By Robert Kittle
The South Carolina House of Representatives voted Wednesday to fire the board of trustees at South Carolina State University. A new audit released Wednesday says the school will be $23.5 million in debt by the end of June.
Rep. Harold Mitchell, D-Spartanburg, who played football at SC State, said after the vote, “There’s just a lot that we should be proud of, of the university, and I’m going to fight, just like any and everybody else in this General Assembly, to make sure that it stays open and we get what is needed there to make it solvent.”
SC State is the state’s only public historically black college or university.
The SC State board recently fired president Thomas Elzey. Mitchell says Elzey put his personal barber on the school’s payroll. “You make these cuts for the small jobs there at the university and then you bring in a barber, your barber, from Charleston to Orangeburg, and the report shows that it was to the tune of $37,000,” he says. “You’re paying somebody $37,000 and you don’t even have a full head of hair?”
The House bill would have the state Budget and Control Board oversee SC State. The Budget and Control Board consists of the governor, state treasurer, state comptroller general, and the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
The state Senate has also passed a bill to fire the SC State board. Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, says, “Next step is to reconcile the two bills, between the House and Senate, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work. Have the Budget and Control Board get their designees and then go ahead and start meeting, making recommendations of how we can fix SC State.”
