After an understandable uproar and ethics questions, Charleston County Council amended its parting agreement with its former attorney, Joe Dawson, now a federal judge, but there’s an important part to this whole regrettable deal that voters should remember instead of just moving on. Specific…

Regardless of whether a conflict of interest played a role in the state’s allowing a controversial oyster farming operation near Folly Beach — and most indications are it did not — South Carolina needs to improve its processes for reviewing and allowing this relatively new form of mariculture.

While Charleston County’s new Lowcountry Rapid Transit system is in its formative stages — its first bus isn’t expected to roll until 2026 under the best-case scenario — developers already are thinking about how this innovative transportation line will transform the properties along its route.

Kids probably won’t die or even get terribly sick as a result of Gov. Henry McMaster’s demand that schools allow children to attend without masks, in defiance of Education Superintendent Molly Spearman’s requirement and DHEC’s recommendation. After all, serious illness and deaths from COVID-…

The public accounting over the tragic death of Jamal Sutherland inside the Charleston County jail earlier this year has been mishandled to date, and while this week’s release of videos is a positive, overdue step, more needs to be done.

There’s something oddly fitting about the way Bob Caslen’s brief tenure as the president of the University of South Carolina came to an end.

We know that S.C. employers, like their counterparts across the country, are having an increasingly difficult time finding people to hire. We know too that more than 100,000 South Carolinians are receiving federal unemployment benefits that are initially larger and continue long after regula…

A bill backed by U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and a bipartisan group of seven other senators would extend and greatly expand the extra charitable giving deduction from 2020 federal individual income taxes that was a part of the national response to the pandemic. Congress should move quickly …

The S.C. Corrections Department says it intends to release the name of any prisoner who is executed whenever South Carolina gets back into the execution business. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's not releasing the names of any other prisoners who die in state custody unless or…

A week of debate in the Senate didn’t produce a good reason for South Carolina to let people carry handguns openly in public. We heard that people want to do this, and that some mistakenly believe the U.S. Constitution gives them a right to do it, but that’s not the same as a reason the stat…

For as long as South Carolina has had a Commerce Department, lawmakers have given it free rein to hand out incentives, often in the form of massive tax breaks, often in secret, in order to bring jobs to South Carolina.

No one knew for sure if the rural town of Allendale could get internet access by installing new equipment atop a state-owned TV tower. A state agency, to its credit, took a chance anyway, and its success already is paying off there and should serve as a model for connecting other parts of ou…

Tuesday’s Sullivan’s Island election results struck a clear and powerful chord for conserving one of the most special parts of the town: its growing maritime forest. We hope even those islanders who voted for losing candidates come to see the wisdom of this outcome in the long run.

The state budget bill adopted last week by the S.C. Senate is quite a blessing to nonprofits and local governments, which were showered with $100 million worth of useful and not-so-useful projects and programs. But unlike the past decade, those earmarks were outed by a reform that allows tax…

Democrats used the filibuster last year to prevent the U.S. Senate from passing a police reform bill developed by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. Today, Senate Republicans are poised to block a Democratic reform bill they say goes too far in strengthening federal oversight of police departmen…

Those who have followed The Post and Courier’s ongoing “Uncovered” series realize that it’s about more than stories of state and local officials abusing the public trust; it’s also about how residents, voters and others struggle mightily these days to learn about this abuse and hold their of…

Rivers Avenue will never look the same again. And that’s a good thing.

It’s time for Charleston City Council to resume meeting in person but with added precautions that recognize the pandemic isn’t over. Council also should keep the technology that has made it more convenient for people to monitor and even participate in those meetings.

An innovative new partnership between the Medical University of South Carolina and the state Department of Corrections takes a promising step toward improving health care for the state’s roughly 15,000 prisoners. As the severe impact of COVID-19 on inmate health demonstrated, the partnership…

There’s probably nothing we can say at this point to convince S.C. senators who don’t already realize that it’s a bad idea to let concealed-weapon carriers start carrying their guns on their hips.

Everybody knows it’s three strikes and you’re out in baseball. We need that same rule when it comes to state and local governments in South Carolina letting the public know how they’re conducting the public’s business.

After the 2015 killing of Walter Scott — which ultimately resulted in a 20-year federal sentence for Officer Michael Slager — North Charleston invited the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services Division to review of the city’s policing practices. It was a review city …

The investor-owned utility that thought S.C. politicians were so desperate to unload Santee Cooper that they’d practically pay someone to take it finally got the message that a sale isn’t in the offing after the S.C. Senate voted 36-8 against even soliciting new bids.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster has never been as aggressive as we’d like about using his authority to help fight COVID-19, but by today’s political standards, he’s been generally responsible. That changed on Wednesday, when he launched an assault on masks.

