Ethics watchdog: Ex-councilman should pay for special election to fill seat

Richland County taxpayers are picking up the tab – as much as $62,000 – for a special election to fill Kelvin Washington’s former County Council seat after Washington pleaded guilty to not filing state income tax returns for three years and the governor declared the seat vacant.

But an ethics watchdog believes that cost shouldn’t be borne by the public.

John Crangle, director of Common Cause S.C., said he believes Washington should reimburse the county for the May 31 District 10 special election in Lower Richland.

“It’s commonplace in South Carolina (that) public officials get themselves in trouble,” Crangle said, citing as examples a string of South Carolina sheriffs removed from office in recent years for criminal conduct, including former Lexington County Sheriff James Metts, who went to prison for a year after pleading guilty to a federal charge of interfering in the handling of two county jail detainees.

“The entire cost of wrongdoing of public officials should be dumped on them, not on the people that elected them,” Crangle said. “The taxpayers are not to blame for the wrong of any of these public officials. The public officials are.”

Crangle said he has long hoped to see a state law be enacted to require elected officials to pay the financial consequences of being removed from office for criminal wrongdoing. And at least one Richland County delegation member said she would consider introducing a bill along those lines.

“It does make sense,” said Rep. Beth Bernstein, D-Richland. “And if it saves taxpayers money and is a deterrent to lawmakers or those who are elected to ... get into crime,” then it’s worth consideration, she said.

But, Bernstein said, she hasn’t begun to consider what the details of such a bill might look like, such as how to treat a situation where an official resigns from office rather than is removed.

An order for Washington to pay for the District 10 special election would not be the first time a public official has been made to foot the bill for the consequences of his crime.

In 2008, U.S. District Judge Joe Anderson, at the urging of Crangle, ordered former state treasurer Thomas Ravenel to pay $28,676 for the cost of the General Assembly special session to elect his successor as part of Ravenel’s sentencing on federal cocaine charges.

One difference, though, is that Washington already has been sentenced for the crime that had him removed from office. So Crangle likely cannot ask a judge to amend Washington’s sentence to include restitution for the cost of the special election.

Also unlike Ravenel’s case, an order for Washington to pay the cost of the special election to fill his seat would be “a moot point,” said Washington’s attorney, Mike Duncan.

“He does not have the funds to pay,” Duncan said.

A $62,000 special election bill for Washington would come on top of the $85,500 in fines and late fees he already owes to the State Ethics Commission dating to 2012.

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in February to not filing tax returns for three years, Washington was charged with felony DUI in connection with a crash that hospitalized two victims.

In March, on the same day candidate filing opened for County Council seats, Gov. Nikki Haley announced Washington would be removed from his seat for failing to file tax returns, which she said constitutes a crime of “moral turpitude.”

Washington was to be up for re-election if he chose to run in the November general election.

It will cost about $34,000 for the May 31 special primary election to fill the District 10 council seat until after the general election in November. If necessary, a June 14 runoff would cost an additional $28,000, the county elections office has said.

With the seat already regularly slated for the ballot in the November election, another regularly scheduled primary also will be held June 14, with an if-necessary runoff scheduled for June 28.