The secret report Beaufort County won’t let you see won’t be the last word on misdeeds, luckily | Opinion

Show me a more secretive county council in South Carolina than Beaufort County’s.

You can’t.

As if its refusal to release a report on an outside investigation into five years of financial shenanigans wasn’t bad enough, there are new reasons to distrust Beaufort County: The cost of the — completed! — investigation is still climbing, and county attorneys are claiming that releasing the report would require a unanimous County Council vote .

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.

State law says an “institution’s financial or administrative records” are not exempt from public disclosure, and media lawyer Jay Bender puts it more plainly, “There is nothing that would justify the Beaufort County Council in withholding spending records. Period.”

Even if an argument is made that releasing the report requires waiving attorney-client privilege, nothing in state law or in slideshows , model rules of parliamentary procedures , freedom of information handbooks and freedom of information handbook supplements put out by the South Carolina Association of Counties says a vote must be unanimous. That notion was advanced in June without corroboration as public pressure mounted to make a public report on rampant purchasing abuses, you know, public.

Yet only three of 11 County Council members — David Bartholomew, Paula Brown and Tom Reitz — want to make public the report by the Haynesworth Sinkler Boyd law firm the council solicited a year ago for $350,000 and first reviewed in private in late June.

Bartholomew, Brown and Reitz voted to discuss this issue in public at the July 23 council meeting, but six colleagues — Chair Joe Passiment and members York Glover, Alice Howard, Mark Lawson, Larry McElynn and Anna Maria “Tab” Tabernik — blocked that. They — and members Logan Cunningham and Gerald Dawson — refuse to release a report the public has a right to see.

At the meeting, Glover even had the audacity to explain his desire for secrecy by saying, “I don’t know what can come out of that report that will be damaging to this council.” And Lawson had the gumption to explain his desire for secrecy by saying, “There’s nothing in this report that I’m afraid of being released to the public.”

Well, which is it? No wait, scratch that. Who cares?

A) Public records being damaging isn’t a reason to keep them secret. And b) If you’re not “afraid” of anything in a report that is public by definition then don’t keep it secret.

While pushing to discuss the issue in public last month, Reitz revealed the cost of the law firm’s work was “$350,000 and climbing, probably $400,000 now” — even though the council had capped the expense at $350,000 in August and never voted on it again.

In a bit of pretzel-shaped logic, the council majority is citing attorney-client privilege as the reason it won’t release a — completed! — report on the — public! — financial records because — wait for it! — lawyers wrote it.

By that logic, any government body that wanted to keep misdeeds secret would just hire lawyers to “investigate” and bury them.

It’s twisted, alright. Especially seeing as the lawyers who wrote the report acknowledged verbally at a public meeting back in March that they had found “excessive, personal, frivolous and not business driven” purchases “in violation of the county’s p-card manual.” You remember that meeting? It was the one where the council tried to get away with just getting an oral report for $350,000 (or more!) of taxpayer money. Talk about paying lip service to an investigation into county misconduct.

The purchases, the lawyers said then but did not put in writing, included office decor, office holiday decorations, office furniture, an Apple watch, a Bible annotator, “inappropriate” books, earbuds, headsets, cellphone cases, office snacks, meals and flowers.

It reeked of a coverup then. It stinks more like one with each passing day.

Unbelievably, only council members Bartholomew, Brown, Reitz and Tabernik replied to questions about the issue in June from reporter Sebastian Lee — even as the county sheriff blasted the council majority for secrecy and for accepting the consultants’ conclusion that “there was no evidence of criminal activity.”

On Monday, Chair Passiment and County Administrator Michael Moore did not respond to questions I emailed them about the rationale for an unanimous vote and Moore did not respond to other questions about how much the consultants billed or received.

Additional big questions remain.

When will the full report emerge? (It’s only a matter of time.)

What cost will this secrecy have on the incumbent council members up for re-election next year — Cunningham, Dawson and Glover? (Sadly, we can’t vote out more.)

And how much longer after the release of this report by consultants who are laughing all the way to the bank will we have to wait for the real one from the Attorney General’s Office, which is also investigating past abuses by Beaufort County?

That’s one the County Council majority won’t be able to control, try as it might.