Radical changes and outcomes expected when Catherine Templeton took over two years ago as director of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control Direct haven’t come as expected, observers and even critics say.

And while there are some still complaints about overworked staff, bloodletting among the staff appears to have started to staunch itself.

For years, DHEC has been cast as toothless lion -- underpaid, overworked, understaffed. Political and economic forces have regularly robbed the department of its best and its brightest with officials often taking jobs at companies they had been paid state dollars to regulate.       

But these days, the agency -- smaller and more streamlined -- is pressing forward.

Telling numbers

In 2004, there were close to 5,500 total DHEC employees of every stripe and responsibility. That number included positions paid for with federal pass-through dollars. Roughly 1,700 of that total were funded by state General Fund budget dollars, according to state budget documents. That year, the state committed roughly $105 million toward the agency’s total budget that year.

In the current fiscal year, the total staffing has dropped to about 3,600 employees, with 1,150 of those coming from state dollars. This year, the state this year put $100 million toward DHEC’s budget.

Those numbers represent a nearly one-third reduction in state and federal-paid positions, and a small reduction in state-dollar support. By comparison, the state’s gross domestic product in 2004 was $136 billion, and by 2013, the most recent numbers available, it had grown to $184 billion -- a 35 percent increase.

So, in the time the state’s GDP increased by $50 billion, the legislature had reduced DHEC funding by $5 million.

Stopping the bleeding

Templeton, who came into office on a wave of criticism in March 2012, has bright numbers to report, despite dwindling financial support from the state legislature.

Templeton did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, deferring to agency spokesman Mark Plowden.

Under Templeton, the agency total employment drop has slowed to close to 1.5 percent, or about 43 jobs, according to Plowden.  Translated, that means the slashing and burning really took place in past years, particularly during the Great Recession.

In the environmental quality control department, the office that processes important environmental permits, there were 1,132 full-time slots when Templeton took over, according to numbers provided by Plowden. That number has been reduced to 1,066; of those only 942 have been filled -- a 17 percent reduction from what was funded two years ago.  

Permit Central

So with less permitting officials on the job, work has slowed, right? Wrong.

One of the streamlining efforts Templeton had implemented was the creation of “Permit Central,” an online web portal where applicants can file and learn how to speed up the process.

According to Plowden, since implementation, “most” permitting times are running 40 percent faster.

“More importantly, legal appeals to those permits have not increased, meaning those permits have integrity,” pointed out Plowden, who added that it all had been accomplished with no additional budget request.

“Increased efficiency while maintaining quality -- that's what should be expected across all of state government.”

Officials’ errors -- not staffing numbers -- caused DHEC’s biggest snafu under Templeton, a botched tuberculosis outbreak response in Greenwood County, according to the agency and observers.

Not so fast or rosy

Meanwhile, insiders warn of an underfunded and under-experienced future for DHEC.

One current DHEC professional, speaking on anonymity, said there are bigger “vision” and “command structure” issues plaguing the agency. For this official, who has several decades of private sector environmental experience prior to working at the agency, it wasn’t so much the number of those who left after Templeton ascended, but what they took with them.

The official argued that senior engineers and scientists “read the writing on the wall” and left. Into their void stepped lawyers and “bean-counters” more loyal to politics than the complicated environmental issues they were charged with safeguarding, and didn’t have the institutional knowledge to carry out the agency’s science-heavy mission.

Few complaints here

Permitting presents a delicate balance. Go too fast with too few officials and the state’s conservation groups will protest safeguards are being ignored. Go too slow, and manufacturing,  industry and developers will complain the state’s slog out of the Great Recession is being slowed.

Apparently, a balance has been struck, as representatives from both sides struggled to point fingers at DHEC.

On the industry side, S.C. Chamber of Commerce president and executive director Otis Rawl said none of his members have come to him and complained about the current pace of permitting.

“The biggest thing I’m hearing is about the need to resolve the ‘certificate of need’ issue,” said Rawl, referring to a change in state law two years ago that has made it difficult for many health care facilities to receive DHEC permitting crucial to their business.

That problem, according to Rawl, isn’t even DHEC’s problem, but one that should be laid at the feet of the legislature, which was unable to provide a solution in this year’s legislative session.

On the green side, representatives from the S.C. Coastal Conservation League said the number and pace of permits being issued wasn’t on its radar.

