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Article published Apr 15, 2003
Senate budget writers revive agency House eliminated

Associated Press

COLUMBIA -- A little known agency that the House eliminated as it worked on its version of this year's budget was saved by a Senate Finance subcommittee on Monday.
The Procurement Review Panel, a two-employee agency that handles complaints about state contract awards, was eliminated along with its $109,520 budget.
The House's version of the budget would have sent those complaints to the state Administrative Law Judge Division.
"Those businesses are going to have to wait an extraordinary amount time if they are going to go through the administrative law judges," said Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter.
Other senators agreed the panel should stay.
"It has made a big difference in settling problems in South Carolina," said Sen. Yancey McGill, D-Kingstree.
and chairman of the subcommittee that restored the panel's budget.
"It's one of the most cost effective things we do," said Hugh Leatherman, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which took up work on the state's $5.1 billion spending plan Monday.
The Finance Committee also dumped a House plan that would have given the governor's office more oversight of sex education programs in public schools.
Associated Press
COLUMBIA -- The Corrections Department has dropped accreditation at four of its prisons to save money, agency Director Jon Ozmint says.
The move will leave six of the state's 29 prisons unaccredited, and Ozmint says that if the budget situation does not improve next year, more prisons may lose their seal of approval from the American Correctional Association.
The outside accreditation will be replaced by what Ozmint said will be tougher in-house evaluations.
"Do you pay someone to tell you you're meeting standards that you already exceed?" Ozmint said.
But others say that means the same people who run the prisons will be responsible for making sure that they are run right.
Bob Verdeyen, ACA's accreditation director, has tried to persuade Ozmint to keep the contracts because he said accreditation helps reduce liability insurance premiums.
It also can help corrections departments defend against some lawsuits, Verdeyen said.
"It doesn't guarantee that you won't be held liable, but logic tells me we would have been sued more times," Verdeyen said, referring to his 11 years as a federal prison warden.
"There's no watchdog," said Mike Davis of U.S. Risk Underwriters, one of the nation's largest companies that manage insurance for private prisons.
The move will save $250,000, no small amount when the prison department is facing a $28 million deficit this fiscal year, which ends June 30.
The new director, who officially took over the department in February, has eliminated 148 jobs to save money. Most of the cuts came in education programs.
The money the agency would have spent accrediting the four prisons whose citations run out this year would have cost a quarter of the agency's maintenance budget for all 29 institutions, Ozmint said.
The prisons that will lose accreditation are Perry, the state's smallest maximum-security facility; McDougall, a medium-security prison; Walden, a minimum-security facility; and Watkins, another minimum-security prison.
Eleven more prisons come up for reaccreditation next fiscal year, and Ozmint plans to ask for a one-year extension. But the director says without some budget help, those prisons may lose their accreditation too.
Ozmint's decision has some support from an unlikely source.
Cutting accreditation is justifiable if the only other option was cutting more employees, said Columbia lawyer Gaston Fairey, who has sued the state several times on behalf of inmates about prison conditions.
"I support his action in times like these," Fairey said. "Those are the kinds of things that, unfortunately, states have to do."

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