- BIG STORY: Budget delays expose bigger fiscal questions
- ROUNDUP: Norman, Graham lead early GOP primary polling
- LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: Today’s special
- BRACK: Better water planning would help state
- MY TURN, Harris: Challenges for healing 25 years after 9/11
- MYSTERY PHOTO: Six big columns
- FEEDBACK: Send us your thoughts
Budget delays expose bigger questions about S.C.’s fiscal future
News analysis by Jack O’Toole | South Carolina’s budget process isn’t broken, but it is under stress — and experts say those stresses are only expected to grow over the next decade and beyond.
At present, they note, the pressures are primarily political as lawmakers struggle to reconcile promises of major income and property tax cuts with the health, education and infrastructure needs in America’s fastest-growing state.
In part, that’s why the legislature formally adjourned for the year on May 14 without passing a 2026-27 budget — and why state agencies are still operating under last year’s budget more than a month into the new fiscal year.
It’s also why the $15 billion budget deal announced last week by S.C. House and Senate negotiators, which leaders hope to push through both chambers sometime this summer, failed to produce a final agreement on almost $400 million in economic development and local infrastructure spending. Instead, a special committee will try to make those numbers add up between now and the end of September.
Bigger problems ahead
But the real budget challenges facing S.C., analysts told the Charleston City Paper this week, aren’t political. They’re structural. And they aren’t the kinds of problems lawmakers will be able to solve with last-minute budget deals or special committees.
Chief among these challenges, they say, is a population that’s growing and graying at the same time, with senior citizens expected to outnumber those under 17 by the end of next year. As a consequence, health care and infrastructure costs will continue to drive spending higher, even as the working-age share of the population paying into the system falls from 63% to 58% by 2040. (That, in turn, means the state will take in less revenue.)
But structural budget concerns don’t end with demographics. Just as worrisome, analysts note, is S.C.’s exposure to climate risk, particularly along the coast. Since 1980, for instance, the average U.S. number of “billion-dollar storms” — everything from hurricanes and tornados to wildfires and floods — has grown from about three per year to almost 25, with the pace accelerating in every decade. South Carolina is already among the states feeling the budgetary impacts.
Nevertheless, there are structural solutions to the structural challenges facing S.C. budgeters, state and national experts told the City Paper — tools that can give lawmakers the time and information they need to make better decisions as demographics and nature continue to remake the state.
Two-year budgeting
Currently, South Carolina is one of 30 states that writes a budget from scratch every year. The other 20, including neighboring North Carolina, use a two-year, or biennial, budgeting cycle — a process that can help lawmakers take a longer view while providing more stability for state agencies.
Pickens County Republican Sen. Rex Rice, who served on the House budget-writing committee for more than a decade before moving to the upper chamber, has introduced biennial budgeting legislation in three of the last four sessions.
Under his plan, the first year of every two-year legislative session would be a budget year, allowing lawmakers to dig into the details and focus intensely on creating a two-year budget. The second year would then be used for major legislative initiatives, stronger agency oversight and mid-session budget adjustments as required.
“Writing a $15 billion budget every year is a lot of work for a small number of people,” Rice said. “We need to do a better job of literally going through the agencies when they make their budget requests, and I think we could do that better with a full budget year.”
The devil in a biennial system, he noted, is in the details. In particular, he said, lawmakers would have to remain flexible in year two, as revenue estimates are updated and unexpected needs arise. Another concern, he added, would be ensuring that teachers and state employees didn’t have to wait two years for pay raises.
“Those things would need to be addressed in the adjustment session,” he said. “But looking at the other states that are doing it, we can see what’s working well and how it could work well here.”
Long-term assessments, stress tests
Two other ideas experts repeatedly suggested that S.C. consider were long-term budget assessments and budget stress tests, which they said would ideally be implemented together.
“One of the most important things for any state government is to make sure its budgeting is sustainable,” said Josh Goodman, a state budget analyst with the Pew Charitable Trusts. “And not just next year, but five years from now, 10 years from now, and further into the future.”
He added, “The things that states do — education, health care, public safety — those are timeless tasks for government.”
And the best way to ensure that sustainability, he said, is to arm lawmakers with more information on long-term spending demands and the impacts of immediate crises such as recessions.
“A long-term budget assessment, which projects revenue and spending forward several years, can tell you whether you’re in a structural deficit or not, so you see problems down the road and prevent them from really causing problems for your state,” Goodman said. “While a stress test looks at ‘What if things are worse than we expect?’ — and helps you be prepared for that event.”
Asked if those ideas are actually making a difference in states where they’ve been implemented, Goodman pointed to New Mexico’s 2022 long-term assessment, which revealed a looming structural deficit due to declining oil and gas production.
