Here’s how Beaufort County’s finances just went from bad to worse | Opinion
The Beaufort County Council is between the proverbial rock and a hard place, squeezed on one side by an ongoing state Attorney General’s Office investigation into financial mismanagement and squeezed on the other side by a plan to have voters support a possible sales tax increase next year.
Each day a probe into “flagrant violations” of spending policies continues is a day closer to the November 2026 election when the council wants voters to trust it with more sales tax revenue.
Trust it? As if.
Fifty-one weeks have passed since the council reluctantly bowed to public pressure and voted to turn a secret report on years of fiscal mismanagement over to state and county law enforcement officials. At the time, the council said it was a step toward making the report public to everyone. But a year later, the report on public spending hasn’t emerged. Instead, new problems have.
With a grand jury looking for signs of any criminal activity, you’d think the Beaufort County Council, County Administrator Michael Moore and the bureaucrats below him would have their financial house in order so they could begin to restore the public trust officials acknowledge they lost years ago.
But new developments last week make it seem like the county can’t be trusted no matter who is in charge. Check that. The developments make it seem like no one is in charge. Fiscal woes aren’t ending. They’re multiplying.
Opposite of transparency
At the County Council’s most recent monthly meeting on Monday, Aug. 11, Moore made two jaw-dropping revelations that seemed to catch council members by surprise.
He said that the county owed 5,500 property owners a collective $1.6 million in unpaid interest on property tax refunds it had withheld from them over a five-year span starting in 2020. Then he tried to spin the revelation as an act of transparency, even though a news release revealed he learned about the illegal withholding in May, three months before his public announcement.
A release dated Aug. 13 began, “In a move that demonstrates its continued commitment to transparency, fiscal responsibility, and service to the public, Beaufort County Government has identified and corrected a lapse in interest calculation on real property tax refunds dating back to 2020.” The next paragraph said Moore found out back in May, signaling the opposite of transparency.
Moore replaced fired county administrator Eric Greenway in July 2024, so he’s been on the job less than 14 months. I and others hoped a changing of the guard to Moore and new council chair Alice Howard might signal an actual commitment to transparency for the besieged Beaufort County government. But that was months ago. Now it’s hard to believe their talk will turn to action.
Touting a three-month lapse in the reporting of a problem that persisted for five years isn’t transparency. It’s a requirement because the county’s annual audits will have to be restated. It’s a big mess.
Last Monday, Moore also shared with the council that the county had negotiated an emergency contract for health-care services at the county jail to replace an existing provider who had given 60 days’ notice. Moore said the new provider’s contract would cost an extra $26,000 a month and likely run through the end of the fiscal year on June 30. That would leave the county with $260,000 of higher unplanned costs over 10 months for a vital county responsibility that shouldn’t be managed using sole-source contracts.
On top of all that, the council in recent months has been reducing a list of projects being funded by a 2018 sales tax increase because it has mismanaged that pot of money so badly.
The county had to scale back or eliminate much of the work and they still have barely completed any of it after having cost overruns because of a range of factors in and out of their control. It’s one reason voters rejected a new sales tax increase last year.
Now, they hope to finish more of the work by — you guessed it — November 2026 so they can tell voters they did good when asking them for another massive sales tax increase to spend on vital projects that they’ll manage better this time, they swear, so help them God, pinky promise, etc.
Trust this council? As if.
Financial mismanagement
Adding intrigue to all this, Greenway, the county administrator who was fired two years ago amid mounting questions about his performance, revealed last week that two Ethics Commission complaints filed against him two years ago have been withdrawn.
He said one of the complaints alleged he’d hired his daughter to work on a county logo and the other alleged he’d accepted gifts from a developer. In a 30-minute interview on former council member Mike Covert’s “Beaufort County’s House of Cards” show, Greenway said he’d asked his daughter, a graphic design student, to do unpaid work on updating the county’s logo and that he’d gone hunting on the property of a local developer who at the time had no business before the county. Greenway said he stayed in a blind on one visit and killed his first deer on another.
Who’s to be believed? Who knows? Wouldn’t it be great if we could see the county’s secret report and if the state’s investigation would conclude with more answers than questions?
In his interview, Greenway criticized the council for never making public its report on misspending — and for being part of the problem by pocketing office snacks after meetings.
“There’s some sort of slow walk or there’s some sort of cover-up, in my opinion, going on to try to keep the truth from coming out,” Greenway said. “No doubt I’ve probably made mistakes, but to blame me for buying office snacks on camera in a public meeting is completely false. I never bought office snacks. However, the clerk of the council and the County Council Office buys plenty of snacks to use at meetings. Many of those snacks walk out the door in council members’ pockets on the way home to their grandkids and, you know, little ones at the house. Eric Greenway, you know, to my knowledge, never authorized the purchase of office snacks.”
Now, if you’re wondering why Greenway refers to himself in the third person, I can’t tell you. But if you’re wondering what he’s talking about, the procurement card misspending included snacks.
In March 2024, an outside consultant shared that the council “p-card” use soared 85% from $1,104,808 in 2019 to $2,039,467 in 2023 and that 172 county staff members had p-cards at one point. The consultant said misspending was found to be “excessive, personal, frivolous and not business driven and often in violation of the county’s p-card manual,” ranging from office decor, office holiday decorations, office furniture, an Apple watch, a Bible annotator, “inappropriate” books, earbuds, headsets, cellphone cases, office snacks, meals and flowers.
Back then, the council tried to get away with having the consultant just give a verbal report after it paid his firm $350,000 of taxpayer money to investigate the county’s purchasing and procurement practices.
Talk about financial mismanagement.
Declining to give interviews
I and others had the audacity to demand the actual report, and the council then tried to get away with only making public a vague executive summary. That screamed coverup and incompetence so loudly that the county sheriff and county solicitor began clamoring to see the report as well.
Finally, last August, the council voted to release it to them. Soon after the Attorney General’s Office told local law enforcement officials to say nothing publicly because of its involvement.
And here we are.
Howard, the council chair, did not reply to a voice message I left for her on Friday.
Moore replied to my request to interview him Friday with a text message that day that said the county hasn’t received any updates on the state’s investigation into potential criminal activity since it turned over the report on financial malfeasance a year ago.
But he didn’t reply to a followup text Friday when I specifically asked him about the financial headaches of the healthcare contract and five years of unpaid interest to property owners, which I characterized in my text to him as “big problems that speak to more mismanagement.”
So what are Beaufort County residents to do? I’d suggest that they stop giving their leaders any more sales tax revenue or any benefit of the doubt. If leaders can’t manage health-care services at the jail or interest on tax refunds, why should they get to manage more sales tax revenue?
Why should they even be leaders?
Maybe the state’s investigation will end soon and its spotlight will leave us all with a better handle on what happened. But it seems county leaders are still stumbling around in the dark.