Change form of government to end spats

Here we go again.

A ridiculous spat between the Beaufort County auditor and treasurer has taken the county down a familiar road.

On this road, elected officials assigned to do the most basic grunt work of county government administration are not accountable to the county administrator. It’s nuts.

The result is that little can be done to referee an immature squabble between auditor Jim Beckert and treasurer Maria Walls over who is responsible for sending out tax bills and when.

We don’t see why this billing issue even exists. The auditor announced that it is his duty to send out tax bills. That has not been the case in the past. State law as we read it says it is the auditor’s duty to prepare the list of who owes what and turn it over to the treasurer by Sept. 30 of each year. It makes sense for the office that collects the bills (the treasurer’s office) to send out the bills. So why is there a problem?

With 45 other counties in South Carolina, surely we could find the routine, workable solution if our system was broken, which it did not seem to be. Surely, we could avoid this time-wasting impasse now dumped at the feet of Beaufort County administrators and County Council members who have better things to do.

We learned in years past that these core functions of government need to be in-house, where lines of responsibility, accountability and even basic job qualifications are clear.

It came to light with issues in the office of previous treasurer Joy Logan. Questions were raised over a poor audit, a thieving employee and excessive overtime pay. Excuses and finger-pointing were the norm because there is a built-in disconnect in the administration of county functions.

That treasurer was voted out of office. But we realized at the time that it was really the system that needed to be replaced. Without a direct line of authority, accountability is absent until an election comes around once every four years. There has got to be a better way to deal with the basic administrative tasks of fairly collecting hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

At the time, we urged County Council to look at making the treasurer and auditor administrative positions, answerable to the county administrator. Under our current type of government, council-administrator, the treasurer and auditor are elected. If we had the council-manager form of government, County Council could choose whether it wanted to appoint people to those jobs or hold an election.

Changing the form of government would be up to the people in a referendum.

It’s an idea worth exploring no matter who sits in those chairs.

We’ve seen this movie before. It’s once again time to address the root problem.

This story was originally published October 1, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Change form of government to end spats."