Beaufort County has outgrown the sloppy government it’s getting | Opinion

When Eric Greenway was appointed interim county administrator by the Beaufort County Council, two significant requirements were attached.

He was to provide council with a weekly list of all purchases over $5,000, and update council about any hiring or firing of important county positions.

Four years later, Greenway was fired as county administrator amid a criminal investigation for alleged misconduct. It came July 28, two days after sexual harassment and retaliation allegations against him surfaced.

At both the outset and the end of Greenway’s run, the council was caught trying to get control of its most basic duties to the public.

Today, council is seeking a third-party review of all county purchases and all contracts for professional services this year. It wants an audit of the county’s purchasing card system that employees use to buy supplies on credit. And it wants a review and critique of the county’s procurement codes.

A County Council that can’t keep up with that on its own is in way over its head.

And between the seedy bookends of Greenway’s tenure runs a constant theme: Slack oversight.

County government is a loosey goosey affair.

It appears that’s the way council members want it, based on the reason they needed Greenway to become interim administrator in the first place.

It’s because they bullied and ran off an administrator (without ever saying why) who insisted that council mind its own business and follow professional protocol.

For example, she objected when a council member was embroiling a staff member in his secret plans for a major road project – and telling the staffer not to tell his boss, the county administrator.

She also objected when the council chairman, on his own, gave a 13 percent raise to the council clerk.

Bear in mind the reason one council member insisted the two accountability requirements be added to Greenway’s initial appointment.

It was to address problems experienced with previous interim administrators, particularly the one who wrote a $24,000 consulting contract for himself as he walked out the door to join the staff of the Town of Hilton Head Island. He was fined by the state ethics commission, and the controversy revealed that the county had lax to no oversight of contracts with employees and former employees. And it had an administrator’s contingency fund with no rules or oversight.

Most recently, Greenway was being investigated by circuit solicitors, yet County Council members said they had no idea what it was about.

And they didn’t fire him until after an employee Greenway hired aired dirty laundry last week after she was fired by Greenway’s successor.

The impression is that secret dirty laundry is OK.

The secretive way – some would say underhanded way – the county behaves was revealed when it subsidized a daycare camp for the children of county employees last summer, warning staffers: “Since the program is not open to the public, we are doing our best to disguise it.”

On Greenway’s watch, the county rented a building to a volleyball club run by one of his neighbors, bypassing the county recreation commission that is swamped by others with similar needs.

Also, Greenway presented council a proposal to swap land with the county Rural and Critical Lands Preservation Program – without giving the public a chance to chime in, or even giving the board overseeing the land program time to review it and make a recommendation.

The characters come and go, but the theme remains the same.

It often takes someone in the public to cry foul, filing a state ethics complaint, or reporting suspicions to the sheriff.

Beaufort County Council needs to take this moment to change. It got four new members this year who should insist on it.

Greenway is the symptom, not the illness.

The illness is a tradition of inside wheeling and dealing, a lack of checks and balances, a free-for-all atmosphere that ignores the checks that are in place, and consistent, maddening secrecy.

Beaufort County has boomed in population. It has outgrown sloppy government.

But Greenway or no Greenway, that’s what we’ve got: sloppy government.