Wednesday, Jul. 16, 2008

Law lets Greenville try to disband one special little government

H.4754 reads almost like parody.

It allows a county council to take over a special purpose district. But only a special purpose district created without a public referendum. And only a recreation special purpose district. That covers an entire county. And doesn’t provide aging services.

The county council can subsume the district only if the district’s board, the county council and the legislators from that county all give their approval. By two-thirds votes. After a public hearing.

And the authority to make this change expires on Dec. 31 — six months and 21 days after Gov. Mark Sanford signed the bill into law.

But by S.C. standards, this legislation is no laughing matter. It’s bold and — here’s the incredible thing — a significant step in the right direction. It marks the first time the General Assembly has ever agreed to allow county councils to disband special purpose districts.

And if the folks in Greenville County can get all their i’s dotted and t’s crossed before the witching hour, this apparently will mark the first time in more than a decade that a special purpose district has gone away.

One down, 499 or so to go.

These special little governments were created years ago by state legislators, on an ad-hoc basis, to provide services back home before the Legislature finally relented and allowed the creation of multi-service county governments, which can operate more efficiently and have the added advantage of actually being elected by the voters back home. But the Legislature didn’t disband those now-unnecessary special little governments, some of which constitute huge power bases for the legislators, some of which control the legislators.

The one law eventually passed to allow the districts to disband themselves is wholly — and deliberately — unworkable. And so those special little governments kept operating. For years. And now decades.

Finally, the Greenville County Recreation Commission decided that providing the best service to the public at the lowest possible cost was more important than perpetuating its own power; and the best way to do that, the commission agreed, was to become part of the Greenville County government, where it could take advantage of central administrative and purchasing functions. So the commission asked Greenville legislators to pass a law allowing it to disband.

But part of the change to allow the creation of county governments was a constitutional ban on state laws that apply to just one county. And there was no way the people who make their living and derive their political power from other special purpose districts were going to stand by while the Legislature passed a bill that would allow county councils to dissolve their districts. For that matter, they weren’t crazy about the idea of letting any district disband, because that would reduce their numbers, which would reduce their political clout, which they use for the purpose of ... maintaining their political clout.

So the law-writing process had to start with a game legislators play in order to pass a single-county law without violating the ban on single-county laws.

Normally, legislators ignore that ban, knowing it’s only enforceable if someone goes to the trouble to file a lawsuit. But any action that could reduce the power of the special purpose district lobby will be challenged, and so Greenville lawmakers knew they had to walk a careful line: Write a bill that applies to the entire state, so it won’t be struck down by the courts, but make sure it doesn’t really apply to anyone besides the Greenville Recreation District, so they can get the votes to pass it.

So they limited the law to rec districts, to appease the fire districts and sewer districts. They limited it to whole-county districts, so they wouldn’t stir up opposition in counties such as Lexington, which have two rec districts. Limit it to rec districts that weren’t created through a public referendum, so the Richland County district wouldn’t be covered. (Even this wink-and-nod approach isn’t guaranteed to survive if it’s challenged. The Supreme Court has thrown out other thinly disguised one-county laws whose disguise was a little too thin.)

Even those restrictions weren’t enough to appease the special purpose districts. So lawmakers added the requirement for the extraordinary, two-thirds votes of support. And then they set the clock ticking, to reduce the chance that any district they didn’t somehow protect through all the exceptions couldn’t make the change.

It’s ridiculous that the special little anachronisms would be able to dictate terms to the Legislature. Ridiculous that the Legislature won’t just pass a bill that allows all county councils to subsume any special purpose districts they want, whether the district’s governing board likes it or not, whether the local state legislators like it or not. But at least for now, that’s the way the politics of local government works in South Carolina.

So cross your fingers that the folks up in Greenville County can figure out exactly how they’re going to set millage (since the city of Greenville has its own rec commission and doesn’t want to have to pay for another one) and handle the other details they have to feel comfortable with before they do what they’ve all pretty much agreed they need to do.

If they can pull this off, then maybe, just maybe their exercise in more efficient, representative government will impress the more public-minded commissioners of other public service districts, and one by one, they’ll acquiesce to their own special little laws allowing their dissolution. And slowly, maybe we’ll get the more efficient, representative local government that the Legislature promised us more than three decades ago.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.