Fake government: Beaufort County’s ‘train to Crazyville’ needs to be derailed | Opinion
Beaufort County Council chairman Stu Rodman of Hilton Head Island appears to be trying to run his own personal government, and he needs to be cut off immediately.
Out of the public eye, Rodman is conducting “a train to Crazyville,” as one County Council member put it, and it’s fair to wonder how long it’s been this way.
The behavior is wrong on many levels. Most importantly, it continues a disturbing pattern of trying to carry out public business in secret.
It also likely explains a lot of the discord that has made this version of the County Council remind us of the dysfunctional, out-of-control school board of two years ago.
And now, we must wonder, will it cost us new county administrator Ashley Jacobs, a promising new leader who has shown her disdain for the ways of old but must be having second thoughts about coming to Beaufort County.
Last week, we learned through emails from last fall that Rodman bypassed the county administrator, going directly to a county employee in a secretive “one on one discussion” to derail a road construction plan for the Windmill Harbour area.
The emails — to Rob McFee, the county’s director of Construction, Engineering & Facilities — blindsided Jacobs. But it is clear from other emails that this is not the first time Jacobs has struggled to keep Rodman in line. A month earlier, Jacobs had explicitly reminded McFee to take directives from her, not Rodman or the council.
Rodman’s email to McFee shows his desire to keep Jacobs out of his plan, telling him to keep the conversation between “just the two of us.”
That is wrong in every way imaginable.
SC law
It is illegal. State law is clear: “The council shall deal with county officers and employees who are subject to the direction and supervision of the county administrator solely through the administrator ...”
State law is unambiguous for good reason.
Rodman’s tactics violate protocol — the simple decency required within any organization.
It violates the chain of command — something that should be respected in the county that “makes Marines.”
It is meddling. An elected representative has one power: a vote. A single vote. No representative, even those who chair public bodies, is granted the power to act outside the will of the council or interfere with the professional staff.
When the Island Packet staff reported a year ago on a series of emails among County Council members in 2018, it was telling that Rodman claimed in one of them that “Paul (Sommerville, then the council chair) and I can run the county.”
No, they can’t. But that was said as Rodman and Sommerville used various tactics to get Josh Gruber named county administrator even though six council members opposed it. Again, it was a drama being carried out in private. But the email shows that Rodman does not understand his role, which is why, two years later, the county train is still headed for Crazyville.
Rodman’s tactics also are unprofessional. He has placed a county department head in the position of being insubordinate to his boss — or telling the County Council chairman to mind his own business and take up public affairs in the public arena where they belong.
His emails are disrespectful. Rodman is showing egregious disrespect for the county administrator, who has earned praise even from Rodman since entering this cesspool not quite a year ago.
Rodman talks about his business acumen, but no business can function properly with loose cannons. Rodman is a loose cannon. He is trying to usurp power that he has not been granted.
Lost trust
Local government should benefit from a special layer of trust with the public because it is run by people we know and see at church and the grocery store.
Maybe that’s the worst part of this. We are seeing a steady erosion of public trust in our local government. It seems to come in little bites, until you step back and realize that secretive agendas have become the fabric of local government.
In this culture, high-level employees write lucrative contracts for themselves and each other, then get hired to run another local government nearby. It’s a culture where the FBI investigates the school district. A mayor’s uber-first-class trip to Italy, a County Council member who doesn’t even live in our state, an unexplained new tax, negotiations with developers behind closed doors ... it all adds up and, before you know it, you’ve got fake government totally separate from real people.
This is not normal, and it is not acceptable. Things do not have to be this way. We can be better.
With the County Council and Beaufort County Board of Education, we have learned that a backchannel government lives in emails that are out of the public eye — until citizens or journalists request them through the Freedom of Information Act. Then we learn of bitter, uncivil, unprofessional personal battles, and sometimes worse: a pattern of manipulating “public” outcomes.
The Town of Hilton Head Island now has unveiled a predetermined proposal for a new 25-year tax — without saying why it must be rushed to public vote this May, or how $25 million allegedly going to the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina would be spent.
The public deserves better.
The public said as much when it replaced the old school board majority in the voting booth.
But when citizens cannot trust their County Council on something as basic as an intersection near their home, it’s time for a reboot.
Hiring Ashley Jacobs was a good start toward greater transparency in government, but she deserves better treatment than what she’s received from her bosses. County Council needs to start conducting public business in public and treating each other with respect. The train to Crazyville needs to be derailed.