Brad Wyche, founder and executive director of green watchdog Upstate Forever, as well as the former chairman of the DHEC board from 1999 to2003, said the agency’s biggest problem continues to be a “lack of resources.”

Wyche said DHEC staffers under his watch would routinely be unfairly criticized for the promptness in which they issued permits and the like.

“But, they have got to have the resources in place to do the job they were legally assigned to do: if the state passes a law and have regulations in place, it has to provide the resources to implement and enforce the law,” said Wyche.

Providing permitting pace statistics may actually serve up a red herring, according to Alan Hancock, a Conservation Voters of South Carolina staffer who worked at DHEC until November of last year.

Hancock praised the work Templeton’s administration has done streamlining some of the permitting processes, calling some of what was removed “exercises in paperwork.”

Local government takes some of the work

State Rep. Nelson Hardwick (R-Surfside Beach), chair of the House Ag Committee and former DHEC district EQC director, said some of DHEC’s regulator workload has been reduced at DHEC by localities taking on more and more of regulatory duties.

In his home county of Horry, where he is part of a two-person engineering firm specializing in storm-water drainage, Hardwick said that if a builder wants to erect an 11-house subdivision, he would go to local authorities rather than the state these days.

Like Wyche, Hancock defended the DHEC permitting staffers, saying their jobs would be much easier if Gov. Nikki Haley hadn’t taken such a public “pro-business” position regarding the agency’s mission in the past.

Bill Davis is senior edior of Statehouse Report.  He can be reached at:  billdavis@statehousereport.com.

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Although tobacco no longer dominates the agricultural landscape in the South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, there are still a number of acres of the golden leaf planted, such as this field near the Vox community of rural Florence County. Photo by Linda W. Brown of Kingstree. More.

During this period in South Carolina (1865-1877), freed slaves were elected to Congress as Republicans and all sorts of new progress broke out until the white elites figured out how to recapture power and to, ultimately, clamp down on former slaves through harsh Jim Crow laws.

Now comes “The New Racism,” a fresh article in The New Republic which focuses on recent leadership and policy changes in Alabama. It posits the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to lift the vestiges of Jim Crow and segregation so African Americans could share in the freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution.

As a result in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and other Southern states, blacks gained elective office like never before. Slowly, the spoils of power --better roads, schools and health care -- started being shared in poor, underserved communities. Blacks had power at the voting booth. White politicians paid attention to them. Blacks and white moderates changed the South, attracting economic development, progress and even Northern retirees.

But as the Alabama-themed article illustrates how white Republicans calculated that by splitting moderate white Democrats from power through gerrymandering districts and outpoliticking them at the polls, they could marginalize African American legislators, reduce their power and, in the end, retake statehouses and retake control. In turn, they could erode progressive reforms characterized as the “Second Reconstruction” in The New Republic article.

ON WHY FERGUSON ISN'T ORANGEBURG Historian Jack Bass wrote a book on the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 protest at S.C. State University that left three African American men dead and injured 28 others.  The incident, which predated the highly-publicized shootings at Kent State University in 1970, got comparatively little media attention, unlike the fatal shooting of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer that led to international headlines.  In an interview this week, Bass said he thought the Orangeburg Massacre and events this month in Ferguson, Mo., were similar because they were both out of the ordinary.  The anomaly in Ferguson (population 21,203; 29 percent, white; 67 percent, black) is that most majority-black towns don’t have mostly-white police forces, he said. And in South Carolina, the massacre was an anomaly because the state generally dealt with desegregation in a non-violent way, he said. “If you take away Orangeburg, everything else was pretty peaceful.” But also in both places, some bad judgments were made, Bass added. “In Ferguson, it was my impression that you had a bad local police force, poorly trained. They had all of that equipment and, I guess, figured they ought to use it,” he said. “In Orangeburg, you had a lot of confusion -- five different law enforcement agencies -- the National Guard, Highway Patrol, sheriff’s office, city police and SLED. All five were operating on different [communication] frequencies.” Also, he noted, some of the training of law enforcement authorities wasn’t considered good because officers in Orangeburg were authorized to shoot if they felt their lives or colleagues’ lives were in danger instead of a protocol of not shooting until authorized by a senior officer. “You really kind of had a recipe for disaster” in Orangeburg, he said. -- Andy Brack

To the editor:

I always read your Statehouse Report with interest, but I was particularly impressed by your discussion on the ambiguous consequences of voter ID.  I've argued all along that it is very difficult to measure -- particularly in the short-run -- the impact of such legislation. 

