Palmetto Pride, a five-year-old nonprofit that backs litter-prevention programs around South Carolina, found itself in the hot seat a few months ago when Sanford began talking about his plans for next year's budget.

The program, Sanford said, is a classic case of "pass-through" spending: Money passes through one of the state agencies to pay for projects but is not held to the same level of spending scrutiny as other parts of the budget.

The governor says millions of dollars in projects each year are funded this way. As a staunch fiscal conservative, Sanford says the spending of those dollars should be accounted for like all the other dollars the state spends.

Palmetto Pride says there's one major flaw in that argument: The nonprofit doesn't get its money from taxpayers. Rather, the state funds it gets come from fines and fees assessed against litter bugs and other violators targeted by the state.

Today, the governor is allowing a glimpse of his executive budget for the next fiscal year, which begins in July. The 2005-06 budget will focus largely on law enforcement priorities, but there's a chance some light will be shed on what Sanford has in store for Palmetto Pride and a slew of other pass-through spending plans.

"We are not saying this (Palmetto Pride) isn't a program without merit. It clearly is," Will Folks, a spokesman for the governor's office, said Monday. "It is simply a question of what is the best way to make the roads cleaner, and how we do that with the minimum strain on the taxpayer."

Folks said currently, Palmetto Pride has carte blanche to issue grants and pay its executive director whatever it wants, without justifying its budget.

All but $30,000 of Palmetto Pride's $3 million budget is passed through the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, which technically oversees the nonprofit. But in reality, the state agency has no say in where the money is spent.

That money is the lifeblood of numerous local agencies around the state. Carolyn Tomlinson, director of Keep Dorchester County Beautiful, said the agency she heads depends a lot on grant money from Palmetto Pride, which doles out about $400,000 a year to anti-litter and beautification programs around South Carolina.

"Before it (Palmetto Pride) came along, it was hard to find donations and support," said Tomlinson, who noted that her agency just received a $10,000 grant from Palmetto Pride. "They just made it quite a bit easier to fulfill some of our programs."

Sen. David Thomas, R-Greenville, chairman of Palmetto Pride and nicknamed the "litter czar," doesn't think that the gaps with the governor are unbridgeable, and says he is open to changes that need to be made so the program can continue.

"The governor is holding us up as an example because we are so high-profile," said Thomas, who describes himself as an environmentalist. "It is my job to impress upon him what is on the line here," he said. "Litter cleanup is big. There's a lot at stake, like economic development and tourism. We need to continue the job we are doing."

Littering statewide has declined by a third in the past few years, a tangible result of Palmetto Pride's education and prevention efforts.

Suggestions to privatize the program won't work, Thomas said, because it's too tough to come up with a multimillion-dollar budget that way. That said, Thomas isn't opposed to the transparency the governor thinks is appropriate.

"It's very legitimate for the governor to ask those questions," he said. "There are many groups out there receiving money from the state that are below the radar. But we're not one of them."

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