Beaufort County Chair quietly gave employee a $10K raise, angering some on council
Facing a potential shortfall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Beaufort County’s administration did not budget for employee raises to prevent furloughs and layoffs.
However, the county’s top elected official, using a county council fund, quietly gave a 13% salary increase to the council’s clerk in August without the elected body’s approval.
Multiple Beaufort County Council members said they first learned of the raise last week when contacted by The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. The money was also approved against the wishes of the county’s then-top administrator and its human resources director, said Ashley Jacobs, the administrator who was forced by council to resign last month.
Documents obtained by the newspapers show the raise — $10,000 — was given to Clerk to Council Sarah Brock. Brock, who has worked for the county for just over a year and a half, now earns $85,000 a year.
Called on Friday, Brock said the salary she receives was part of a verbal agreement she made with then-Council Chair Stu Rodman and Vice Chair Paul Sommerville on May 27, 2019, after she spoke with the S.C. Association of Counties about comparable salaries.
According to the 2020 SCAC Wage and Salary Report, the average maximum salary for a clerk to council in Group 1 counties — counties with populations over 200,000 such as Charleston County — is $83,087. The average maximum salary for Group 2 counties — which includes Beaufort County — is $71,920.
News of the salary increase — given behind the scenes in August without a public vote by council — comes as the county faces a multitude of problems related to a lack of transparency, in-fighting among council members and an overwhelming desire to look good in the public’s eye.
Many in the community have also questioned the motives behind council’s eagerness to oust Jacobs as administrator. Jacobs’ supporters say she was fighting for the kind of financial transparency that would have kept a behind-the-scenes raise from occurring without a public vote.
Chairman Joe Passiment’s unilateral decision also raises questions about elected officials using taxpayer money with no oversight. In July 2019, the newspapers highlighted a similar issue with the administrator’s contingency account, which was used to pay various consultants, organizations and events, including a controversial $24,000 consulting contract with former Administrator Josh Gruber and annual contributions to a motoring festival totaling $43,000.
After learning of some of the spending activity by previous administrators, Beaufort County cut the administrator’s $215,301 contingency account by $115,301 — more than half — for fiscal year 2020.
Called Friday, Passiment defended the raise, stating that the full council discussed Brock’s evaluation together, and that he followed procedure when giving the salary increase.
He said he knew that Jacobs was against giving Brock a raise because the county had not planned for merit-based raises. However, he said, administration has control of its staff and “council has control of its staff with a separate budget.”
He added, as he did when asked why council was planning to fire Jacobs, that “personnel issues are personnel issues.”
“I don’t understand why we’re discussing this,” he said.
Told about the raise on Thursday, Council member Brian Flewelling said he was “very upset” that Passiment used taxpayer money without approval by the entire council. However, he said Brock “works very hard” and he “probably” would have voted to increase her salary had it come up for a vote.
“It is very bad public policy to have any kind of decisions made like that unilaterally by a minority of council, and specifically just the chairman,” he said. “The chairman is usurping his authority and overreaching, and some members of council are blatantly aware that that’s a problem.”
The $10K raise
Documents obtained by the newspapers show that Passiment gave Brock a $10,000 raise — to $85,000 from $75,000 — this past summer. The documents show that the “effective date of change” for the raise was July 1, but it wasn’t entered into the system until Aug. 19.
Asked about it on Wednesday, Jacobs, who was administrator at the time, said she and the county’s human resources director, Amanda Kincaid, previously told the chairman that the raise “violated the integrity” of the county’s ongoing compensation and classification study, which sets salary ranges for all county employees.
Passiment, according to Jacobs, responded that the money would come from the council’s contingency account, which is used for purchasing.
Called Friday, Passiment denied this, saying the council’s “salaries and wages” line item was used to fund the raise. He said money was already budgeted in the account for the salary increase.
In a Friday afternoon email to the newspapers, Interim County Administrator Eric Greenway, appointed late last month, wrote that the raise was paid through the council’s “salary line item and is consistent with [the clerk’s] employment agreement from when she was first hired.”
He wrote that, if needed, money could be transferred from another council fund at a later date.
Attached to Greenway’s email is a message from Brock that says she was told the raise would be paid by the council’s contingency account if there wasn’t enough money from the council’s salary line item.
The council’s contingency account is capped at $100,000.
Former Administrator Jacobs said she told Passiment that county council had to publicly vote on the raise because she “didn’t have the authority to take funds from that line item without their approval.”
He declined, Jacobs said.
“I told both Passiment and [Finance Committee Chair Chris] Hervochon that they needed to put this on an agenda, but they never did,” she said.
The documents obtained by the newspapers show that Brock was given a countywide 3% cost of living increase — to $72,099.90 from $70,000 — in July 2019. Then, in August 2019, then-Council Chair Stu Rodman approved a $2,901 raise for Brock — to $75,000, according to a personnel change form obtained by the newspapers.
At least two other council members, called Friday, appeared to be aware that Passiment had planned to give the raise.
Rodman said he knew about it and said it was “well-deserved.”
Council Vice Chair Paul Sommerville also said he knew and disagreed with the notion that the raise needed to be voted on by the entire council.
“There have been numerous times in my tenure as chairman or vice chairman where we have made adjustments, and I don’t believe it was ever something that was voted upon,” he said. “It falls to [the chairman and vice chairman].”
However, contacted Thursday, Council members Gerald Dawson and York Glover said they were hearing about the raise for the first time.
Glover said he thought council was waiting for the completion of county’s compensation and classification study before giving any raises to county employees.
Council member Mike Covert said he did not know about the raise until after it was already approved. He said his concerns about the salary increase were “not a reflection” of Brock’s work because “she does a great job,” he said. But, he said he doesn’t agree with secretly giving raises to certain employees when other employees weren’t supposed to get one.
“The citizens are the ones paying for it,” he said. “This has nothing to do with [Brock]. It has all to do with the chairman and leadership of County Council and that we didn’t vote on this. This appears to be an arbitrary raise when nobody else in the county was afforded this same thing.”
Covert also said the substantial raise was “a little excessive.”
“In business, you give raises, but you do them often and a little at a time,” he said. “Nobody else got a merit raise. It seems a little fishy to me.”
This story was originally published November 15, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