History doesn't repeat itself, but I think it's instructive that the first efforts at disenfranchising blacks in the late 19th century had a cumulative impact that could only be seen in hindsight.  Cynicism, disillusionment and a sense of helplessness may also be factors. 

I talked with a black friend here in Brevard and his sense was that black voting would go down.  As he said, for (mostly) working-class black voters, it seems a useless expenditure of limited energy when you know that the system here in North Carolina is essentially rigged after the 2012 election. 

The other observation that you made (based on voting patterns) is that the most important part of the puzzle of political change is the continuous shifting of whites in South Carolina to the Republican Party is a fulfillment of the Nixon goal of creating a black Democratic and white Republican Party is coming to pass, at least in much of the deep South.

In any case, thanks for your insights -- however much they lead me toward melancholia.

-- Dan Carter, Columbia, S.C.

Remember what Hollings also said?

To the editor:

Love your work! When [U.S. Sen.] Fritz [Hollings] was being challenged by Bob Inglis, out of frustration he referred to Inglis as a “goddamned skunk!” When asked to apologize, Fritz agreed and said, “I would like to apologize to the entire skunk family!” He was re-elected in a landslide!   

—Ronnie Bruce, Greer, S.C.

Snarky cracks not likely to have effect

To the editor:

Most of the cracks you cited were belittling and rather nasty. However, politics being what they are, nice, polite putdowns are not likely to have any effect.

Your bringing up Australia reminds me of the time when I was American Vice-Consul in Western Australia and monitored Sir Robert Menzies' appearances [the prime minister] in Perth during the 1964 Federal election.  Menzies was a vain, arrogant and pompous bully who squashed anyone who got his dander up.

The first event I attended was a rally held in the square that fronted the main post office, a monumental building whose portico was held up by massive columns. Sir Robert (pictured at right) stationed himself on the top step and began to speak. I managed to infiltrate his entourage, so I stood within ten feet of him. The rally got off to a bad start. The sound system didn't work.

Menzies, perhaps in jest,  remarked that "Labor saboteurs" must have cut the wires. Underlings quickly repaired the damage and Menzies launched into his boilerplate speech. One of the issues in the election was the projected purchase of an untested American fighter plane that Labor claimed was an unnecessary boondoggle. A leather-lunged redheaded  heckler, dressed in working clothes and holding a rolled-up newspaper, yelled over and over, "What about the", and he gave the model number of the fighter. Menzies finally turned and bellowed, "Well, what about it?" The heckler replied, "It isn't even off the drawing boards." Menzies measured him and said, "Well, my friend, it doesn't look like you are off the drawing boards either".

Later that day Sir Robert was scheduled to lay a corner stone at the University of Western Australia. Sir Robert stood poised with trowel and  cement. The cloth was lifted.  Much to everyone's  surprise, a bust of Labor leader Arthur Calwell was revealed. Menzies was unfazed. He slapped a dollop of cement on top of the bust and intoned, "I declare this stone well and truly laid."  I found out years later that Menzies actually respected Calwell. In fact, one could say that they were friends. But politics are politics.

If Menzies had one redeeming quality it was his devotion to the Queen. When she made a royal tour I watched the welcoming ceremony on television. John McEwen, leader of the Country Party, and Calwell carried dignified and respectful greetings from their parties. Then it was Menzies' turn. He became maudlin . He concluded by reciting "Passing by;  mercifully he didn't try to sing it. When he came to the last lines, "I did but see her passing by, but I will love her 'til I die," he was practically in tears. I swear the Queen winced.

Embarrassed she might have been, but the Queen rewarded Menzies by awarding him into the Order of the Thistle. My wife and I saw the induction ceremony in a newsreel. Once again, Menzies almost wept. Someone in the audience yelled, "Cor, it's Robin 'Ood". A few days later, I was listening to parliamentary debates on radio. Menzies was bloviating.  Eddie Ward, a Labor bombthrower, shouted, "Bob, they should have given you an Oscar instead of the Thistle." For once Menzies was flummoxed. Instead of tossing a barb in reply he broke down and laughed.

And speaking of Sen. Hollings, who can forget "Tommy, you full of ....... prunes."

-- John H. Wilde, Greenwood, S.C.

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