Break up DHEC or leave it be? SC task force studying agency’s future releases suggestions
A group tasked with examining the provision of health and environmental services in South Carolina has been unable to reach consensus on perhaps the most pressing question it was called to answer.
The task force to Strengthen the Health and Promote the Environment of South Carolina, or SHaPE SC, a diverse collection of more than 50 health officials, environmental advocates and business, industry and governmental interests, recently wrapped up five months of meetings without rendering judgment on how the state’s health and environmental services should be structured and delivered in the future.
The group, which has met since June with the aim of influencing legislators keen on making major structural changes to the Department of Health and Environmental Control and several other related state agencies, presented its final report to the DHEC board Wednesday.
While the report makes more than two dozen recommendations for addressing critical challenges to the delivery of health and environmental services in South Carolina, such as paying workers better and fostering greater collaboration between state agencies and community organizations, it offers no opinion on a legislative proposal to break up DHEC.
“Any restructuring on a large scale will have significant expense to the state and its taxpayers,” the 44-page report concludes. “Without further details, the task force as a whole found that it was unable to make specific recommendations pertaining to any pending legislation concerning agency realignment at this time.”
Bernie Hawkins, a Columbia attorney who facilitated the task force’s discussions, said that while some SHaPE SC members strongly supported realignment, others vehemently opposed it.
“What we decided early on was that we were looking for consensus across all three subcommittees and we determined that we simply were not going to get a consensus among the subcommittees on the question of alignment,” he said.
Several task force members, including Lee Pearson, an associate dean at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, expressed disappointment at the group’s inability to reach an agreement on realignment.
Pearson, who chaired SHaPE SC’s public health subcommittee, said he feared lawmakers attempting to restructure health and environmental services in South Carolina without input from the task force would make uninformed decisions.
“I’m proud of the work that we have done collectively across all of our subcommittees, but I am concerned that we’re delivering a package that’s not fully wrapped,” he said at the group’s final meeting in October. “That troubles me because others can conveniently point to this group and say, ‘Well, if they couldn’t decide, then who can?’”
Lill Mood, a retired public health nurse who also served on the task force, warned members that by not weighing in on realignment they risked squandering an opportunity to shape the future of public health and environmental control in South Carolina.
“We’re just saying, wherever you put us, we’ll do the best we can,” she said, adding that, in her opinion, there would need to be an extremely compelling reason to shuffle the responsibilities of state agencies.
Breaking up DHEC
Senate Bill 2, introduced by Senate President Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, at the height of the pandemic last December, proposes to dissolve the sprawling Department of Health and Environmental Control and replace it with two separate agencies.
Split apart, the agencies would turn into the Department of Behavioral and Public Health and the Department of Environmental Services. Both would be Cabinet agencies under the governor’s control.
The Department of Behavioral and Public Health would be composed of DHEC’s health division and other previously distinct agencies like the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services and the Department of Mental Health.
The Department of Environmental Services would assume many of the duties DHEC’s environmental division now handles, including air quality, hazardous waste and water pollution compliance, while also absorbing the Department of Natural Resources’ water division.
Gov. Henry McMaster has not endorsed the bill’s specific realignment plan, which remains a work in progress, but has expressed general support for breaking up the agency due to its size.
DHEC, one of only three combined health and environmental agencies in the country, has more than 3,000 full-time employees and about 1,000 part-time and temporary workers, making it one of South Carolina’s largest departments.
Talk of splitting up the expansive agency is not new, but has gained renewed attention amid the current public health crisis. Detractors who criticize the agency for its halting response to the coronavirus pandemic and disjointed early efforts to get COVID-19 vaccines into the arms of residents argue the department has too much on its plate to function effectively.
The Senate plan to break up DHEC was presented several times to lawmakers earlier this year, but is still in the early stages of development and won’t be fully hashed out until lawmakers return to Columbia in January.
DHEC moves ahead with recommendations
DHEC Director Edward Simmer, a career Navy doctor who was appointed to his post just as lawmakers were beginning to discuss chopping up the department, formed the SHape SC task force in April to provide legislators a blueprint as they mapped out the agency’s future.
By bringing together leaders of relevant advocacy groups, state agency officials and representatives from industries DHEC regulates, Simmer hoped to generate a broad and eclectic mix of ideas for meeting the challenges of delivering health and environmental services to South Carolinians.
Over the past several months, the task force’s public health, behavioral health and environmental protection subcommittees met numerous times to develop recommendations that formed the basis of the joint report presented Wednesday to DHEC’s board.
Once adopted by the board, the report will be passed on to the governor’s office and Legislature for review ahead of the January legislative session.
The SHaPE SC report recommends spending more money on health and environmental services, which it says suffer from a severe lack of resources, and spreading financing more equitably between DHEC’s three core areas of environmental affairs, health care quality and public health.
The task force also advises hiking employee salaries to attract and retain high-quality workers, enhancing public and private partnerships to strengthen access to services, more clearly defining agency objectives and legislative priorities, and improving communication with lawmakers, among other suggestions.
Despite its failure to reach a consensus on how best to restructure health and environmental services in South Carolina, Simmer said the group’s work was instructive and would be used to inform internal changes at the agency that are not dependent on realignment.
“Whether we’re one agency, two agencies, whether some agencies become part of us, we don’t know,” he said at the task force’s final meeting last month. “But no matter what, I think we can do what is in those recommendations, and we should.”
This story was originally published November 10, 2021 at 9:31 AM.