By Robert Kittle
A South Carolina Senate subcommittee voted unanimously Tuesday to confirm Susan Alford as the new director of the state Department of Social Services. Former director Lillian Koller resigned last year just ahead of an expected vote of no confidence by senators. Senators have been investigating problems at DSS like heavy caseloads and high turnover, which have led to children dying after DSS involvement.
Sen. Joel Lourie, D-Columbia, one of the leading critics of how things have been going at the agency, said a conversation he had with Alford convinced him she was the right person for the job.
“When you were asked to consider taking the job you said that you wanted to think about it,” he said. “And you went home and read the Legislative Audit Council report and you were angry. Ms. Alford, at that point I felt a huge sense of weight come off my shoulders, because I felt like we would have a director who has the passion for change in that agency as much as this committee has the same passion and has worked so hard on for the last year-and-a-half and as much as the employees at the agency and the child advocates want change.”
Now that the subcommittee has voted to confirm her, a full committee will vote Wednesday. If those senators approve her confirmation, the full state Senate will vote on it.
Alford spent years at the state Department of Juvenile Justice and says that agency overcame a class-action lawsuit against it over the treatment of juveniles, problems that are similar to what DSS is going through.
“I think the thing you try to do initially when you go in an agency is there’s so many things that you’ve got to work on that you try to look at your priorities, and my rule is to look at the 20 percent of the things that cause 80 percent of the problems,” she told reporters after her confirmation hearing. “And I believe we’ve identified a number of those things within the department to be able to work on. Caseload size is a biggie. Turnover is also a big one, and the ability to get the department stable enough that folks can really do their jobs well, and then from there you look at how you create improvements in all the different systems that you have.
She also told senators that a recent legal settlement will prevent taxpayers from having to pay millions of dollars in federal fines. The state has been fined more than $100 million for not having a statewide child support enforcement computer system that federal law required in 1997. The state has missed that deadline because of problems with three different vendors, all of which led to lengthy lawsuits that slowed things down even further.
The system is now expected to be up and running in four years, and the lawsuit settlement will pay the federal fines the state will be assessed until it is, Alford told senators.
