Certain state budget records remain secret

By RICK BRUNDRETT

If S.C. lawmakers this week finalize a state budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1, they likely will decide whether to authorize hundreds of millions of dollars in earmark spending.

Meanwhile, there continues to be a lack of transparency about earmark requests by lawmakers for specific projects or programs in their home districts – a longstanding practice in the 170-member Legislature.

After revealing in May that lawmakers collectively proposed 475 earmarks – 303 of which were made by the House – that could cost S.C. taxpayers as much as $467.2 million, The Nerve submitted a request to the House under the state’s open-records law for internal forms that House members must submit when making earmark requests.

The total $467.2 million works out to be about $84 for every man, woman and child in South Carolina, or about $173 for every estimated state income-tax filer next year.

Under a House rule, each written request must include the member’s name, “an explanation of the earmark project or program requested,” and “such other information as the form may require.”

The potentially more-detailed individual forms are used to prepare a master earmark list presented to House members before debate on the second reading of the state budget bill and subsequent budget versions. That type of list was used by The Nerve for its May story.

But in a written response last week, House Clerk Charles Reid, who is the 124-member chamber’s top administrator, denied The Nerve’s request for the completed House forms, contending those records are “considered to be working papers constituting correspondence and communications of the members and staff of the House of Representatives and the House Ways & Means committee.”

“As such,” Reid, who is a lawyer, continued, “these documents are exempt from disclosure pursuant to, and not necessarily limited to, the doctrine of legislative privilege” and relevant provisions of the S.C. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), citing attorney-client and “working-papers” exemptions under the law.

The Nerve has been aware of the “working-papers” exemption since its launch in 2010, revealing then that the House and Senate used the exemption to deny FOIA requests for legislative correspondence and other records related to the massive taxpayer-backed incentives deal for aerospace giant Boeing, which located an assembly plant in North Charleston.

That exemption is among 19 exemptions under the state open-records law, though the FOIA makes it clear that a “public body may but is not required to exempt” applicable records.

In his June 17 response to The Nerve, Reid said staff members of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee informed him that “it is their intent that earmark items that make it into the final budget document adopted by the General Assembly will be posted on the website along with the request forms.”

The most-recent House earmark-request list is posted, as required under House rules, on the Legislature’s website under the heading, “FY26-27 Member List – House Amended,” but was done so only after the House passed its amended version of the fiscal 2026-27 state budget in early May. The Senate’s list of 172 requested earmarks for the upcoming state budget isn’t posted on the website; Senate Clerk Jeff Gossett released it to The Nerve in May upon request for last month’s story.

Unlike other state appropriations, earmarks don’t originate with written agency budget requests at the start of the annual budget process or aren’t included in the prior fiscal year’s appropriations, under Senate and House rules.

In contrast with the House, Senate rules don’t specifically require senators to submit individual forms for their respective earmark requests. Instead, before the second reading of the state budget bill, the Senate Finance Committee chairman must attach a “statement” including the sponsor of each earmark, the requested amount, and an “explanation of the project or program,” under Senate rules.

A similar Senate earmark list also is required for the later compromise budget version produced by a joint House-Senate conference committee.

Although the publicly available House and Senate earmark lists for the upcoming fiscal year identify the sponsors and amounts of the earmarks, there are no included details of the projects to be funded other than short descriptive phrases of the purpose.

Currently, there is no state law requiring earmark transparency during each phase of the budget process. Typically in recent years, lawmakers have waited toward the end of the regular legislative session to propose and approve additional earmarks for the upcoming fiscal year, based on rosier year-end, surplus-revenue projections.

The South Carolina Policy Council – the parent organization of The Nerve – has recommended earmark-reform changes to state law, including requiring that earmark requests be posted to a “designated location on the Statehouse website within 24 hours of the request, creating a real-time earmark transparency dashboard for the public.”

Large wish lists

The proposed budget earmarks for fiscal 2026-27 primarily would come out of more than $1 billion in existing and expected state surplus funds, according to House and Senate budget records.

And, as The Nerve reported in May, those surpluses don’t include an additional $369.4 million in one-time funds that the state Board of Economic Advisors projected would be available to the joint budget conference committee tasked with working out differences between their respective chamber’s approximately $44 billion total state budget versions for the upcoming fiscal year.

The six-member conference committee includes House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee. As The Nerve revealed in its May story, Bannister led all lawmakers in the total amount of proposed individual earmarks ($20.6 million in seven requests), with Peeler 4^th in that category ($9.9 million in nine requests).

The Nerve’s review also found that Democratic lawmakers made plenty of earmark requests. Rep. Jackie Hayes, D-Dillon, for example, topped all lawmakers in the total number of individual requests – 14 that would cost taxpayers a collective $2.9 million – while Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, made nine requests totaling $3.9 million.

Hayes and Hutto are members of the joint budget conference committee, which was appointed on May 7. The other two conference committee members are House Majority Leader Davey Hiott, R-Pickens, who did not seek reelection this year; and Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, who is chairman of the Senate Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee.

Hiott and Hayes sit on the Ways and Means Committee, while Davis and Hutto serve on Senate Finance.

The joint conference committee’s compromise budget version for the upcoming fiscal year hasn’t yet been released publicly, and no public committee meetings were scheduled for this week. The full House and Senate are scheduled to reconvene today at noon.

A final budget version will go to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who will decide whether to issue vetoes, including for any appropriated earmarks. Ironically, in his budget veto message last year for the current fiscal year budget, McMaster praised lawmakers for pausing their earmark-spending habits.

“Finally, I applaud the General Assembly for their remarkable evolution and the strides made with the disclosure of earmarked appropriations, which were previously shielded from public scrutiny or debate,” the governor said.

Brundrett is the news editor of The Nerve (www.thenerve.org). Contact him at 803-394-8273 or [email protected]. Follow The Nerve on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @thenervesc.

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