“They had huge budget surpluses at the time,” Goodman said. “But when their long-term assessment showed an imbalance ahead, that spurred lawmakers to put those temporary surpluses into trust funds and endowments that are an ongoing source of revenue to fund the state’s priorities in the future.”
Also noteworthy, according to Pew officials, is Utah, which unlike most states, had an actionable plan on the shelf when Covid hit in 2020 thanks to previous stress testing.
And the good news for S.C., if lawmakers decide to give themselves these tools, is that the building blocks already exist in state government.
“What we see is that South Carolina, like a lot of states, has taken most of the preliminary steps to using these tools,” Goodman said, noting that officials already run a bare-bones, numbers-only analysis three-years into the future. “So the next step would be to add the kind of detailed analysis that shows where the state’s fiscal strengths and weaknesses really are.”
And that information is even more critical, he noted, in states where leaders are considering big budget moves, such as S.C. GOP legislators’ pledge to eliminate the income tax.
“Whether it’s tax cuts or a new program, lawmakers don’t want to just do it for a year or two — they want it to be permanent,” he said. “But first, you have to actually know whether you can afford it over the long term.”
Jack O’Toole is Statehouse bureau chief for Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com
Norman, Graham lead early polling for special GOP Senate primary
By Jack O’Toole, Statehouse Bureau | The two-week Republican sprint to replace the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on this November’s ballot officially kicked off this week as the state GOP certified nine candidates to compete in the Aug. 11 special election.
High-profile contenders include U.S. Sen. Darlene Graham, recently appointed to serve the remainder of her late brother’s term, former Congressman and Gov. Mark Sanford, and U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman of York County and Russell Fry of Horry County.
The biggest question mark in the race? The real value of President Donald Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement of Graham, who until recently served as head of South Carolina’s Commission for the Blind and is little-known to GOP voters.
Fueling those questions is Trump’s increasingly spotty record of crowning winners in Republican primaries, including last month’s Palmetto State gubernatorial contest. After backing Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette exclusively in the first round, Trump issued a last-minute dual endorsement during the runoff, when polling began to suggest the magnitude of S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson’s 40-point landslide victory.
At least one local S.C. GOP official sounded skeptical of the sway Trump still holds over primary voters when he spoke to the Washington Post on Thursday.
“People are going to be independently minded in this,” Dorchester Republican Party Chairman C.J. Westfall said of the race. “I don’t think that Trump is the end-all, be-all that he used to be.”
That view seemed to get a boost later in the day from a fresh Emerson College/Nexstar Media poll of GOP voters showing Norman leading with 22%, followed by Graham at 19%, Fry at 12% and Sanford at 11%. A quarter were still undecided.
- Related: City Paper endorses Sanford
Other candidates in the race include Greenville businessman Mark Lynch, who finished a distant second to Graham in the June primary, Walterborough attorney Duke Buckner, former Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark McBride, retired Air Force officer Glenda Gail Parker and Lexington County entrepreneur Sam Shepherd.
Johnson picks Skardon as running mate
James Island nonprofit leader Sam Skardon is the running mate for Democratic Party gubernatorial nominee Jermaine Johnson, the campaign announced Thursday.
“Sam Skardon has a history in helping out marginalized communities and individuals who traditionally have not had access to capital and the political spectrum,” Johnson told the Charleston City Paper earlier this week. “Sam’s dedication to the people of South Carolina is unmatched,” adding that the campaign’s vision is to build a new South Carolina for the future.
Richland County’s Johnson, elected to the S.C. House of Representatives in 2020, won 60% of the vote in the June Democratic Party gubernatorial primary against two candidates who spent millions of dollars.
Skardon, the 38-year-old former chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party who ran for state Senate in 2020, said his pick as an outsider candidate for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket is a positive for working families across the state.
“Our state government simply isn’t delivering results right now on the issues that matter most to hardworking South Carolina families,” Skardon said in an exclusive interview. “I’m looking forward to meeting those South Carolinians who want new and better results from their state government, listen to them, and implement a vision for a state that actually addresses their needs.”
A Mount Pleasant native, Skardon graduated from Academic Magnet High School, got a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and earned a master’s in business administration from Georgetown University. His wife Leslie is a freshman member of Charleston City Council. They have twin 4-year-old boys.
In other recent news
Tributes, politics at Graham’s funeral. As South Carolina’s political elite gathered Wednesday in Columbia to pay tribute to the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, there was something looming in the background — the race to replace him on the Republican ballot in the fall.
- S.C. bids farewell to Graham
- South Carolina honors Graham
- Graham’s wit, determination recalled
- Statehouse mourners say goodbye to Graham
- Joint Base Charleston to be renamed in honor of Graham
2028: Democrats vote to give S.C. first in the nation primary in 2028. In a hotly contested vote, members of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee selected S.C. over Nevada and New Hampshire as the site of the party’s first presidential primary in 2028.
