Rick Reames’ long quest to undermine penny transportation tax

For months, state Revenue Director Rick Reames accused Richland County Council members and reputable local businesses and their owners of conspiracy, illegal acts and corruption — all based on his own questionable belief that state law makes it illegal to spend money from the penny transportation tax to cover administrative costs of the county’s road-building program.

He apparently hopes people will be duped into believing his baseless claims simply because he is a public official. That’s a gross abuse of the public trust he enjoys.

It is time for the public to learn that the emperor has no clothes.

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All Mr. Reames has are trumped-up claims that he hopes will help him do what he’s been trying to do for four years: kill the voter-approved penny sales tax. Mr. Reames and his cohorts — Rusty DePass, Michael Letts, Joe Azar and others — began attacking the sales tax well before any money was collected or spent and prior to any contract being approved.

In 2012, Mr. Reames, then a private attorney, filed a protest in an attempt to overturn the results of the referendum that approved the tax. Since becoming director of the state Revenue Department, he has tried to bully County Council into making changes that could damage, if not kill, key elements of the penny program, such as the policy that gives small and local businesses an opportunity to participate in the procurement process.

But people are catching on to Mr. Reames.

In her July 3 column, State Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wrote: “It was no surprise that Circuit Judge Thomas Cooper said the state Department of Revenue can’t withhold transportation tax revenue from Richland County just because it doesn’t like how the county is spending the money.” She said the Revenue Department chose “an aggressive reading of the law that the county says limits its ability to use transportation money to cover administrative costs associated with the roads program” and that the county “made a strong case that the agency is misreading the law."

Ms. Scoppe, noting that a governmental body’s decisions aren’t illegal simply because people dislike them, referenced Washington Post columnist George Will’s recent column lamenting the overzealous prosecution of government officials based on “novel interpretations” of the law. In other words, claiming the law says something that it doesn’t. As Mr. Will put it: “But the criminalization of normal political interactions is especially ominous when aesthetic considerations expose a person to prosecution for actions inseparable from the quotidian business of representative government.”

In his effort to derail the penny program, Mr. Reames has claimed authority that is nonexistent in the law while making irresponsible accusations against council members and others.

He has sought to legitimize his scheme by hiring Richland County Rep. James Smith to defend his agency against the lawsuit brought by the county. I know Rep. Smith has to make a living, but I hope he will not spread untruths and innuendos that flow from the minds and mouths of penny sales tax opponents. Some of the Revenue Department’s claims come directly from blogs known for mishandling the facts.

Associate Editor Scoppe made an interesting observation about the criminal investigation the Revenue Department requested SLED to conduct: “Innuendo — and the department’s legal papers are replete with innuendo — suggests that council members got illegal favors when they rewrote their bidding rules and entered into a contract with a ‘program development team’ to run the $1 billion roads program. But it’s hard to know how seriously to take that innuendo given how reckless the agency has been with its talk of criminality.”

Reckless indeed. At some point, Mr. Reames needs to be made to answer for this gross abuse of his office. His actions border on being unethical — if not worse.

This story was originally published July 31, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Rick Reames’ long quest to undermine penny transportation tax."