‘Need to be accountable’: Beaufort Co. council denies Solicitor’s $150K request
Beaufort County council members have denied a $150,000 request from the prosecutor’s office, arguing the agency needs to be more transparent in how it spends its money.
Council members voted 6-5 Monday night against providing 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone’s office the money to hire three lawyers to help reduce the growing criminal case backlog. Some members griped about the lack of accountability and sparse information the office has provided about its spending.
“When we put out taxpayer dollars, we need to be accountable,” Council member Paul Sommerville said. “We need to be able to justify, where did that money go?”
In an interview Wednesday, Stone said his agency is doing everything by the rules and that council members did not bring those concerns to him before the meeting.
“I don’t think our request was unreasonable,” Stone said. “I was very clear about what I’m doing with the money.”
Why does Colleton County handle circuit’s finances?
At the meeting, Sommerville took aim at the Solicitor’s Office’s finances, specifically complaining that they were handled in Colleton County and that the solicitor never shared details of expenses.
Stone was the only elected official in Beaufort County whose agency didn’t submit a line-by-line expenditure last fiscal year. Stone does so for Colleton County but does not break out just how Beaufort County funds are spent, a county spokesperson said.
“One of the biggest concerns I’ve always had is the way their finances are run through Colleton County,” Sommerville said.
According to Stone, S.C. law requires every solicitor to have a “host county” for its finances.
For 86 years, the influential Murdaugh family ran the Solicitor’s Office from Hampton County, which is why it was the circuit’s host county. In 2006, when Stone was elected, he said he tried to move the operations to Beaufort County.
The Beaufort County administrator at the time told Stone they didn’t want that responsibility, he said.
Stone said he then approached Colleton County, which now serves as host.
Colleton County employees calculate and manage the solicitor office’s personnel, payroll, human resources and other financial tasks. Colleton is one of five counties in the 14th Circuit (which includes Jasper, Hampton, and Allendale counties), though Beaufort provides more than half of the criminal caseload.
The Solicitor’s Office receives around $5 million annually, with contributions from each of the five counties, the state, federal grants, fines and fees, as well as two municipalities (Bluffton and Hilton Head), according to Colleton County chief financial officer John Carpenter.
Beaufort County contributed the most: nearly $1.9 million in the last fiscal year to the Solicitor’s Office.
The second biggest contributor is the state, which gave $1.4 million. Colleton County gave $315,000 last fiscal year and regularly receives a $75,000 to $80,000 credit in return for doing the agency’s financial services, Carpenter said.
Sommerville said that because expenses are tabulated and kept in Colleton County, Beaufort County doesn’t get enough information about how its own dollars are being spent.
“All we can do is write a check to Colleton County and hope for the best,” said Sommerville, reached by phone on Wednesday.
Sommerville, who has been on the council since 2007, said he didn’t know anything about why Colleton County managed all the finances.
Stone is the only solicitor with five counties under his purview, he said. This means that “there are always going to be multiple counties that don’t have the same information as Colleton,” according to Stone.
He said he attended a finance meeting with the County Council last week and did not get any of these questions.
Stone did not commit to regularly sending a detailed list of how Beaufort County money is spent, but he said council members can get that information from Colleton County.
“I don’t know what they want. They haven’t asked me,” Stone said. “Almost everyone of them have my cell number.”
Why more lawyers?
Stone has said he needed more lawyers to reduce the circuit’s ever-increasing backlog of criminal cases. Cases bottleneck because each must be brought by the Solicitor’s Office and heard by a judge for disposition: either a guilty plea, a trial or a dismissal.
The backlog ballooned from 3,800 pending cases in January 2020, prior to the pandemic, to 6,005 cases as of last month, according to the Solicitor’s Office.
With limited court time, and the closing of court in 2020 because of COVID-19, the Solicitor’s Office said it will take six years to clear the accumulation of cases.
That’s why the agency received an additional $265,000 from the state this summer to hire four new attorneys, three of whom passed the bar exam this summer.
Beaufort County passed on giving the Solicitor’s Office more funding then, as well.
“More boots on the ground,” Stone said in a July interview. “That’s the only thing that’s ever reduced a backlog.”
Stone would later seek an additional three lawyers, denied at Monday’s hearing. He previously estimated the reduction in the backlog would not start until the first week of November, which is when the four new attorneys would be up to speed.
Interviewed on Wednesday, Stone did not seem particularly concerned about Beaufort County denying his request for $150,000. He said he is in the process of seeking that funding from the state.
‘A management issue’
Council member Larry McElynn joined Sommerville in taking a hard line against Stone at the budget hearing.
“I won’t support this request for more money to address what I consider, essentially, to be a management issue,” McElynn said.
He cited a specific driving-under-the-influence program in which the Solicitor’s Office received $190,000 from the county to hire prosecutors to handle DUI cases. Previously, police officers without law degrees prosecuted their own cases, contributing to the low DUI conviction rate.
McElynn, reading from a written speech, said the council has not heard from Stone about the effectiveness of that program and whether the office hired those lawyers.
However, at a virtual budget hearing on March 15, which McElynn attended, Stone presented statistics from the DUI program. The statistics compared DUI dismissal rates between 2017, before the Solicitor’s Office began helping, and 2020. Stone said the dismissal rate dropped from 55% in 2017 to 15% in 2020. However, there were no jury trials due to COVID-19, so the amount of cases heard differed greatly.
Reached by phone Wednesday, McElynn was asked four times about his comments at Monday’s meeting and each time declined to discuss them, deferring to Council Chair Joe Passiment.
Other council members at the meeting said they wanted more details on how the money Stone was requesting would be used. They also said they wanted greater “transparency.”
Council member Stu Rodman supported Stone’s request. “The only way you work through a backlog is more manpower,” he said.
However, the motion was defeated on Monday night after Passiment cast the tiebreaking vote.
