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The firm will be paid $21,000 for six months of work, which could include lobbying the state legislature and laying the foundation for possible legal action to ensure the county gets a fair share of money for public schools, officials told The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette on Tuesday.
The county and school board will split the cost of McNair's work -- $3,500 for each of the six months the General Assembly is in session -- to address the 30-year-old Education Finance Act, Beaufort County Council Chairman Weston Newton said.
"It's a glaring inequity that's staring us in the face," said Newton, noting the county sends $134 million in sales-tax collections to the state for EFA funding but gets back nothing. "The amount of dollars is staggering, the inequity is perhaps without comparison and the idea is that the dollars we're talking about are so significant."
School board chairman Fred Washington said he initially opposed spending public money for a lobbying effort. However, he said after talking to state Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, and Rep. Bill Herbkersman, R-Bluffton, he was convinced the delegation's staff lacks the time and manpower to gather the information the county and district desire.
Davis and Herbkersman said they welcome McNair's help and support the county's decision, which Washington and Newton said should not be construed as frustration with the county's legislative delegation, which has been unable to persuade the legislature to make education funding more equitable.
Washington said the delegation simply lacks the seniority to force change without help. The information and political connections the McNair firm can provide should help -- the law firm will analyze legislative proposals and identify other counties that, like Beaufort, send much more money to Columbia than they get back, Newton said.
He added that having a law firm do the research would allow the county to move quickly should it decide to go to court to have the funding formula changed.
If the county does decide to sue the state, the legal bill would climb well past the initial $21,000, officials acknowledged. In that case, legal costs might be shared among other counties that also send the state much more money than they get back, they said.
Davis said that keeping a lawsuit as an option is "not an admission of defeat (in the legislature), but an indicator of our resolve."
Davis, who campaigned on the promise of making the funding formula more equitable, said he believes members of the county's legislative delegation will get solidly behind the effort.He added that he is not above playing hardball with members of the Senate who resist the changes Beaufort County is seeking.
One tool at his disposal, he said, is using a Senate rule that would allow him to block legislation being pushed by other senators if they resist the changes the county is seeking.
None of the money used to hire McNair will be taken from classroom, Washington said.
Because Beaufort County has relatively high property values compared to other school districts, the funding formula leaves the county in the position of paying the base cost of educating students without much state help.
The effects of Act 388 -- which eliminated property taxes for school operations for resident homeowners and substituted money raised from a new statewide, 1-percent sales tax -- made the issue even more urgent, officials said.
Non-resident homeowners in Beaufort County now provide at least $120 million of the county's $172 million school operations budget, Washington said, because the state funding is not there.
"Now's the time," Washington said of hiring the law firm. "All these factors are coming together. We want to make sure we're getting all the information necessary to make sound decisions."
