25 minutes cost state $10,165

The S.C. House finished work on the state budget at 11 p.m. Thursday, but legislators kept talking — and delaying a final vote — until 12:25 a.m. Friday.

That last 25 minutes cost state taxpayers $10,165 in “per diem” expense payments that House members claimed for working Friday — technically another full day.

It is a staple of contentious nights, a dirty ghost of debates past, that if they go past midnight, they collect another day’s pay.

House members joked all evening that debate would stretch past midnight so everyone could collect the $95 per-person check.

Indeed, that’s what happened.

Rep. Ken Kennedy, D-Williamsburg, said he earned the money.

“I stayed there until 12 o’clock and I figured hey, it’s another day,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy sits on the Ways and Means Committee and was heavily involved in the debate, particularly on trying to preserve $10 million in the conservation bank for buying public lands.

But 17 of the 124 House members refused to accept the per diem early Friday. Others may submit letters rejecting it when session resumes Tuesday.

Some, like Majority Leader Rick Quinn, were angry that several House members called for a roll call at 12:17 a.m. The official House journal does not yet reflect who was recorded as asking that the roll be taken.

If no one had asked for a roll call, the House would not technically have started another day’s work and the payments would not have been required.

Quinn, R-Richland, said some of the debate earlier in the evening was intended to delay.

“It would have been easy enough to walk out of there right before 12,” he said.

Nothing requires the House to be done with the budget in three days, but it is the recent tradition and the clear preference of Republican leaders.

The House worked on the budget:

• From 10 a.m. to 8:05 p.m. Tuesday

• From 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

• From 9:30 a.m. Thursday to 12:25 a.m. Friday

To be sure, the last hour of debate was more passionate than any of the roughly 32 hours that preceded it.

At 11 p.m. Thursday, Minority Leader James Smith, D-Richland, took the podium and scolded Republicans for writing a budget that he said shorted public education, glossed over problems with health care and robbed trust funds.

Then Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, blistered her colleagues for not having the guts to buck House leaders on what she called the worst budget she’d seen in 12 years in the Legislature.

Rep. Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, his voice tight, took the floor at 11:50 p.m. to defend the budget he and his Ways and Means Committee sweated over.

“It is my desire that we not go over midnight and cost the state,” more money, Harrell said. “But I cannot sit in this chair and let these comments go unanswered.”

Harrell spoke for less than 10 minutes, saying the budget addressed core needs in a tight year.

Other legislators still wanted to be heard, pushing the vote until after midnight.

One was Rep. Joel Lourie, D-Richland, who prefaced his remarks by saying he would not take the per diem.

“We should have finished our work in three days,” Lourie said Friday. “We didn’t, so I wouldn’t have felt good accepting another day’s pay.”

Rep. Kennedy was back at work at his Big G hardware store in Greeleyville Friday afternoon. He had gotten home at 3:30 a.m.

“Am I giving back the $95?” he said. “No.”

Reach Bauerlein at (803) 771-8485 or vbauerlein@thestate.com Staff writer Aaron Gould Sheinin contributed to this report.