Sanford's vetoes target colleges, other projects

By JIM DAVENPORT Associated Press

COLUMBIA — More than $28 million would be slashed from public college budgets under vetoes issued by Gov. Mark Sanford on Tuesday.

The governor axed 149 items worth about $70 million from the $5.8 billion state budget passed by the Legislature. Sanford also vetoed 14 items worth $26 million from a separate $73 million bill, telling lawmakers they need to do far more to repay trust fund accounts raided during four years of lean budgets.

Four-year and technical colleges accounted for more than a third of the budget bill's cuts. Other large vetoes included $5 million for beach renourishment and $3 million for a new research jobs program.

Vetoes in the second bill included $7 million for Charles Towne Landing and $2 million for Orangeburg Technical College.

The governor's changes now go back to the Legislature, which must decide whether to override them.

The 149 budget vetoes surpass the 106 Sanford issued last year. Last year's vetoes brought out a House override steamroller that struck down all but one of Sanford's proposed changes in about two hours. The House will move a bit slower this time and likely won't take up the vetoes until Tuesday, said House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville.

Wilkins said he had just received the vetoes late Tuesday afternoon and could not immediately comment on what direction the House might take. "I will look through the vetoes to see which ones we think we should sustain and which ones we don't," he said.

The Senate then would take up the vetoes before the General Assembly adjourns June 2.

With the sheer number of vetoes, "it will take a good while to plow through those," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman said.

Sanford pointed to Leatherman for at least one budget shortcoming. When a senator wanted to add $15,000 to the spending plan for repairs to a Revolutionary War General Francis Marion's tomb, Sanford said Leatherman argued the state should spend $50,000. "This sort of budget writing results in increased spending without any weighting of relative need for a particular activity," Sanford said in his veto message.

Leatherman said it "is extremely unusual" for a governor to single out a legislator in his budget vetoes, but he said he's not taken aback by it. "You sort of get thick skinned after 25 years" in the Legislature, Leatherman said.

Sanford said his "vetoes are about the principle of doing first things first. I believe we should pay back trust funds borrowed when times were tough before we begin new and additional spending."

Caution is needed because the state's finances easily could slip given the national deficit, high gasoline prices, high consumer debt and the weak U.S. dollar, Sanford said.

\"If the economy does not rebound and we don't prepare ourselves for the future with the proper measures, we are bound to face the dreadful events of the past few years," including underfunded schools, reduced Medicaid programs and fewer police, he said.

The governor repeatedly has said that failure to repay trust accounts is a threat to the state's top credit rating.

Legislators insist that their spending plan addresses concerns credit rating agencies have raised. For instance, the budget repays two so-called rainy day reserve accounts.

Meanwhile, the budget put $117 million legislators had raided from trust accounts, including some of the money borrowed from a maintenance fund for the Barnwell low-level nuclear waste site.

Sanford said his vetoes would clear the way for that to rise to $210 million. That leaves a balance of about $226 million to be repaid to those accounts, Sanford said.

But even if the vetoes survive, the legislature would have to decide how to spend the cash.

"The governor can veto; the governor cannot appropriate," Wilkins said. If the House goes along with the vetoes, the money would become a surplus that the Legislature would have to decide how to spend next year, the speaker said.

Even if the money sits in a state account until that happens, it will generate interest that the state can use, Sanford said.

Democrats criticized the Republican governor for targeting health care and education programs along with cultural and historical sites and institutions, such as cash to repair the Old Exchange Building and Morris Island Light House in Charleston and the Penn Center, one the nation's first schools for freed slaves, in Beaufort County.

"Mark Sanford just doesn't get it," state Democratic Party Chairman Joe Erwin said. "He has become so immersed in his narrow political philosophy that he has grown completely out of touch with regular families in South Carolina."

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