Editorials from across South Carolina: session shortening, farm bill veto, FOI changes

Shorter session

The South Carolina Legislature hasn’t finalized much of major importance this session, a fact that speaks for substantially shortening the legislative session, beginning next year.

A bill that would do just that received approval of the House Judiciary Committee last week, and will go to the House floor this week, with only a few legislative days remaining.

Even with highway and ethics bills still in the balance, the House should make time to put this bill to an affirmative vote. It would cut the 2017 session by three weeks, and future sessions by as much as four weeks.

The Senate approved the proposal 35-0 earlier this month, demonstrating that there’s no time like an election year to put a good government bill to the test.…

(C)utting the session by three weeks would save the taxpayers about a quarter of a million dollars. Reducing the time spent in Columbia is at least a step in the direction of removing an impediment to legislative service.

And it would burnish the Legislature’s record in a year that has so far produced little to boast about.

Farm bill veto

South Carolina’s farmers, especially those in the lower half of the state, suffered immeasurably last October when torrential rains washed out their crops. Farmers lost $500 million in what became known as a “thousand-year” flood that dumped more than two feet of rain on parts of the state.

Thanks to the vision of the South Carolina Legislature, that aid is on its way. Both the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly to override Gov. Nikki Haley’s veto of the aid package. (The Senate voted 39-3 and the House voted 112-2.) If ever there was an appropriate time for the state to step in and offer those farmers relief, this is it. After all, agriculture is among the top industries in South Carolina, and failure to lend aid after a once-a-millennium disaster would have been a failure of government. …

With all due respect to the Governor’s Office and Gov. Haley, cheerleading from the halls of government would have done very little to help the state’s farmers who suffered an aggregate $376 million in crop losses alone during last year’s floods.

Yes, we should treat everyone fairly. Haley should have been eager to help these farmers deal with these unprecedented losses. Everyone would understand, then, if some other business sector suffers a catastrophe and the state steps in to mitigate those losses to preserve jobs and revenue.

FOI enforcement

City and county governments and school districts are required by law to give you public information when you ask for it and to conduct business in public meetings. The state Freedom of Information Act requires this.

But local governments have been violating the spirit and even the letter of the law for years. Local governments have charged members of the public outrageous fees for copies of documents and other information, far more than it costs to look up and reproduce the information. Public bodies have met in secret to discuss matters that the law requires them to discuss in public.

They have done so because there is no reasonable method to enforce the law. …

A bill working its way through the General Assembly would address this problem. It would create an administrator who could hear disputes about public information. If a local government denies you information, you could appeal to this administrator and he or she could force the local government to give you the information. On the other hand, if you were pestering a school board with frivolous, time-consuming requests, the administrator could rule for the school board.

The bill would create an enforcement mechanism for the Freedom of Information Act that wouldn’t force citizens to take on the costs of litigation to defend their rights.