As pitches go, it’s not terrible: Beaufort County government wants residents to raise $950 million for a series of “critical” road and traffic improvements over 10 years through a new 1% sales tax of which a huge chunk, maybe more than half, would be paid by visitors, not by locals.
The problem is Beaufort County government itself is terrible.
Trusting council members or their bureaucratic charges to manage any money at all requires a leap of faith the length of the U.S. 278 bridges from Bluffton’s mainland to Hilton Head Island.
“I cannot shake the feeling that we are being kept in the dark,” one council member emailed his colleagues in March. “There’s no reason to operate under a cloak of secrecy if we are doing everything in the best interests of our constituents,” another replied.
“In the dark”? “Cloak of secrecy”? Give us more money to mismanage? No thanks. Back in September, yet another council member said Beaufort County didn’t just have a black eye because of all its troubles. “We’re in the trauma center in an induced coma,” she said.
What’s so bad? Council members didn’t make sure the revenue from the last sales tax hike was well spent and they have now parted ways unceremoniously with three consecutive county administrators and may have broken the state’s open-meeting law in hiring a fourth in May.
Only two of the nine projects a 2018 sales tax increase was supposed to fund are done, Ann Ubelis of Lady’s Island told the council Monday. “You ask us to trust?” she asked. “No, we don’t.”
Yet on a 9-2 vote, the County Council placed a new tax measure on the Nov. 5 ballot. Only Council member Thomas Reitz sounded like a voice of reason, explaining his no vote by noting that it’s the wrong time to ask people to pay more money for these projects, given that inflation is up, average incomes are down and so few of the projects promised in 2018 are even close to done.
It’s impossible to overstate how little trust Beaufort County government deserves right now.
In 2018, then-administrator Josh Gruber signed a county contract paying himself a $24,000 consulting fee on his way out the door and later faced an ethics complaint and a fine for his self-dealing. Successor Ashley Jacobs oversaw a tumultuous period of employee turnover and infighting before she resigned in 2020. Then Eric Greenway came along, and things got worse.
As reported by the Hilton Head Island Packet’s Sebastian Lee in multiple stories over the past year, Greenway gave a woman he had an interest in dating a consulting contract and then a full-time, six-figure county job, and also tried to get her consulting company to buy nearly $36,000 of weighted blankets from a company owned by the deputy administrator’s husband so the county could purchase them and cover the trail.
A federal lawsuit the woman has filed against Beaufort County alleges Greenway once saw her and her boyfriend and texted her: “Be aware of what you gave up tonight and what this will cost you…. But have f——- fun because you are now just an employee of Beaufort County and I’ve lost all trust and affinity for you!”
New county administrator Michael Moore, a Navy veteran, has a tough assignment when he starts July 1. One way to begin to rebuild the trust Beaufort County has lost would be to issue a written report from an outside consultant paid $350,000 to investigate the county’s purchasing and procurement practices.
At a council meeting three months ago, the consultant verbally described years of “excessive, personal, frivolous, not business-driven” county charges, and county council chairman Joseph Passiment said, “We have acknowledged those mistakes and we’re moving on,” but no written report was produced. It was as if one didn’t exist or matter.
Moving on? If taxpayers can’t see how that money was mismanaged, they should not just vote against a sales tax hike, they should vote out any council member who won’t release the report.
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