Politics

A Look at South Carolina Gov. Haley’s Successes and Stumbles

Published

9 years ago

July 16, 2015

Oakland Post

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (AP Photo)

SEANNA ADCOX, Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — GOP Gov. Nikki Haley’s successful push to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s Statehouse grounds following last month’s massacre at a historic black church has boosted her national profile. But that transpired over just a few weeks of the five years she’s been in office.

Here are a few other successes and some of her stumbles:

___

JOBS

Haley has successfully branded herself a jobs governor, propelling her to re-election last year. Major announcements include Boeing’s decision in April 2013 to create 2,000 additional jobs at its North Charleston plant after legislators passed a $120 million incentives package she eagerly signed.

Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Trelleborg and Giti Tire also have announced new or expanded facilities in recent years, making South Carolina the nation’s tire capital.

But early in her tenure, legislators blasted her as nearly torpedoing an economic deal negotiated by her predecessor. She opposed giving Amazon a temporary exemption from collecting state sales taxes in exchange for 2,000 jobs. The bill eventually became law in June 2011 without her signature.

Since then, her administration has actively used incentives to bring companies to the state — angering tea party activists who helped put her in office. In May, Haley and her Commerce agency secured Volvo Car’s first North American plant, and a pledge of 2,000 jobs, by promising more than $200 million in state incentives.

The Associated Press has questioned her administration’s math on the total number of jobs announced since she took office, twice finding her figure was overstated and easily misinterpreted, as thousands of the jobs won’t arrive for years and some have already fallen through.

___

AUTHORITY OVERREACHES

Minutes after the 2011 regular session ended, Haley ordered legislators back to pass her top agenda items. The GOP-controlled Legislature sued, and the state Supreme Court ruled she lacked the authority to make such an order.

Similarly, the state’s high court ruled a panel she chairs should not have disregarded a 2012 legislative agreement in the state budget by raising state employees’ health care premiums.

___

ETHICS

Haley has called, unsuccessfully, for strengthening South Carolina’s ethics laws. Her push began shortly after the House Ethics Committee cleared her in June 2012 of allegations she illegally lobbied for an engineering firm and a hospital while a House member, benefited from lobbyists donating to the hospital’s foundation, and should have disclosed consulting income from the firm since it had state contracts.

It was the second time in two months the then-GOP-dominated committee cleared her, saying the state’s ethics laws are too ambiguous.

The first vote to clear her came immediately after the committee found probable cause that violations had occurred. The back-to-back votes caused a backlash and led to a formal hearing.

Haley repeatedly said there’s nothing wrong with asking lobbyists to donate to a nonprofit — especially since the foundation paid her a salary, not a commission — and that it was impossible under the state definition for her to lobby for an agency regulation. She said she didn’t report the consulting income because state law doesn’t require it.

Haley has said her own experience led her to push for reform, to make clear what’s right and wrong, so others don’t go through what she did.

___

MISSTATEMENTS

In fall 2012, Haley acknowledged state officials didn’t do enough to prevent a hacker from stealing the personal data of 6.4 million people and businesses from the Department of Revenue’s computer servers. The acknowledgement came as a report showed dual verification for access and encrypted Social Security numbers could have prevented the theft. It followed weeks of her saying no one was to blame and nothing differently could have been done.

On the campaign trail last year, Haley sang the praises of a regulatory task force she created, saying it issued more than 3,000 recommendations on how to cut bureaucratic red tape, and all of those recommendations were “dealt” with. Actually, the panel’s report listed less than 50 recommendations, many of which have not been implemented. Her office later clarified that staff worked on each suggestion, whatever the outcome.

In September 2011, Haley acknowledged she couldn’t back up claims that half of people seeking work at the Savannah River Site, a former nuclear weapons manufacturing site now undergoing long-term cleanup, failed their drug tests. She repeatedly made the assertion to advocate linking drug tests to unemployment benefits. The actual number was less than 1 percent.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Related Topics:Confederate flag Nikki Haley South Carolina

Up Next

NAACP Wants Confederate Symbols Taken Off Georgia Property

Don't Miss

Obama to Visit Kilpatrick’s Prison in Oklahoma

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Bay Area

Map Reveals Measure X Fuel Reduction Progress Throughout Richmond

Passed by voters on Nov. 3, 2020, Measure X is a 0.5% tax on taxable purchases for general purposes, with the County Board of Supervisors determining how it will be used. The tax generates approximately $120 million annually in support of county services.

