DHEC’s future looks grim. Will legislators finally break up the agency as time runs low?
The proposed breakup of South Carolina’s 49-year-old health and environmental agency moved ahead Thursday, with a key legislative committee approving the plan and sending it to the House of Representatives for consideration days before the legislative session ends.
But while the bill splits the Department of Health and Environmental Control into separate health and environmental agencies, the House Ways and Means Committee changed the legislation so that details of the breakup would not be worked out until after more study is conducted over the next two years.
DHEC would remain intact as a department until then, according to the amended bill.
The measure approved by Ways and Means goes to the full House for consideration with three days left in the regular Legislative session. That leaves chances of the bill passing up in the air because it needs House approval and concurrence by the Senate..
But Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, vice-chair of the Ways and Means Committee, said “the bill is not dead..’’ If the committee had wanted to kill the legislation, it would not have taken up the measure Thursday or it would have voted against the bill, she said.
Rep. Murrell Smith, the committee chairman, said he has not heard much opposition to splitting DHEC into separate health and environmental agencies. The main question is working out the details, he said.
Powerful Upstate Sen. Harvey Peeler, a dairyman and main proponent of breaking up DHEC, should be aware of the changes approved by the committee, Smith said. Senate leadership was told of the amendment the committee planned to take up Thursday, Smith said
“We need to be prudent and make sure that we are doing the right thing, and we take our time and get it right,’’ Smith, R-Sumter, said. “There’s nothing worse that we can do than make mistakes in the process..’’
Smith, the incoming speaker of the House, said a previous version of the bill — already approved by the Senate — proposed too many substantial changes in South Carolina’s oversight of health and the environment to act swiftly. The bill pushed by Peeler, R-Cherokee, sailed through the Senate without giving the public a chance to speak.
Boosters of separating DHEC say the agency is unwieldy, with too many duties to act swiftly and efficiently enough to address environmental and health concerns.
Dissolving DHEC and creating separate health and environmental departments, both directly under control of the governor, would be one of the biggest shifts in the structure of state government since the early 1990s..
Formed in 1973, the department has a broad range of responsibilities that touch the lives of most South Carolina residents.
Its duties include inspecting restaurants, monitoring drinking water for pollution, overseeing immunizations, dealing with public health crises like COVID 19, issuing pollution discharge permits to industry and checking for air and water pollution. The agency event regulates tattoo parlors. DHEC has more than 3,000 full-time workers and is one the state’s largest agencies.
That’s why many House members urged slowing down the effort to dissolve the agency.
According to the House version approved Thursday, the bill leaves it up to another state agency and a new 10-member, legislatively appointed committee to decide details of how the breakup occurs. Presumably, the Legislature would then sign off on those recommendations, although the amended bill did not make that clear. Cobb-Hunter said the intent is for the legislature to vote on the recommendations.
The previous Senate-approved version of the bill spelled out many changes that have been criticized as ill-conceived.
Under the amended bill, the Department of Administration would issue a final report by March 2023. The legislatively appointed committee would look at the administration department’s report before making recommendations on how to accomplish the change. The committee must issue a report by Jan. 15, 2024, according to the amended bill.
It was not known what the administration department and the committee would examine, but one of the areas is expected to be the Department of Mental Health.
The Senate version of the bill put the mental health agency in the new large health agency with DHEC’s health division. But after an outcry from boosters of the Department of Mental Health, the committee on Thursday dropped mental health from the proposed new agency.
For now, the mental health department and its governing board will remain in place, but the committee will be looking at whether to fold the agency into the new Department of Behavior and Public Health. The legislation says putting mental health into the new health agency still is under consideration.
“I don’t want anyone to think that mental health is not going to eventually be combined with the health agency,’’ Smith said, but added “that’s something we need to study.’’
Another area the committee could look at is whether to incorporate any duties of the S.C. Department of Natural Resources into the new Department of Environmental Services. Past versions of the DHEC breakup bill had included plans for the new department to absorb some of the water resource duties now covered by the DNR.
The S.C. Farm Bureau favored that plan, saying it would cut down on red tape and ease the permitting process. Others said that could eliminate the systems of checks and balances that now exist between DHEC and the DNR.
Edward Simmer, DHEC’s director, said it makes sense to study the details of the breakup before the new health and environmental agencies begin to operate. Until then, “nothing changes,’’ Simmer said.
DHEC is one of the few state agencies in the country where both public health and environmental protection are the responsibility of one department. Most states have separate public health and environment departments.
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control was formed from the union of the old state health department and the state’s pollution control authority after lengthy discussions in the early 1970s. Supporters have said combining health and environment into one agency made sense because so many environmental issues affect health.
But the agency is a controversial one, in part because it includes an array of regulatory programs that can upset people who need permits. Restructuring DHEC has been a topic of conversation dating to the 1980s, and bills to disband it come up regularly.
Through the years, DHEC has been criticized for failing to aggressively attack certain environmental and health problems, in part because the agency has such broad responsibilities.
Well publicized problems include DHEC’s failure to resolve long-running threats to drinking water in small communities. Many small drinking water systems have regularly broken safe drinking water laws. But DHEC has issued light fines without fixing the problems, The State reported in 2019.
Critics also blasted the agency during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The department failed to quickly disclose information that could have told people where outbreaks were occurring.
Supporters of DHEC have said the agency does a good job but must deal with political pressure from the Legislature that sometimes makes aggressive action difficult.
This story has been updated.
This story was originally published May 5, 2022 at 2:30 PM with the headline "DHEC’s future looks grim. Will legislators finally break up the agency as time runs low?."
