COASTAL OBSERVER

Two of the five candidates for the Republican Party nomination for South Carolina governor brought their campaigns to Georgetown County in recent weeks. The primary, still six months away, will decide who will replace Gov. Henry McMaster, who is limited to two terms.

AG wants to build on lessons learned in office

After 15 years as South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson thinks he can do more.

“What I learned is, you can’t sue and indict your way out of every problem in government,” Wilson told the Georgetown County GOP Club last week. “I want to be able to take South Carolina from good to great. I want to be a transformational governor, not a transitional governor.”

Polls this fall showed Wilson trailing Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and U.S. 1st District Rep. Nancy Mace among Republican voters in the five-way race. 

A poll released this week showed Wilson leading the field with Mace dropping to third place following a confrontation with police at the Charleston airport in October. The poll by the Atlanta firm Wick found just under 40 percent of GOP voters are undecided.

Local GOP officials said they were worried about turnout for the meeting held three days before Thanksgiving, but over 70 people filled the Waccamaw Library auditorium to hear Wilson explain how he will eliminate the state income tax,  invest in infrastructure and education, and “DOGE South Carolina government.”

Wilson said tying state spending to population growth would allow it to reduce the income tax from 6 percent to zero.

County Council Member Bob Anderson asked how he would make up the lost revenue.

“As the economy grows, revenue streams grow,” Wilson said. “You go back to Calvin Coolidge, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump. Every time they cut taxes, revenues went up because people were allowed to keep their money and reinvest it.”

Wilson said the state also needs to change the property tax system, which is limited by a 2006 law known as Act 388.

“We put owner-occupied homes in first class, which is where they need to be, but we have put industrial and commercial properties in steerage,” Wilson said.

He told of the owner of an 8,000-square-foot home who complained that its taxes were lower than those on a 1,500-square-foot rental property that he owned. The taxes were passed on through the rent.

“We need to re-look at that,” Wilson said, proposing a study committee.

He said the state’s infrastructure could be more self-sustaining if the state was more innovative. He proposed converting interstate medians into toll lanes through private partnerships, leasing the sides of the rights of way for utilities and privatizing rest areas.

Government offices should occupy the upper floors of their buildings and the ground floors be leased to businesses.

“There are so many things that we can do that are more innovative that will allow us to fund our state’s infrastructure needs,” Wilson said.

In education, the state needs to increase its emphasis on 3- and 4-year-olds, he said. 

“The three most expensive things the government does: it educates, incarcerates and medicates,” Wilson said.

Spending more on schools would mean spending less on prisons, he said, including in that funding for career education in high school.

And the state needs its own version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency. 

“I never heard of the word DOGE until this time last year, and you were all the same,” Wilson said. “I have been observing fraud and abuse in government for many, many years. You said fraud, but there are wasteful and abusive government practices that don’t rise to a criminal, corrupt level. It’s just bad government.”

People who work in government need to know there is oversight the same way drivers need to know police are enforcing speed limits, he said.

One man asked Wilson to pledge that he isn’t a RINO, or Republican in name only.

“I think my record speaks for itself,” he said.

That includes challenging initiatives from the Obama and Biden administrations and defending the state’s anti-abortion legislation, he said.

The man said there are RINOs with good records.

“Pull it apart if you want to,” Wilson said. “But I’m not a RINO.”

Lt. governor says business background is key

When Gov. Henry McMaster said he wanted a business person for his running mate in 2018, Pamela Evette had a question.

“Why me? I wasn’t even my high school class president,” she recalled at a campaign stop in Georgetown this week.

The two-term lieutenant governor is among five candidates seeking the Republican Party nomination to replace McMaster in next June’s primary.

“Come January, it’s going to heat up because, let’s face it, here in South Carolina the election is the primary. I don’t foresee having a Democrat governor anytime soon,” Evette told a gathering of 20 people at the S.C. Maritime Museum before going to a private campaign event in Litchfield.

Watching over the audience was a poster featuring a photo of Evette and President Trump.

“I’ve been with President Trump from the start,” she said. “Before I was ever even in the political world.”

While she acknowledged that all the candidates will claim to be “the best Trump conservative,” Evette said her experience growing a startup business services company is what sets her apart.

“If you wouldn’t hire that person to be the CEO of your company or run the finances in your house, them don’t elect him to be your next governor,” she said.

While lieutenant governor, a position that Evette acknowledged doesn’t have much authority, is the only elected office that she has ever held, she said she was given a mandate by McMaster “to do whatever’s going to make South Carolina better.” And she is proud of the administration’s record in cutting taxes, raising pay for law enforcement and banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

“That’s what encouraged me to throw my hat in the ring,” Evette said.

Her goal is to eliminate the state income tax and cut spending. “We’re going to have to leverage technology so that we can work smarter,” Evette said.  “When you run efficiently, you drive profit to your bottom line. Well, when you run you government efficiently, you don’t use as much of your taxpayer dollars to get things done.”

Savings from improved technology, she has been told, could run about $900 million a year.

Like the president, Evette said, she wants to cut regulation.

“We should sunset all of our regulations, bring them back up in front of the General Assembly,” she said. “If they’re old and outdated, let’s get rid of them.”

Those that allow “bureaucrats to put too much personal spin on them” need to be tightened, Evette added. “This will help businesses grow.”

It will also help generate additional revenue for the state, she said.

Reducing regulation will also reduce the cost to maintain and expand infrastructure, Evette said.

“President Trump has said he would like to get rid of federal permitting and bring that permitting down to the state level, which means that it will move quicker,” she said. “If things move quicker, they cost less.”

Evette said she would also like to see the state shift more responsibility for road maintenance to the counties.

The state needs to expand school choice to get “the money following the child,” she said. That will also encourage more parental involvement in education, she added.

Evette is also eager to see more control shifted from the federal government to the states.

“Somebody came up to me and said, ‘what a horrible pick for secretary of education. What does Linda McMahon know about education?’ I said she wasn’t hired to fix education,” Evette said. “She was hired to take it apart at the federal level.”

The same principle applies to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Evette said. The state Office of Resiliency can do the work of the federal agency.

“They know exactly the needs of the people in South Carolina,” she said. “Any business person will tell you, when you get rid of all the middlemen, there’s a lot more money to get to the bottom line, which is the people that really need it.”