be because all of us allowed it to.

The Post and Courier

April 16

Judicial pay raises should go instead to jobs that go unfilled

Prisons are dangerously overcrowded, in part because the Corrections Department can't find enough people who will work as correctional officers. The results, as we saw a year ago, can be deadly.

The Department of Social Services is under court order to improve services and protection for the 4,600 children in its care, yet previous funding increases haven't been enough to make the job attractive, so a federal judge could soon order actions we won't like.

In our schools, class sizes are creeping up, and districts have to use substitutes and import teachers from other countries because fewer and fewer people are finding it attractive to become and remain teachers. Teachers are to receive 4 percent pay raises next year, with new teachers making up to 10 percent more, and a promise of a total 10 percent hike over the next few years.

Most other state employees are on track for 2 percent cost-of-living pay raises.

But the biggest salary hikes in the budget passed by the House and under debate this week in the Senate won't go to those who fill our most understaffed positions. That honor goes to our state's judges - a group of people who want their jobs so much that they're willing to plan and plot for years in advance and subjugate themselves to standing around in an underground parking garage for hours on end, days on end, just for the opportunity to say "good morning" to the hiring directors.

Judges' salaries would increase by 15 percent under the Senate Finance Committee plan - 33 percent under the budget passed by the House. Prosecutors and public defenders, whose salaries are tied to judicial salaries, also would see pay hikes.

What we hear are arguments that our judges make less money than judges in other states and concerns about whether we'll continue to attract good candidates, with its implication that we're not luring the very best attorneys away from lucrative private practices.

Neither argument washes.

We agree that it would be nice to be able to increase judges' salaries. It also would be nice to be able to increase the salaries of Highway Patrol troopers, SLED agents, DHEC inspectors, drug counselors, state auditors and countless other public servants. But unless we decide that we want to pay higher taxes, and elect a Legislature that raises them, we don't have the money to raise people's pay just because it's a nice thing to do. We must concentrate our money on those crucial jobs that we have been unable to fill.

S.C. legislators are on track to approve the largest spending increase per public school student since 2006, directing that additional money to much-needed teacher raises. But state funding still will lag what state law requires. The Legislature can and should do more - and also pass education reforms that will improve what is taught in classrooms.

The political reality is that unlike teachers and correctional officers and social workers, judges can't just move to another state because they don't have the political connections to be selected as judges in other states. They can be judges here, or they can be lawyers. It is, in short, a buyers' market for judges.

Because there are so few of them, it costs a lot less money to raise pay for judges - even significantly - than for teachers or prison guards or DSS workers. The Senate plan spends $6 million, the House $11 million - compared to $159 million for teacher raises. But that's still $6 million or $11 million that could be spent to help fill jobs that aren't being filled.

Our state's priority should be, must be, to raise salaries for those positions we can't fill at current salaries. Once we get that done, we can move on to jobs we wish we could pay better.