Ever want to say something about Atlantic Beach’s latest predicament, but weren’t
sure what? Thursday’s editorial offers help:
If Myrtle Beach Mayor John Rhodes
were arrested, or Conway Mayor Alys Lawson, or Surfside Beach Mayor Doug
Samples, our newsroom would quickly shift into overdrive. Reporters and
photographers would be sent to dig up background. Front pages would be
redesigned. Sources would be mined for information. Competition would be fierce
for every nugget of information. Articles and editorials already in the works
would be moved to the back burner to fit in news and commentary on the arrest.
When Atlantic Beach Mayor Retha
Pierce was arrested – again – this past week, the reaction around here was a
bit more muted. Rather than “Oh my God!” it was more of an “Oh, her again?”
Voters in Myrtle Beach will be electing their mayor and
some council members this year – primaries are just around the corner – and the
elections bring with them a perennial question: Should Myrtle Beach transition
to a system built around district representation rather than the current
at-large offices?
Opponents of the current system point
out correctly that politicians from the north end of the city have dominated
City Council for years. Of the current seven-member council, six live north of 16th Avenue North –
five are north of 46th Avenue
North. Only Mike Lowder, who lives around Fifth
Avenue South, lives in southern Myrtle
Beach.
Thursday’s editorial calls for a bit
more opposition in local elections, for the benefit of everybody:
Surprise! Republican Mark Lazarus is
your new Horry County Council Chairman.
Well, not much of a surprise. In
fact, this was about as far from a surprise as is possible. If surprise were a
city, we’d still be right here and those actually in Surprise would be halfway
across the world, somewhere in Eastern Europe.
If surprise were measured on a scale of 1 to 100, we’re around a -6. That’s how
far from surprised we were with the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
How unexciting and predictable was
this race? Only a paltry 1.23 percent of Horry County
voters bothered to turn out on Tuesday. The unfortunate poll workers at the
Gurley precinct in Loris waited all day and nobody showed up to vote. Hopefully
they had a good book.
Thursday’s editorial praises the
release last month of the state’s report on its voting machines:
Well, at least we know we’re not
crazy. We’ve been complaining for years about the voting machines used in South Carolina, pointing out that they’re – in the words
of a
2007 Ohio study – “buggy, unstable and exploitable.” We’ve seen batteries
fail, broken or misprogrammed machines delay voting and votes
go uncounted in Horry County. If this is really the best option South Carolina voters
have right now, it’s time to start thinking about other options.
Tuesday’s editorial makes the
argument once again that it’s time to get rid of some of these down-ticket
races that are just cluttering up the ballot:
Can you name the state education
superintendent? How about the state adjutant general? Comptroller general?
Commissioner of agriculture? If you can, kudos to you, you’re ahead of the
game. If you can’t, the situation we suspect most residents are in, it’s time
to ask once more: Why are these elected positions?
The short answer, of course, is that
the state legislature has never trusted the person in the governor’s office to
appoint these positions. Heaven forbid that the person in that seat might
actually have some larger measure of control over state government. Instead, it’s
left up to voters to choose the winners of these posts every four years, voters
who most likely have little if any knowledge of who they’re voting for. We
suspect most voters simply pick the person in the party they identify with, in
which case the real contest is not at the polls, but in the internal pushing
and shoving among candidates to be the one on the ballot.
Alone among Horry County’s 120
precincts, the folks of the Spring Branch precinct in Nichols – in the far
northwest corner of Horry County – turned out more than a quarter of their
voters on Tuesday. The Hickory Hill precinct in Loris was the only other
polling place to record more than a fifth of their registered voters at the
polls.
Break out the “I voted” stickers and
dig out voter registration card. It’s election day in Horry County.
We realize this may come as a
surprise to the 91 percent of Horry
County voters who didn’t
bother to show up at the polls two weeks ago in the special primary election.
Of the more than 140,000 registered voters in the county, almost 130,000 were
nowhere to be seen. And, frankly, we expect that turnout for today’s special
primary runoff election will be even lower. But it doesn’t have to be. And it
shouldn’t be.
Sunday’s editorial weighs in with our
thoughts on the race for Horry County Council chairman:
As Horry County
ponders who to put into the role of County Council chairman, two major, ongoing
issues come to the fore.
The first is no surprise. It’s the
same concern we’ve had for the past few years: How can we improve our local
economy and get more people back to work? While local jobless numbers are
showing some welcome improvement, our recovery from the crash of a few years
ago remains painstakingly slow. More than 11 percent of Horry County
workers were without jobs in December, the latest numbers available from the
state Department of Employment and Workforce. Job seekers in our region
outnumbered job openings 5 to 1.
Sunday’s editorial is the second part
of our two-day series on county recreation fund spending:
With $20,000 a year each in taxpayer
money to spend at their leisure, we’d expect Horry County Council members to
adhere to the strictest guidelines for doling out that cash, ensuring that tax
funds aren’t being wasted or used improperly. Instead, council members have
done little to keep tabs on how large portions of the money is spent, never
question each other’s spending and regularly ignore even their own rules on how
such funding should be distributed.
The issue is the county’s district
recreation funds, a relatively obscure part of the county’s spending process
that gives each council member a pot of money to spend at the beginning of each
fiscal year. The councilmen are then charged with spending that money on
whatever projects they think will best fulfill the mission of community
recreation in their district.
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