Charleston County Council has fulfilled the first part of its responsibility to set in motion the rerun of a voided half-percent sales tax election. Next week, council is scheduled to meet in special session to agree on the language of the new referendum. Once that is completed, the responsibility will shift to Gov. Mark Sanford. We believe the governor's only real option is to then set an election as soon as legally possible.
On Tuesday, County Council unanimously voted to ask the governor to set a date for a new election. Council's action came in the wake of the discovery of a 1938 law that provides for a rerun of an election that for any reason is found to be null and void. While the half-percent sales tax was approved in November 2002, the result was thrown out by the S.C. Supreme Court because of its prejudicial language favoring the vote. That language had been approved by County Council.
While there was no evidence that a single voter was misled by council's unfortunate editorializing, the court said, in effect, that didn't matter. Instead, the landmark ruling said a referendum is fatally flawed if the language is less than neutral. Clearly council has to clean up that language in accordance with the ruling. According to the governor's aides, he is yet to receive any communication from the county. It is his office's position that he would have to see the new referendum wording before considering a new vote. That's a reasonable request.
County attorneys already are busy on that score. There's reason for haste. One of the beneficiaries of the half-percent sales tax, the county's public transportation system, will go out of business in April if it fails to obtain the kind of permanent financing the 2002 referendum was expected to provide. Legally, once the governor calls for the election rerun, it can be held within 60 days.
It should be noted the governor has called two new elections under the 1938 law, but none involving a referendum. It's important to emphasize that the 1938 law calls for a rerun of the previous election as opposed to a new, special election. That means referendum language must be virtually the same, absent the flawed wording. It doesn't mean that the rerun can be delayed until the next regularly scheduled election. If that were true, there would have been no need for the law requiring the rerun.
We believe the 2002 election showed it was the will of the voters to approve the one-half percent sales tax for public transportation, open space and road construction and that the will of the voters was thwarted by County Council's bungled language. We believe a 1939 court decision that grew out of the 1938 law says that once the matter is formally brought to the governor's attention, as County Council is in the process of doing, there is no choice but to order the rerun.
Certainly it is only fair that the voters be given another chance to express their views on funding public transportation before the buses are taken off the roads.
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