Beaufort County Legislative delegation reinstates City, County’s nominees to BJWSA board
By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday evening, Dec. 10, and I’m in a small assembly room at the Buckwalter Recreation Center in ever-expanding Bluffton.
The utilitarian room has about 40 chairs — all of them filled — and this evening the room is hosting the cream of Beaufort County’s elected crop including Sen. Tom Davis, Reps. William “Bill” Herbkersman, Michael Rivers, Jeff Bradley and William Hagar — aka the Beaufort County Legislative Delegation.
Earlier this afternoon Sen. Tom Davis made a motion to reconsider the Delegation’s recent decision to replace Andy Kinghorn and Rob McFee on the Beaufort Jasper Water and Sewer Authority’s Board.
Kinghorn had been reappointed by the City of Beaufort; McFee had been reappointed by Beaufort County; and both of these appointments were sent over to the Delegation assuming approval and a new certificate signed by Governor McMaster.
In November, however, the Delegation rejected both men and substituted an architect, Grady Woods; and also substituted Roger Bright who is the Vice President for Development at Forino Construction — a company currently involved in Beaufort and Jasper counties having done five different housing projects.
Mr. Herbkersman who is Chairman of the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee in the S.C. House of Representative and also Chairman of the Legislative Delegation, made no bones about the fact that he had spearheaded the change in the nominees. He began by saying the Authority was “going
forward into the biggest bond issue in its history” and “without Donna Altman you don’t have a financial person on the Board.”
Thereafter the rejected Andy Kinghorn was given the podium and what followed was a lengthy give and take between Mr. Kinghorn and Rep. Herbkersman that focused on the culture at the Water Authority under the now-retired General Manager, Joe Mantua, with Kinghorn admitting that “things were going downhill” during this time.
Kinghorn also admitted that the engineering department “was not as good as what we have now.”
Mr. Kennedy explained to Rep. Herbkersman that certain developers were angry about the application process, and he (and others) began to re-write the hooking-up regulations. He said there were criticisms, and they found many of those criticisms valid. But they also discovered, with the help of a consultant named Black and Beach, that the capacity fees being collected from developers were not nearly enough to cover the costs of building new treatment plants, and installing new pipes and constructing additional settling tanks.
And so the Board increased the cost of its capacity fees — initially from $7,000 per unit to about $11,000 per unit. It reminded me of chess; Herbkersman would move his bishop; Kinghorn his knight; it is all on television.
Throughout this exchange it was acknowledged that former General Manager Dean Moss; former Finance Director Terry Murray; and former Chairman Donna Altman had performed well during their respective tenures.
After Kinghorn left the podium Greg Padgett, current Chairman of the Water and Sewer Authority continued the discussion of the Mantua administration and the culture at the Authority during his term saying, “People didn’t want to come to work”; but he also acknowledged that Andy Kinghorn, Dave Strange and Jeff Ackerman were the board members who reached out to the development community in its effort to re-write the Development Policy and Planning Manual.
Rejected nominee Rob McFee spoke next saying that the Board “had become disengaged;” but with the arrival of board members Dave Strange and Jeff Ackerman things got better.
York Glover, Beaufort County Council’s liaison to the Water Authority, also spoke to the Delegation saying, “finance is the biggest problem.”
After two hours of discussion — that was mostly Mr. Kennedy responding to Rep. Herbkersman — Sen. Tom Davis made a second motion to return Kinghorn and McFee to their Board seats. This motion passed, 4-2, and there seemed to be a collective sigh of relief among those then making their hand-shaking exit from the Bluffton gymnasium.
But this is far more consequential than a game of chess. The Board anticipates borrowing up to $300,000,000 to cover the costs of new, necessary infrastructure. The debt service on this new borrowing will not be covered by capacity fees collected from developers. A big part of it will be paid by rate payers and there will be more rate hikes. Even so Board members know that tough decisions will have to be made about what is built; what is not built; what maintenance is deferred and how to allocate this debt service between rate payers and developers.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
