You won’t see ‘Trust’ on the ballot, but it’s there

You can’t sell soap with a dirty face.

That’s one of the lines still ringing in my ears from my misspent youth.

It was from my father. And it’s the kind of thing that would haunt you too if you were a preacher’s kid.

It was a lecture about trust, or the lack thereof.

And I’m afraid the fate of local sales-tax referendums on Tuesday’s ballot may not hinge as much on money as they do on trust.

The Beaufort County Board of Education wants us to trust it with $313 million from a 1 percent sales tax over the next 10 years. But it did nothing when Superintendent Jeff Moss changed nepotism rules and his wife was hired to a new $90,000 job in the central office.

That’s called lost trust.

And Beaufort County has a different referendum, also asking for a 1 percent sales tax for capital projects. That project list includes $6.2 million for an arts venue for Hilton Head Island. And even though the mayor begged for it to be on the ballot, this is something that has not been planned or approved by Town Council. And a Town Council committee wants us to trust that its research on the possible arts venue is not a forgone conclusion.

I’m not saying anybody needs to have their mouth washed out with soap, but I will say that this stuff is not floating with a lot of people.

Compared to the dregs of society the two major political parties have put up for president on the same ballot, we’re squeaky clean.

But for folks around here, it’s a blow to not trust your school superintendent or mayor.

We’re not planning an arts center. But it might cost $60 million. Or $30 million. And we need $6.2 million to plan what we’re not planning.

As one Lowcountry boy pointed out to me, $6.2 million is some kind of grandiose planning.

Oh, I assured him, it’s a lot harder to plan things that don’t exist. He just didn’t have any vision.

Well, I will not repeat in a family newspaper what he thought about this plan, except that it had something to do with a first rodeo and the stuff that sometimes comes from horses.

Trust.

It’s worth a lot more than $6.2 million.

It’s even worth more than $313 million.

In fact, you can’t buy it.

I wish people could appreciate how hard this community had to work to get our first major school construction bond referendum passed. It was an era when there was a lot of distrust of public schools by penny-pinchers who used to walk five miles through the snow to all-white, one-room schoolhouses where everyone supposedly conversed in Latin, respected their teacher and tested well above average.

Meanwhile, sewer water was backing up into the kitchen of the dilapidated old Michael C. Riley Elementary School in Bluffton.

We did, as a community, get that referendum passed. And since then, we’ve built better than half a billion dollars worth of schools in Beaufort County, including a shiny Michael C. Riley to replace that old “separate but equal” building, circa 1954.

That took a lot of trust, particularly for our legions of retirees who long ago graduated from PTA meetings and could easily have thumbed a nose in the ballot box at these kids today.

They didn’t because they thought the school district had a clean face.

People don’t think that anymore. And it’s a dirty, rotten shame. Too many people worked too hard for too many years for today’s school board to toss it down the drain.

The greatest known scandal in the South Carolina Statehouse in my era showed up in grainy video of legislators selling their vote to undercover agents with stacks of cash. It was called “Operation Lost Trust.”

That was more than 25 years ago. Trust is something that takes a long time to rebuild.

I was at the Statehouse many years later and the speaker of the House at the time, David Wilkins, said that for all the trappings of his job, with the ancient mace and the committee appointments, he really only had one thing.

“My vote,” he said.

Maybe voters on Tuesday will exercise that power to give every benefit of every doubt to everybody. Voters and jurors can do that.

But as Daddy tried to tell me, life’s a lot simpler if you don’t try to sell soap with a dirty face.

This story was originally published November 6, 2016 at 6:55 AM with the headline "You won’t see ‘Trust’ on the ballot, but it’s there."