A question raised by the attorney general's office about the legality of Charleston County's upcoming half-percent sales-tax referendum now is in the hands of the S.C. Supreme Court. We can only hope that the high court will signal by week's end whether it sees any reason for concern about the framing of the question now slated for the Nov. 2 ballot.
While the attorney general's office doesn't usually become a party to legal action that is the outgrowth of one of its opinions, this isn't a usual situation. The opinion was issued after the deadline for changing the ballot language had passed. That wasn't the attorney general's fault. Any blame for the timing lies with the group of local legislators who asked the attorney general for the 11th-hour opinion.
Nevertheless, the opinion did urge the county to seek judicial guidance and the county countered that it couldn't get a final determination before the November election without the help of the state's chief legal officer. Attorney General Henry McMaster agreed to assist by becoming a defendant in the county's petition to the high court for original jurisdiction. Both sides moved quickly and the matter has been in the court's hands since last week.
The best-case scenario for sales-tax advocates is that the high court will issue a ruling from the bench that the referendum does meet the legal test. At issue is whether a three-part question on the funding of mass transit, road-building projects and the purchase of open space can be answered with a single "yes" or "no." That question actually was raised in a lawsuit that invalidated this same referendum after it was approved two years ago. It got no comment from the court. Instead, the court said the referendum's fatal flaw was its biased language that favored the tax.
But the attorney general's office had concerns that the state law that seems to allow one answer to a multi-part question conflicts with another and warned that there has never been a court ruling directly on the issue. The county, however, says it is confident in reworking the question that it followed the letter of the law.
The court could resolve the issue once and for all in the days ahead. It also could decline to accept original jurisdiction. In the latter instance, the referendum would proceed but the question would be left hanging. Under that scenario, if the tax were approved once again, yet another legal challenge, starting with the lower courts, would be a foregone conclusion.
We'd like to see the high court give a definitive answer now, one way or another. If the court ultimately isn't going to allow a single answer to a multi-part question, it would be far better to stop the process now and set a new date than to proceed with the November referendum under false hope.
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