Secret money grab for bowl violates public trust

REASONABLE PEOPLE can disagree about whether it makes sense for the Legislature to spend $380,000 to help start a football bowl when the state can’t afford to put an adequate number of troopers on our highways or enough guards in our prisons or to provide basic care for the severely mentally ill or to pay for the teacher specialists and summer school programs we promised failing schools.

Although it has the potential to become a major tourism draw, we’re not convinced that the state should invest in this proposed Palmetto Bowl under the current circumstances. While they’ve cut their request from $700,000 under pressure, supporters now acknowledge they plan to ask for the $380,000 every year for the next 15.

But the Legislature decides every year to spend money on items we don’t think are justified; that is simply part of the budget-writing process.

What sets this expenditure apart — what makes it absolutely intolerable — is the deceptive way supporters are going about grabbing the money.

If you go on the Internet and pull up a copy of the Ways and Means Committee budget under debate in the House this week, you won’t find a hint of this expenditure — not in the individual lines that are supposed to spell out where state money is going, and not even in the pages and pages of narrative directions to state agencies explaining how to spend that money. The only place you’ll find any reference to the Palmetto Bowl is in a spreadsheet that lists new spending items — a spreadsheet that is not available on the Internet, and that you will never see unless you’re enough of an insider to know to ask for it.

Until The State’s Valerie Bauerlein noticed that line in the spreadsheet, started asking questions and outed supporters, there had never been a word of public debate on the expenditure. It wasn’t just that no reporters had shown up for meetings when this was discussed; Rep. Chip Limehouse acknowledged that meetings on the bowl spending had been private.

We wish we could say this is a first. But it is a time-honored tradition for influential legislators to slip money into an agency’s budget with the literally unwritten understanding that the money will go not to the agency but to a beneficiary of the legislator’s choosing. As in the case with the Palmetto Bowl, whose funding is stashed in the budget for the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department, the agency is merely a pass-through; it has no say over the expenditure, and therefore provides no oversight of the project on which the money is spent. Often, there is not even any logical connection between the pass-through agency and expenditure; two years ago, House Republican Leader Rick Quinn funneled $900,000 for local soccer fields through the Department of Health and Environmental Control, whose budget he largely writes as chairman of the subcommittee that oversees its spending.

If they had been willing to have an open, honest debate from the beginning, supporters of the bowl game might have been able to make their case that this is a worthwhile investment. But they relinquished any claim to legitimacy through the deliberately deceptive and secretive way they have gone about getting the money. If the Legislature wants to maintain any credibility as an honest guardian of the public good, it needs to reject this proposal — and any similar ones that haven’t yet been discovered.