In rolling out its campuswide ban on tobacco products six years ago, The Citadel noted that it was “committed to providing a safe and healthy learning and working environment for our cadets, students, faculty, staff and visitors and recognizes that tobacco use in any form is a significant he…

State lawmakers need to get to the bottom of what’s going on with South Carolina’s agency that handles juvenile prisons, particularly after a new audit found that the Department of Juvenile Justice failed to maintain adequate security staffing, saw a rise in violence and continued to grapple…

It’s understandable that people would worry about whether getting a COVID-19 vaccine is safe, about whether it might have as-yet-unreported side effects or about whether they really need the shot.

For decades, Charleston area cycling advocates have been seeing red because our streets aren’t painted green. That has changed this year with two important and dramatic projects we hope will herald the beginning of a new era where state and local governments work together to create safe, acc…

President Joe Biden is in discussions with Senate Republicans on an infrastructure funding bill, and they may be close to agreement on the types of infrastructure that should be paid for and the size of the eight-year investment program that would address real needs in our highways, rail, ma…

It’s crunch time at the S.C. Statehouse. With just nine days left in the regular session, the rush is on to get high-priority bills passed before they adjourn on May 13, and to sneak through nasty little back-burner measures that haven’t gotten much attention. Like making it easier for tobac…

One of the biggest positives to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic was the recognition that while we can do a lot of life online, there’s a lot we can’t do well. And for most students and families, that includes education.

One of the biggest challenges with “free” money is making sure you don’t spend it irresponsibility. And as the Congress considers President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster and other state officials seem determined to fail that test.

It’s easy to understand why Charleston County’s $30 million recycling center opened several months before the public learned that the actual cost was 25% more: County officials were eager to show off their shiny new object, not so much all the bungling that led up to it.

A Minneapolis jury's conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin on all counts in the brutal killing of George Floyd was seen by so many as such an important moment of reckoning that it would be easy to overlook the news closer to home about police officers being held to account for cr…

A long-simmering mining controversy in Awendaw provides one of the best examples of why South Carolina needs to rethink and update its approach to regulating mining activity, which is an important piece of the state’s economy but must be allowed only in the right places. And as our state gro…

On the surface, The Post and Courier’s latest Uncovered installment exposes a school superintendent whose bad behavior went unpunished in a small, poor school district whose high school and middle school and one of its three elementary schools are ranked among the worst in South Carolina.

The conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin marks a welcome end to a criminal trial that has riveted this nation as few others in recent years. And while many will find solace, relief and even joy in Tuesday’s guilty verdicts on all charges, this must not mark an end to the im…

With President Joe Biden’s decision to remove American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 20 years to the day after brutal attacks on the United States launched from that country, the die is cast. America is done with fighting Afghanistan’s seemingly eternal wars. Maybe.

We aren’t convinced that people should be able to vote over the internet or that our state should mail ballots to voters who haven’t asked for them — or even mail applications to people who haven’t asked for them, although some counties do make requesting an absentee ballot more cumbersome t…

Few things ever built in Charleston have become as iconic as the twin diamond towers of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. bridge. Though it opened only 16 years ago, it’s our tallest and arguably most recognizable and reproduced local landmark.

What if you knew a way to make it impossible for people to commit crimes? A way that costs next to nothing and doesn’t restrict anyone’s rights. You’d jump on it, right?

An incident on King Street recently probably wouldn’t have made news had Charleston police not felt compelled to close down a short stretch of the street for several hours as they dealt with a distraught, baseball bat-wielding man smashing bottles inside — and occasionally throwing bottles o…

When the S.C. Senate took up a bill last week to let college athletes make money off their celebrity, by allowing them to sell their name, image or likeness, Sen. Sean Bennett prefaced his objection by saying “I hate to sound like the 'get off my lawn' guy.”

Developers who want to avoid building on the lowest part of their property — and make other site adjustments to preserve open space, trees, views, even historical sites — have new flexibility in the city of Charleston. This important zoning change could even set a precedent that Charleston a…

Charleston’s City Council has been among the most aggressive governments in South Carolina in using its power to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster has had COVID-19, and his latest interactions were outdoors. So the chance that he could be infected again and could infect someone else is low. But it isn’t zero.

Most of us were probably a bit incredulous the first time we heard about the Venus flytrap: There’s such a thing as a carnivorous plant? One that actually can clench its jaw-like protuberance around an unsuspecting fly?

Registered apprenticeships led by the S.C. Technical College System have emphatically proven their worth. Congress could easily triple the number of these valuable pathways to careers across the nation if it encouraged other states to follow South Carolina’s lead.