Employees of the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control put in close to 100,000 hours and millions of dollars' worth of overtime through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but some of that extra work wasn't done by public health employees.
Documents provided through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that thousands of employees worked outside of their usual schedule as the contagion required the state to build an infrastructure for contact tracing and testing. The total tab from March 2020 to the beginning of this February was $3.3 million in overtime wages, or 99,259 extra hours. In the Public Health wing, thousands of staff worked extra hours.
But notably, hundreds of employees of the sprawling agency's Environmental Affairs section were also drafted, doing everything from data entry to staffing testing events to driving around doses of a new medication. In total, 341 employees who usually work in environmental regulation or permitting helped in some way during that period.
The episode is one of the rare examples of environmental employees and public health employees working on the same mission at the agency. DHEC is one of the largest organs of state government, with close to 4,000 total employees and broad responsibilities. It reviews applications for new hospitals, battles infectious diseases, conducts restaurant inspections, checks the safety of dams, gives permits to build in sensitive coastal areas and reviews plans for septic tanks, among many other functions.
That's led some to argue over the years that the agency should actually be broken apart, a suggestion that's mostly stayed in the background. This year, the proposal got new life as it has been championed by Senate President Harvey Peeler, R-Gaffney.
But ironically, the past year has seen potentially the most coordination ever between the agency's wings. When the need to conduct a special testing event or fix the data management system for test results arose, a call went out to all environmental employees. Sometimes the request verged on desperate.
"This is a all-hands-on-deck call. We need help. Specifically, we have a high-level, short-term project for which we need people to enter data," Will Britt, a deputy incident commander working on coronavirus, wrote in a September message. "We will take as many as we can get for as many hours as we can get them."
More than 100 employees ended up offering their help for that request.
Helping the effort
Almost as soon as the virus started prompting shutdowns in the United States, DHEC began asking environmental employees if they could pitch in. A March 17, 2020, email asked for up to 25 people to help in the Agency Coordination Center, DHEC's center of operations and resource management.
Volunteers helped to input data from tests, assemble testing kits and distribute scarce resources. Sometimes they were called in when the state's data-keeping infrastructure went awry. Shortly before agency officials admitted a "systems issue" had made them temporarily under-report positive tests, environmental employees received an email with the subject line: "Urgent!!: Assistance Needed Sunday, January 10th Public Health Lab!"
Robertha Dorsey, a financial analyst for the DHEC program that regulates gas stations' underground tanks, said she jumped at the chance to help out. Mostly, she shuttled doses of the drug Remdesivir around the state to the sickest COVID-19 patients.
"We didn't have a lot of drivers, but we had enough to get the work done," said Dorsey, whose longest delivery trip was from the Columbia area to Myrtle Beach. "If this was my loved one, I would hope somebody would try to get the medicine to them."
Workers didn't always get paid for this extra time, however. To earn any overtime, they had to work at least 15 hours in a week on coronavirus efforts, and then only got paid for any time above 40 hours in that period, according to multiple emails. Employees of DHEC typically work 37.5 hours a week.
For her part, Dorsey said she didn't volunteer because of the money. "I did it to help," she said.
Derrek Asberry, a spokesman for DHEC, said the pandemic created "unprecedented circumstances" and that "it was necessary to pull as many resources as possible into our response as we worked to increase public awareness, provide answers, and keep South Carolinians as safe as possible."
The repeated call-outs for help were just one of the symptoms of the stress that the pandemic put on the agency in the last year. The department was without top leaders for months, though Dr. Edward Simmer was selected as the agency's new director in December. In another episode, South Carolina lawmakers were briefly befuddled as they offered DHEC more money to fight the pandemic, but the agency hadn't made a formal request.
The agency's response to the pandemic is one of the factors that has made lawmakers give a new look at an old proposal: splitting the department apart.
To split or not to split
Usually, the lower the bill number, the higher the priority, and the bill to sever DHEC was given the title S.2. But the legislation did not make it out of committee in the state Senate in 2021, and won't have a chance to make it to the floor for a vote before next January, since regular session has ended.
An original version of the bill suggested creating a new Public Health agency, and splitting DHEC's environmental responsibilities between the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture. The idea brought swift criticism from many, in part because some environmental programs would be regulating the same businesses that the Agriculture Department is designed to promote, and because it would have split up related programs, like those within DHEC's Bureau of Water.
The bill has since been amended and would instead create a new "Department of Environmental Services" instead of splitting up environmental programs.
Environmental advocates said a dedicated environmental agency would make regulation of the state's air, water and land stronger. Not everyone agrees. In an April subcommittee meeting, Simmer said it did make sense that two separate missions were housed in the same agency, because "protecting the environment is really a focus on people’s health too."
But he also admitted that there was always a risk that public health efforts, particularly during the pandemic, might overshadow the other half of the agency.
Regardless of whether DHEC is split or not, the state has many positions to fill there after the ravages of the pandemic. As of May 17, 13 percent of positions in Environmental Affairs and 23 percent of positions in Public Health were vacant. In total, that's 642 jobs that need to be filled.
Asked whether there was concern at the agency over employees burning out, Asberry, the spokesman, wrote: "Like many others, this pandemic has been exhausting for DHEC staff mentally, emotionally, and physically. We have a dedicated staff and we also provide adequate opportunities for vacation time, medical leave, personal days, etc."
Asberry didn't specify when or if the agency would continue asking for volunteers this year. But Dorsey said the requests seem to have significantly dropped off, and she hasn't personally volunteered since January.