Council divided on posting salaries

With South Carolina and local governments throughout the state cutting public services and often reducing the pay of public employees that remain on the job, there's a growing push for transparency about how the increasingly scarce dollars are spent.

Charleston County is poised to display the salaries of most employees earning $50,000 or more on the county's Web site, but County Council members have been divided on the issue. A proposal to put some, but not all, of the public salary information online will be considered by council Tuesday.

"This is an effort to help people understand what is going on," Councilman Paul Thurmond said at a committee meeting Thursday evening as he proposed the Web posting.

Thurmond said making the information easy to find could eliminate some of the "rumor and suspicion" about what county employees earn, particularly among county employees themselves.

Some members of council weren't so keen on the idea.

Council Chairman Teddie Pryor said the information could lead to morale problems if employees conclude they aren't being paid fairly compared with their co-workers. Pryor suggested taking a poll of employees to see if they supported the idea and also suggested publishing salary information without employees' names.

"What are we trying to prove?" he asked Thurmond.

Pryor eventually agreed with the plan to post the salary information after Thurmond agreed that only those earning more than $50,000 would be posted and that elected officials, such as the auditor and treasurer, could opt out of having their staff salaries put on the county's Web site.

While County Council mulls a final decision about how much of the public information to make easily accessible, The Post and Courier has posted all of the salary information provided by the county.

The list covers 1,388 employees who earn at least $34,000 and specific salaries for the 425 Charleston County employees earning $50,000 or more.

At the committee meeting Thursday, council members Curtis Inabinett, Colleen Condon and Vic Rawl voted against the plan to put selected salary information on the county's Web site. Henry Darby was absent from the meeting, and the remaining council members voted to recommend the plan.

Rawl said that if the county was going to put some employee salaries online, it should put them all online. Condon and Inabinett didn't see the need to post salaries.

"I don't see a reason why that should be broadcast," Condon said.

Council members' pay would not appear on the list recommended for disclosure because the part-time officials are paid $14,352 (Pryor, as council chairman, gets an extra $3,000.).

Also not on the list is County Attorney Joe Dawson, who in recent years was the county's highest-paid employee. And the list reflects only Charleston County's portion of the pay of elected public officials in the county, such as the coroner and clerk of courts.

The county provided the salary information late Friday afternoon, and Assistant Public Information Officer Danica Goff could not immediately explain why Dawson was not on the list.

The salaries of public officials and government employees are matters of public record in South Carolina, but that doesn't mean the information is easy to find.

In most cases, the information is provided to individuals and organizations upon request but is not posted on government Web sites.

"Why would we not make it easy for our citizens to access this stuff?" County Councilman Joe McKeown said Thursday.

Newspapers, including The Post and Courier, often obtain the public salary information and post it on their own Web sites. A searchable database of state employee salary information at postandcourier.com/statesalary has been a popular feature.

Reach David Slade at 937-5552 or dslade@postandcourier.com.