Vaughn column: The Hampton County Mudflat

Most Lowcountry folks who spend any time in the outdoors understand the curse of the mudflat. You can be tooling along in your boat, enjoying the scenery and nature, and the next second you are dead in the mud. Mudflats will stop you cold and if you aren’t resourceful and quick, you will spend the next six hours watching the tide roll back in. The thing about mudflats is you really don’t see them until you are stuck on one. In Hampton County, you can spend much longer than six hours on our mudflat. Hampton County’s mudflat is on Jackson Street East and not on the Combahee River. The Hampton County Mudflat is located in a large white building that houses the County Council chambers.

I hit that mudflat on June 13, 2018, when I asked for a meeting with Rose Dobson-Elliott to discuss the recreation complex the people voted on and approved in 2012.  Sadly, I have been stuck on that mudflat for almost four years.  

It is approaching the four-year anniversary since my boat got stuck on that mudflat as I met with Administrator Dobson-Elliott and members of the Hampton Little League baseball committee. We’ve been stuck on that mudflat ever since. The purpose of that meeting long ago was to determine why your County Council has never acted on the approved recreation complex promised in the 2012 Capital Projects Sales Tax referendum. At that June 2018 meeting, Dobson-Elliott indicated that there was only about $400,000 left in that account and that was not nearly enough to build a recreation complex. In actuality, there should have been $4,418,519 in the account at that time, according to Finance Director Chanel Lewis. Little did I know just how long I was going to be stonewalled on that mudflat. You can stay on a mudflat forever if people don’t want to help you get off of it.

Then came the big cat that burst forth out of the bag in the Council Chambers and scared everyone in the room. On Jan. 10, 2022, the Hampton County Mudflat came alive as the revelation that $5.1 million in restricted fund dollars were misspent by the Council when Finance Director Lewis announced it in an open session. Mud was flying everywhere and, in that flying storm of mud, some Council members were praising Ms. Lewis for finding and reporting the misspending error. Imagine praising someone when they tell you they have broken an ordinance voted on by the good people of Hampton County and spent over $5.1 million dollars of taxpayer restricted money. Lewis revealed that the Council had spent $3,668,944.98 of the CPST money on unapproved expenditures and $1.5 million of Fire Fund money. The Council has still not revealed what that money was spent for. This mudflat is so quiet after Ms. Lewis let that cat out of the bag but the Hampton County Mudflat is beginning to give off an offensive odor and all that shucking and jiving by Council did not stop the mud from hitting them. It was an awful sight to see grown men and women covered in pluff mud. That pluff mud smells different because a lot of plants and animals die in it just like the dream of a recreation complex has died on the Hampton County Mudflat.

As with the CPST money, there is no explanation as to where the Fire Fund money was spent, although Rose Dobson-Elliott has stated publicly that she knows where the $5.1 million was spent. What a conundrum in the mud. If we ever find those receipts for that $5.1 million, I’ll bet there is pluff mud to high heaven on them.

While stuck on this mudflat, I thought of five questions for the Council:

Question #1:  When will you present a plan to the public outlining how you plan to recoup the CPST and Fire funds you misspent?

This will probably not be answered unless new faces sit around that Council table. This Council is too good at stonewalling and procrastinating to answer that question. Why should they answer that question? Nobody is going to make them do it. They can’t tax the people again for a recreation complex and they can’t use the financial recovery money for that purpose. Reality is a bummer. The truth is there is not a consensus on the Council to even attempt to restore that money to the restricted accounts. Might as well enjoy this mudflat for a while. These danged sand gnats are driving me crazy. 

Question #2:  When will something concrete be stated as a result of the Alliance Engineering $60,000 study on recreation?

I suspect we have heard all we are going to hear for a while on this subject. Those three meetings attended by maybe 50 total people are probably all the information we will get for that $60,000. Does anyone have any bug spray?

Question #3:  When will this council and administration tell the public what you spent the CPST and Fire fund restricted money on?

The administration took that money from restricted accounts and transferred it to the general fund. Once it was transferred to the general fund, the money was spent on whatever. There are probably no records of exactly what the money was spent on, which should be considered criminal at worst and unethical at best. It looks like there is no paddle in this boat to get us off of this danged mudflat. 

Question #4:  Is this council ever going to completely answer legal FOIA requests presented to them?

The answer is NO. The Council is not going to answer those questions unless someone brings a lawsuit against them to force the issue. The truth is they are answering those questions by their stonewalling and silence. They are saying by their refusal to answer the questions that we spent the money on what we wanted to spend it on and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. We can sit on this mudflat forever but we have to get to those polls soon.

Question #5:  Will this council ever direct a forensic audit of county funds to clear the air once and for all concerning fiscal mismanagement?

This mudflat will turn to pure gold before this Council authorizes a forensic audit. Unless, and this is a big UNLESS, there are new faces around that table after November, we will all be eating pluff mud for a while. This mudflat grew by leaps and bounds during the fiscal year of 2016/2017 but went unnoticed because the public did not know the Council was dipping into restricted funds. The fact is the majority of the Council has been on board long enough to straighten out this mess, yet they have chosen not to do so. That growth in misspent money coincidently came as the current County Administrator was settling back into her old job again. New faces may take Hampton to new places and get us off this dadgum mudflat. 

Is that a gator over there?