Charleston County attorney Natalie Ham is set to receive a $50,000 bonus to augment her $272,958 salary for efforts outside of her usual legal work for the county.
The move, approved by a 7-2 vote Tuesday night, is creating some controversy among elected council members after the county’s previous attorney negotiated consultant payment after he left the county to become a federal judge.
“Ms. Ham has been working for two years outside her normal duties with the Environmental Management Department,” said council member and former chair Teddie Pryor, who is running to be mayor of North Charleston. “The council discussed and figured she should get some type of compensation for that.”
However, the payment didn’t sit well with council member Larry Kobrovsky of Sullivan’s Island and chairman Herb Sass of Mount Pleasant, both of whom opposed the measure.
“She’s a good attorney, and I know and respect her greatly,” Kobrovsky told the City Paper. “It’s just a question of when you get paid as much as she does in taxpayer money, you don’t give them $50,000 extra for doing extra work for the county. In the private world, when extra work needs to be done, you just step up and do it.”
Ham did not respond to requests for comment. Ham’s duties with the Environmental Management Department reportedly included administrative work for the county’s landfills and recycling programs.
Pryor said hiring a full-time director to do the work Ham provided would have cost the county between $100,000 and $160,000 per year, plus benefits. Ham did not ask for any compensation in return for her efforts, Pryor added, “but council members thought it was the right thing to do. If you hire someone, you ought to pay them.”
‘Hundreds of thousands of dollars’
Ham’s most recent publicly available salary records list her as making $272,958 per year plus benefits.
“When you’re paying someone hundreds of thousands of dollars — that’s enough,” Kobrovsky said. “You do whatever you have to.”
Pryor said the bonus was fair, especially considering the quality of work done.
“She did great,” he said. “We are where we need to be, and we got it all worked out. The landfill is being managed in the correct way now, and we had sales that needed to be opened and closed, and all that is done.”
But the added obscurity surrounding the April 26 vote was another point of contention, Kobrovsky said. Since the measure was discussed in executive session, council members were not required to recite the measure in detail in public session — only the vote needed to be public.
“They really obscured it,” he said. “They weren’t even going to read what the motion was … it wasn’t even clear to me that people would understand what it was.
“Any money spent by a public body ought to be clearly identified and explained,” Kobrovsky added. “Any penny spent, whether it be for compensation or fringe benefits, should be public record and discussed in the open. Everybody should know. The money doesn’t belong to us
— the money belongs to the public.”
Potential concerns stem from former controversy
The payment potentially raises red flags for those familiar with Ham’s predecessor, Joe Dawson, whose highest reported salary with the county was $421,358. When Dawson stepped down from his attorney position in 2020 to become a U.S. district judge, he took nearly a 50% pay cut, but a continued payment deal with the county on his exit would have closed that gap. The deal was uncovered in news reports in early 2021.
At the time, Dawson promised Charleston County that he would continue to provide legal advice for one year as he was going through the judicial confirmation process and serving on the federal bench. In exchange, he was to get $216,000 in monthly payments, plus a percentage of any opioid litigation settlement money the county received.
Nonprofit watchdog group Fix The Court filed an ethics complaint in 2021 because judges aren’t allowed to provide other legal services while on the bench. The dispute was whether the promise of advice constituted legal work. Dawson was publicly reprimanded by a council of judges for the deal, and he later rescinded the litigation fee portion of the deal with the county.
“Joe Dawson was being paid $8,000 a month for at least two or three years,” Pryor said. “[The April 26 vote] is a one-time payment for two years worth of work already done. It was done the right way, it was discussed and voted on in public, and nobody was trying to hide anything.”
Pryor said her work with the Environmental Management Department is set to end by the end of June.
“She has people in place now to run the landfill and … recyclables,” Pryor said. “If we decide we want to keep her in, that’s going to be up to council. But me, personally, I think it’s time to move on and hand it back over to the administrator.”
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