With the end of state agency near, leaders of SC bureaucracy defend its legacy

Inside a drab conference room on Bull Street, the state’s environmental and health board huddled for the last time Thursday, listening to several enforcement reports and hearing updates about the looming changes ahead.

As board meetings go, it was one of the least eventful in the Department of Health and Environmental Control’s 51-year history. But that was expected as the department’s board met for the last time.

In little more than two weeks, the DHEC board and the sprawling agency will be dissolved. Its staff will be dispersed mostly to two new agencies. And the big bureaucracy that drew plenty of criticism through the years will be gone, the victim of a government restructuring law.

On Thursday, DHEC board members and staffers reflected on the agency’s accomplishments that they said were often undervalued. They noted that, among other things, the department had helped guide South Carolina through the COVID-19 threat in 2020, responded to the disastrous effects of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and helped the small Graniteville community react to a train wreck and fatal chlorine spill in 2005.

“Our staff cares more than our citizens understand,’’ said board chair Seema Shrivastava-Patel, who said criticism of the department staff makes her “defensive, like a mother hen.’’

“I will tell you as a board member, and as chair, it’s been an incredible journey.’’

DHEC’s final board meeting, held at its Bull Street headquarters in Columbia, lasted less than two hours and was dominated by praise from board members and agency director Edward Simmer, who is credited with helping improve DHEC’s response to the coronavirus threat. He took office in early 2021 after critics had questioned DHEC’s COVID-19 efforts.

Former agency directors Doug Bryant and Rick Toomey attended the meeting, as did the widow of former director Michael Jarrett. During a post-meeting ceremony, Bryant said the agency went through good and bad times, but he was proud to have worked there. Bryant, who started work at DHEC in 1976, succeeded Jarrett.

DHEC, with about 3,500 full-time staff members, was created in 1973 in an attempt to improve government services. It followed a dispute over whether the state Pollution Control Authority and the state Health Department needed to remain separate.

South Carolina became one of the few places in the country that combined environmental and health functions in one agency. DHEC’s duties ranged from considering pollution permits and monitoring the safety of dams to regulating hospitals, inspecting restaurants and responding to public health threats.

While its mission was to both protect public health and the environment, the Legislature also tasked DHEC with helping South Carolina prosper. That often drew criticism from those who said that worrying about economic prosperity should never have been part of the department’s charter.

At the same time, many of the agency’s critics said board members and high-level officials, often including former agency lobbyists, were too willing to make deals with the Legislature. The agency had plenty of quality staffers, but DHEC management should have stood up more strongly for the environment, and to a lesser degree, public health, critics have said.

Agency defenders say DHEC often was caught in the crossfire between business interests and environmental and health advocates, and the agency did its best to referee the disputes.

The board room that provided so little drama Thursday had been the location of many of the biggest environmental and health disputes in South Carolina history. The board acted as a judge on whether to issue permits that were in dispute or uphold staff members on enforcement actions.

“This is the room where it all happened,’’ Simmer said after the meeting.

Among those happenings was a bitter fight in 1995 over whether to force the operator of a hazardous waste dump to sock away $133 million in the bank to pay for monitoring and cleaning up the site one day. The board backed down from the requirement, the dump’s operator later filed for bankruptcy and today, taxpayers, are spending $4 million a year to make sure the site doesn’t leak into nearby Lake Marion.

But the board also heard disputes over whether to approve foul-smelling chicken farms and development along the state’s eroding beaches, as well as whether to hit businesses that broke environmental laws with stiff penalties. Disputes over midwife regulations and hospital expansions also kept the board busy.

Board members, who were appointed by the governor, sometimes overruled the department’s professional staff and at other times, they downplayed reports by news media for pointing out environmental problems.

Whether the dissolution of DHEC will make for better protection of the environment and health is an unknown, but some people are hopeful.

The new S.C. Department of Environmental Services will pick up the duties of DHEC’s environmental division, while the new Department of Public Health will absorb the agency’s health division. The two agencies will be directly under the authority of Gov. Henry McMaster. Staff from DHEC will, for the most part, move to the new agencies, although some will go to the Department of Agriculture.

Shrivastava-Patel said the Legislature needs to tweak the restructuring law next year. With DHEC becoming a cabinet agency, citizens won’t have a board to address or to hear their challenges to permit decisions or fines. They’ll now have to hire lawyers to go to the Administrative Law Court. She favors having some panel to hear such issues before they go to the administrative court.

Still, Shrivastava-Patel and Simmer said they ultimately agreed with the plan to split DHEC, which at one time had been opposed by many in the agency. They said having two departments should allow the state to focus better on environmental issues and health issues.

The new health department may eventually include other state health agencies, such as the Department of Mental Health, but that remains a point of contention in the Legislature and may not be fully resolved until next year.

“Separating the agencies allows us to get to a better integration of health services,’’ said Simmer, who said he’s interesting in remaining director of the new health department for several years. “Whether it happens this year or next year, that’s probably the right thing.’’

After DHEC is disbanded, the new health and environmental departments that come from the agency are expected to eventually move to other offices. But for the near future, most offices should remain in the same places as they were under DHEC.