Need tips on hiding information? Ask Beaufort County government. It knows how | Opinion
Imagine, if you will, that you own a cupcake business.
You have just discovered that a baker who used to work for you — who resigned after you twice declined to promote him and who now works at a very busy muffin company in the next town — signed a contract with your company with the full knowledge and approval of your finance and legal departments before he left.
You suspect that your executive team — some of whom pushed for the baker’s promotion — knew as well, but they deny it.
In this deal, which again you were not aware of until just now, the former baker has been receiving 12,000 of your cupcakes a month.
The contract — he wrote it for himself — also allows him to take home one of your mixers in case of a “frosting emergency.”
In exchange for these 12,000 cupcakes and this equipment, he will “consult” with your staff for an unspecified amount of time and in an unspecified way at some unspecified point when he’s not working his full-time job at the muffin place.
“Uh, guys,” you say to your staff. “What exactly has this baker helped us with these past few months?”
“Unspecified,” they all say in unison.
“And what other ‘deals’ with former employees have you made using my cupcakes and equipment that I don’t know about?”
Instead of answering, your staff hands you a bill.
“What’s this?”
“We’ll tell you who else got contracts,” they say, “but it’s going to cost you $655 if you want us to look that up for you.”
“That’s ridiculous!” you say. “This is my company. I’ll just look it up myself.”
You head to the records department.
But your staff blocks the door.
“Nope. Can’t go in there,” they say. “Only we can.”
“You know what? I just remembered. You post all the vendor contracts on the bulletin board in my office so I can easily see them. I’ll look there and figure it out.”
An employee runs in front of you with a piece of paper in her hand. She posts it to the bulletin board.
It’s the baker’s contract.
“You’re only just now putting that up there? After I asked about it?”
“That’s ... how we do things here,” the employee shrugs.
You start to look through the other contracts on the board.
“Is this all of them?”
“No! Of course not!” your staff says. “We never posted the ones of former employees.”
“Why not?”
They don’t answer.
“Why not?”
No answer.
So you take out your wallet and hand over the money.
Whoaaaaaaa.
I am just kidding.
I don’t know you personally, but my gut tells me this is not how you would handle the situation.
You would likely be very angry and downright worried about the decisions your staff has apparently been making unbeknownst to you.
And I am fairly certain you would spit-laugh at the idea of paying hundreds of dollars to look at your own contracts so you can verify that your staff hasn’t been using vaguely worded, lucrative deals to, let’s say, quietly give parting gifts to former co-workers.
Sigh.
OK ... now let’s talk about our county government.
Hold onto the cupcake scenario, but no need to use your imagination anymore.
The rest of this is real.
In 2018, as you might already know, Beaufort County’s now-former interim administrator, Josh Gruber, wrote himself a $12,000-a-month consulting contract before leaving the county to become assistant town manager for the Town of Hilton Head Island.
He did this without the apparent knowledge of any council members, but with the approval of the county’s lawyer. He did it after he was twice passed over by Council for the county administrator position in what was a contentious, baffling and drawn-out process.
An investigation by an outside attorney later determined that Gruber’s contract was illegal because it took effect before a state-mandated “cooling off” period during which a former public employee “may not for a period of one year after terminating his employment, accept employment if the employment involves a matter in which the former public employee directly and substantially participated during his employment,” according to the attorney’s report, presented to Council this past June.
The attorney, Joanie Winters of Chester County, also noted “other instances where the County has engaged in similar contractual agreements without the knowledge of County Council.”
“It is important to understand,” she wrote to Council, “that this is apparently ‘business as usual’ with the County.”
The county has been entering into contracts with former employees who have “institutional knowledge” for some time, she told Council.
And some of these contracts are open-ended.
“This is something I would address immediately,” she wrote.
One of these contracts, by the way, goes back to 2009 and is possibly still “viable,” according to the lawyer’s report.
That contract is for $6,250 a month.
Not sure about you, but I’d like to know whether the county, using tax money, has been paying a former employee $6,250 a month over a decade for “institutional knowledge.”
In fact, I’d like to know how many deals with former employees have been made over the years.
Who had these contracts? How much did they make? What work were they being paid for? What were the circumstances of their departures?
In September, and on behalf of the public, Packet and Gazette reporter Kacen Bayless filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the county, seeking any contracts it has entered into with former employees since 2009 and the amounts paid to those former employees.
The county’s vendor contracts are already made available to the public on the county’s website under the “transparency” section.
But not all the contracts are there — something that is not made clear to the user.
In other words, the county is reaping the benefits of the word “transparency” while not being fully transparent.
In responding to the newspapers’ FOIA request, the county estimated that the papers would have to pay $300 for the requested information, but when the contracts were pulled, the county changed that figure to $655.
It took 30 hours to compile the information, the records department explained.
Thirty hours to pull much of the same information that was apparently already pulled for Winters’ investigation.
Thirty hours.
That’s either a whole lot of contracts or a very sad statement of the organizational state of the county’s financial records.
It’s also an apparent indicator that Winters’ report didn’t prompt any member of Council — or anyone in management — to request this same information.
But you can’t find what you don’t look for, right?
At best, these contracts represent an innocent but clumsy systemic mistake, the scope of which needs to be understood before it can be fixed.
At worst, they raise suspicions that county employees have been striking under-the-radar deals to line pockets, make pay-offs or give unapproved bonuses — using taxpayer money.
The only way for the public to know what’s going on is to see those contracts.
The premise of the state’s Freedom of Information Act is clear.
The public has a right to learn what its government and its elected officials are up to, at minimal cost, with minimal delay and minimal inconvenience to them.
That the county believes $655 is a reasonable price to pay before it provides these contracts to the papers — which will disseminate them to the public — is troubling and a subversion of what FOIA stands for and who it protects.
It makes one wonder whether it’s a tactic, an effort to deter local journalists, who are members of an industry struggling financially across the country, from pressing the issue further.
To deter anyone from looking under the hood of a sputtering, oil-burning, gas-guzzling car.
To deter you from finding out more.
