COLUMBIA — A week after negotiations publicly blew up, the Legislature’s chief budget writers have reached a deal on spending $350 million on local projects.
An agreement that shaves $100 million from the House’s list of legislator-sponsored projects and changes the process for future budgets means most of this year’s proposed earmarks — or community investments, as legislators call them — will be at least partially funded, according to the chambers’ budget chairmen.
The House and Senate will return Tuesday to vote on whether to send the pared-down list to Gov. Henry McMaster’s desk.
“I think what we’ve done and investments we’ve made are good things for our constituents,” House Ways and Means Chairman Bruce Bannister told the SC Daily Gazette on Friday. “Resolving it this way is helping the people of South Carolina.”
Last week, he announced that the House wasn’t coming back. After a compromise to separately review local requests fell apart, Bannister said the budget sent to McMaster would be the final word on spending for the year. And he meant it — at the time, anyway.
“I believed we were finished,” said the Greenville Republican.
But negotiations between legislative leaders continued.
Under the agreement, the Senate keeps its $131 million worth of spending on projects that include public parks, water and sewer upgrades, and improvements to police and fire departments. The House has whittled its total to $220 million.
None of the earmarks for first responders, including local fire and police departments, got trimmed. And all projects receiving less than $300,000 stayed. But the rest of the House’s list got reduced by 39%. Those cuts weren’t across the board. Legislative delegations prioritized what to eliminate and fully fund within their counties, Bannister said.
As an example, he said, “If there’s a sidewalk project that is for kids’ safety, and they want to do it right now, and there’s a park renovation that can wait, they may have cut their park out completely in favor of the sidewalk safety project.”
The governor’s office was also part of negotiations. The items he planned to veto have already come off the list, Bannister said.
The agreement leaves roughly $30 million of the money set aside for local projects unspent.
When the Legislature met last week to send the $15 billion budget package to McMaster, six weeks after the start of the fiscal year, both chambers blamed the other for negotiations dragging out and the compromise on local spending falling apart.
Senators’ protests over the process included that the House waited until after the Senate passed its budget proposal to add its long list of earmarks and that the House’s total for local spending was nearly 2½ times the Senate’s tally. House members countered that’s because there are more representatives than senators: 124 to 46. But senators argued they represent more people in larger districts.
The agreement worked out between the two leaders who control the budget process makes several changes starting next year: The House will include local projects in its initial budget proposal sent to the Senate. The chambers will spend roughly the same amount on earmarks. And there will be no direct funding to nonprofits. That doesn’t mean a ban. But any earmarks for nonprofits must be sponsored by a local government, the leaders said.
Those changes won’t be put into chamber rules or law. Rather, it’s a “gentlemen’s agreement,” Bannister said.
The fight over local spending comes one year after legislators took a one-year hiatus from earmarks, at Peeler’s insistence. After spending that had been in the tens of millions of dollars climbed to hundreds of millions, reaching a high of $713 million in 2023, the Gaffney Republican said a break was needed to rein it in.
On Friday, he called the agreement a great first step.
“If handled properly,” earmarks benefit taxpayers, he said.
“It’s a very good budget,” he said, adding that Bannister is a “good negotiator.” “It was worth fighting for.”
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com.