- Road to Democratic nomination will begin in S.C.
- Could putting S.C. first mean less power for Black voters?
Voucher payments to homeschoolers will continue after lawmakers fail to close ‘loophole.’ More than 2,500 S.C. families will continue to receive state private school voucher payments of up to $7,600 after lawmakers failed to close what many program supporters called a ‘loophole’ in the law.
Tattoo shop, couple file lawsuit over S.C.’s tattoo laws. The suit contends South Carolina’s tattoo laws improperly limit artistic expression under the First Amendment.
Conservationist McShane receives Order of the Palmetto. Johns Island resident Mike McShane, former chair of the S.C. Department of Natural Resources board and the S.C. Conservation Bank, has received the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest civilian award, for his conservation efforts.
S.C. gas prices rose over 10 cents in one week. The average gasoline prices in South Carolina have risen 10.3 cents per gallon in the last week, GasBuddy’s survey of 3,028 stations.
Today’s special
Award-winning cartoonist Robert Ariail has a special knack for poking a little fun in just the right way. This week, he looks at water pollution – specifically the increasing amounts of tiny nurdles polluting South Carolina’s streams.
- Love this week’s cartoon or hate it? Did he go too far, or not far enough? Send your thoughts to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Brack: Better water planning would help state
Commentary by Andy Brack | Back in 1929, the man who became South Carolina’s longest-serving state superintendent of education (1922-1947) included a quote in a state report about the need to be prepared.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” said the report by James H. Hope.
It’s still true today. With recent news around the state about two challenges related to the state’s waters, maybe it’s time for South Carolina to get a little more serious about water planning.
Last week, Statehouse Report outlined how millions of tiny plastic pellets called nurdles are finding their way into state waters due to carelessness, accidents or something else. The United States produces about 60 billion pounds of these granular plastics that make the plastic products we use everyday like toothbrushes, water bottles and lawn chairs.
The big problem with nurdles is they get into the food chain because they look tasty to small fish, who eat them. Then big fish eat the small ones. And then we eat the bigger fish and end up with more pieces of microplastics floating around our bodies – not healthy.
Also last week, the Charleston City Paper reported how state waters may be at increasing risk from development. New research shows rainwater that hits temporary waterways called “ephemeral streams” to feed reservoirs and creeks may no longer have federal protections following a 2023 judicial decision. While some state protections remain, the rules are now a little more unsettled.
Squishier rules make for more conservation volatility. This brings us back to planning. More than 30 years ago, the state passed a zoning measure to encourage local governments to do comprehensive land planning. Having more certainty where housing and industrial sites can develop, as well as knowing the areas where conservation is a priority, makes for better, more responsible long-term use of land. It also brings more certainty to economic development – and to conservation – if everyone knows the rules.
These days with all of the hullabaloo over data centers, which use huge amounts of fresh water to cool electronics that keep information flowing, and over continuing environmental threats to water supplies, maybe it’s time to bring more certainty to how we manage water, just as we did with managing land.
If each county had a comprehensive water management plan, for example, it might not have to spend so much time on a moratorium here or a reaction there when a crisis pops up. Why? Because the plan would help mitigate future crises.
“I think it’s government’s responsibility to include the assurance that every citizen has the ability to depend on whatever public water supply is being provided and for it to not be affected by any contaminant,” said Johns Island conservationist Michael McShane, a Ducks Unlimited board member who recently won South Carolina’s highest civilian award for his decades of conservation commitment.
Economic development and conservation can co-exist – and flourish – when rules are clear, said McShane, a former chair of the S.C. Department of Natural Resources board of directors and the S.C. Conservation Bank.
McShane said offering more certainty in water planning would benefit everyone. It’s a logical step forward from the state’s 1994 land planning, too.
And to ensure it wouldn’t be an unfunded mandate, the state should provide some financial assistance to local governments to assist water conservation planning efforts.
“Do a water wetlands plan,” McShane said. “It ought to be part of what they’re doing with comprehensive planning anyway.”
As General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
With increasing threats to South Carolina’s much-heralded abundant waters from nurdles, pollution, development and storm-related flooding, the General Assembly in 2027 should help local governments get on top of water conservation planning with guidelines and funding to make it happen.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Harris: Challenges for healing 25 years after 9/11
Commentary by Lyndon Harris | Twenty-five years ago in New York City, I stood beneath the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center. What I could not have imagined that day was that the hardest part of my journey would begin after the smoke cleared.
I was serving as priest associate in charge of St. Paul’s Chapel, the Episcopal church directly across the street from the World Trade Center. When the second hijacked airplane struck the South Tower, I was standing at its base. The plane exploded into the building and erupted into an apocalyptic fireball. As debris and ash began falling, I ran for my life.
