Put grant, market funds to better use

SENATE LEADERS insisted last week that they could not use the $16 million in their “Competitive Grants” slush fund to balance the budget — as our editorial board, Gov. Mark Sanford and others have urged — without passing a separate law. The same apparently is the case with the $21 million waiting to be used once lawmakers stop squabbling over where and how to build a network of farmers markets.

Fine. So pass the separate bills.

The Legislature can pass a bill in five days. A single legislator can slow things down, but a bill still can be on the governor’s desk in two weeks. It’s true that the Senate and House have now both passed their versions of the state budget, but the real decisions are made by the six House and Senate budget conferees. Two weeks is plenty of time to get that money freed up before they get down to serious negotiations.

This is not a complicated matter that needs studying. We’ve been talking about the grants program for a year. We’ve been talking about the need (or lack thereof) for a new farmers market for several years —although the idea of building a bunch of mini-markets was just dreamed up this year, when legislators went looking for a way to spend the $11 million that wouldn’t be needed for a new state market.

Whether the competition is based on merit (as it should be) or political clout (as it is), the Competitive Grants program was never designed to fund essential services; it was designed to pay for extras. A bunch of mini-markets that no one had even talked about until this year is obviously not an essential.

In a year when lawmakers can’t find enough money to replace two-decade-old school buses, can’t maintain their commitment to the endowed chairs program that is transforming our economy, can’t pay for the tourism advertising that is keeping our economy afloat until it is transformed, when they’re closing down prisons (but not releasing any prisoners, or even slowing the flow of nonviolent offenders into the prisons), it’s inconceivable that they would fail to tap these pots of money.

And there is absolutely no reason they cannot do so.