Unanimous vote or simple majority? What’s required to release the county’s audit report
As pressure on the county council to release its full report into questionable and possibly illegal spending by county employees mounts, the council is falling back on a dubious excuse: it needs a unanimous vote to do so.
One legal expert disagrees. He said that all it needs is a simple majority. The excuse continues to keep the report hidden, exacerbating growing concerns about transparency.
If the demands from the public to release the 30-plus page report from Greenville-based law firm Haynesworth Sinkler Boyd, weren’t enough, the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office demanded last week to see the report unabridged and underacted. The demand was met with the new county administrator, Michael Moore, saying only the council has the authority to release the report.
Any action the council takes requires a vote; but in this case, the council says they must get all eleven “yes” votes to proceed with the release. Council member Paula Brown first made mention of the unanimous vote in her response to a series of questions emailed to council members. Council Chair Joe Passiment doubled down on Wednesday. “That is the advice we have received,” he said through a text message.
Refuting the premise, Jay Bender, a long-time South Carolina media law and administrative expert, says the council only needs a simple majority to release the full report.
“If they claim the attorney-client privilege, the privilege goes to the county, and decisions in the county are made by a majority vote of council,” Bender said. “So all it takes is a majority. I think they either misheard that or their attorney is confused.”
Bender added that he isn’t aware of any action that would require a unanimous vote from the council.
If a majority vote would suffice for the release of the report, the council is already halfway there. Council members David Bartholomew, Paula Brown and Tom Reitz have advocated for the release of the report and continue to push for more transparency. The three voted to have the proposed executive session instead be turned to a public discussion at their last meeting. The three council members would only need to convince three others to join them to gain the six-member majority needed.
Chairman Passiment did not answer Wednesday when asked if a vote for the report’s release to the public or the sheriff’s office would be held at their next meeting.
Trust and transparency
The council’s apprehension to release the report is leading members of the public and law enforcement officials alike to scratch their heads.
“(The report has) been under lock and key for about a month and a half,” said Sheriff P.J. Tanner during a July 25 interview. “Limited access by those who were a part of the council, but they’ve not allowed anyone else to review it. If there was no fear and they think that there’s no issues with any kind of criminal activity on anyone’s part, then why? Why are you resisting giving it to law enforcement? I mean, that’s a valid question, right?”
“When you act suspiciously, it causes people to be suspicious,” Bender said.
So far the council has only released a six-page summary of the report that claimed there was “no evidence of criminal activity” among other opaque language parsing the difference between “malfeasance” and “misfeasance” as differing categories of wrongdoing.
Tanner, frustrated with having not seen the report, questioned the validity of the summary during the July 25 interview.
He pointed to the mysterious purchase of $36,000 of weighted blankets from a company owned by the husband of a former member of the county administrative team as a known incident that should be present in the audit. “How can you suggest there’s no wrongdoing, when you know good and well there is,” he said.
“They just don’t want you (the public) to know the details, and obviously they don’t want law enforcement to have or know the details surrounding the issues of Beaufort County for the past couple of years,” Tanner said. “The county has never provided us anything. They circled the wagons early on and it’s been like that for a year.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2024 at 1:23 PM.