I made it back to my office three blocks south, where we began moving preschool children into the basement. Traumatized adults joined unsuspecting children in singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” The moment was surreal. Soon afterward, the South Tower came down with a violent shock wave and a sickening roar that shook the ground beneath us.
By that weekend, I was leading a ragtag group of volunteers in establishing a feeding station outside St. Paul’s Chapel. That modest effort grew into a burgeoning ministry to the Ground Zero community. Over the next eight and a half months, more than 15,000 volunteers served more than a half million meals. Chiropractors, podiatrists, massage therapists and grief counselors cared for exhausted recovery workers. Some of New York’s finest musicians came to soothe, encourage and inspire. It was an extraordinary community of compassion created in the shadow of catastrophe.
But when the work ended and the cameras left, my life began to fall apart. Like many responders, volunteers and recovery workers, I carried injuries that were not immediately visible. The World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), clinical depression and respiratory illnesses that affected my lungs and sinuses. Given that, plus my own poor choices, I spent more than a decade in a dark place. Reclaiming my life from trauma and depression would prove as difficult as anything I had faced at Ground Zero.
I was not alone. More than two decades after the attacks, studies of World Trade Center responders continue to find elevated levels of PTSD, depression and other mental-health problems. Nearly half of some groups of nontraditional responders—including volunteers, clergy and construction workers—have reported needing mental-health support, according to a 2020 study in Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research.
I was fortunate. My faith sustained me and friends refused to give up on me. Mental-health professionals helped me understand what had happened to my mind, body and spirit. The practice that eventually became central to my recovery was forgiveness.
I trained in the methods developed by Fred Luskin and the Stanford Forgiveness Project, whose evidence-based approach helped me understand that forgiveness does not mean forgetting what happened, excusing wrongdoing or surrendering any demand for justice. Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves and is not the same thing as reconciliation. Forgiveness means reclaiming our freedom from the wounds and resentments that might otherwise shape the rest of our lives.
And here is something else I have learned: every community has its own Ground Zero. Charleston has become known around the world for extraordinary acts of grace and forgiveness after unspeakable violence. But forgiveness is not a single heroic act. It is a daily practice. It asks not only how we remember tragedy, but how we refuse to let tragedy become our identity.
On August 27, I look forward to continuing this conversation with our community at Circular Congregational Church in an evening presented in partnership with Buxton Books. My hope is not simply to tell the story of Ground Zero, but to explore what every community eventually faces: how we remember honestly, grieve deeply and still choose a future that is not defined by our wounds.
Lyndon Harris is a forgiveness teacher and coach, keynoter and workshop leader who lives in West Ashley. His memoir, “Forgiveness at Ground Zero,” (Bloomsbury Academic Press) is available July 23.. More: lyndonharris.com
Six big columns
Here’s an impressive building somewhere in South Carolina. Where is it? For bonus points, tell us something cool about the building. Please send in your best guess – and your name and hometown – to feedback@statehousereport.com. And if you have a mystery photo to share, send that along too (but tell us what it is because we’re horrible guessers.)
Last week’s mystery, “Boardwalk,” proved to be a little tough. It showed a boardwalk on the way to the Sewee Shell Ring at Francis Marion National Forest in Awendaw. The area has been of interest recently because of the Horse Island Fire earlier this month that was about 18 miles away.
Hats off to these four sleuths who got this week’s mystery: Jay Altman of Columbia; Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; and Frank Bouknight of Summerville.
Peel shared, “The trail is a one-mile, self-guided loop that leads the visitor through three different plant communities and marshlands, then to a 4,000-year-old shell ring and an 800-year-old clamshell mound.”
Bouknight added, “The surviving portion of this archeological (shell ring) site is comprised almost entirely of oyster shells in a ring around 150 feet in diameter, rising about 10 feet high. Named after the Sewee, one of the numerous indigenous tribes of the area at the time of Charleston’s founding in 1670, the Sewee Shell Mound had already existed for nearly 4,000 years.”
- SHARE: If you have a Mystery Photo to share, please send it to us – and make sure you tell us what it is!
Send us your thoughts
Please send us your thoughts about politics and policy in South Carolina, but make sure to leave phone numbers and hometowns to help us verify them for publication. We publish non-defamatory comments, but unless you provide your contact information – name and hometown, plus a phone number used only by us for verification – we can’t publish your views.
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Statehouse Report, founded in 2001 as a weekly legislative forecast that informs readers about what is going to happen in South Carolina politics and policy, is provided by email to you at no charge every Friday.
- Editor and publisher: Andy Brack, 843.670.3996
- Statehouse bureau chief: Jack O’Toole
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