Published

4 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

Image courtesy of the City of Richmond.

By Kathy Chouteau, The Richmond Standard

A new interactive map spotlights the City of Richmond’s efforts to reduce fire hazards on City-owned parcels through the Measure X Fuel Reduction Program.

This Fuel Reduction Initiative is one-way Measure X funding is being applied, looking to improve community safety by “managing vegetation and mitigating fire risks across high-priority areas,” according to the City of Richmond.

On the map, community members can see parcels that have been completed, approved for treatment, or are currently under review, according to city sources. It added that the map also offers people a transparent view of the program’s progress.

Check out the map at https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/b17c829f94e249719f9191291a0bcae4/?org=cityofrichmond to see where various parcels in Richmond stand as part of the program funded by Measure X.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Bay Area Soda Taxes Don’t Just Affect Sales: They Help Change People’s Minds

Published

6 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

In the years since voters in several Bay Area cities supported raising taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages like sodas, some juices and sports drinks, UC Berkeley researchers say the norms around those drinks have changed significantly. Photo by Emmanuel Edward/Unsplash.

UC Berkeley researchers found that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, coupled with media attention, coincided with significant changes in social norms around sugary drinks.

By Jason Pohl
UC Berkeley News

It wasn’t that long ago when cigarettes and soda were go-to convenience store vices, glamorized in movies and marketed toward, well, everyone.

Then, lawmakers and voters raised taxes on cigarettes, and millions of dollars went into public education campaigns about smoking’s harms. Decades of news coverage chronicled how addictive and dangerous cigarettes were and the enormous steps companies took to hide the risks and hook more users.

The result: a radical shift in social norms that made it less acceptable to smoke and pushed cigarette use to historic lows, especially among minors.

New UC Berkeley research suggests sugar-sweetened beverages may be on a similar path.

The city of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation soda tax a decade ago, along with more recent Bay Area tax increases on sugar-sweetened drinks, have not only led to reduced sales. They are also associated with significant changes in social norms and attitudes about the healthfulness of sweet drinks, said Kristine A. Madsen, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and senior author of a paper published Nov. 25 in the journal BMC Public Health.

Over the span of just a few years, taxes coupled with significant media attention significantly affected the public’s overall perceptions of sugar-sweetened beverages, which include sodas, some juices, and sports drinks. Such a shift in the informal rules surrounding how people think and act could have major implications for public health efforts more broadly, Madsen said.

“Social norms are really powerful. The significant shift we saw in how people are thinking about sugary drinks demonstrates what else we could do,” Madsen said. “We could reimagine a healthier food system. It starts with people thinking, ‘Why drink so much soda?’ But what if we also said, ‘Why isn’t most of the food in our grocery stores food that makes us healthy?’”

Madsen and colleagues from UC San Francisco and UC Davis analyzed surveys from 9,128 people living in lower-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond. Using data from 2016 to 2019 and 2021, they studied year-to-year trends in people’s perception of sugar-sweetened beverages.

They wanted to understand how the four taxes in the Bay Area might have affected social norms surrounding sugary beverages — the unwritten and often unspoken rules that influence the food and drinks we buy, the clothes we wear and our habits at the dinner table.

Although social norms aren’t visible, they are incredibly powerful forces on our actions and behaviors; just ask anyone who has bought something after an influencer promoted it on TikTok or Instagram.

Researchers asked questions about how often people thought their neighbors drank sodas, sports drinks, and fruity beverages. Participants also rated how healthy several drinks were, which conveyed their own attitudes about the beverages.

The researchers found a 28% decline in the social acceptability of drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.

In Oakland, positive perceptions of peers’ consumption of sports drinks declined after the tax increase, relative to other cities. Similarly, in San Francisco, attitudes about the healthfulness of sugar-sweetened fruit drinks also declined.

In other words, people believed their neighbors weren’t drinking as many sugar-sweetened beverages, which affected their own interest in consuming soda, juices, and sports drinks.

“What it means when social norms change is that people say, ‘Gosh, I guess we don’t drink soda. That’s just not what we do. Not as much. Not all the time,’” Madsen said. “And that’s an amazing shift in mindsets.”

The research is the latest from UC Berkeley that examines how consumption patterns have changed in the decade since Berkeley implemented the nation’s first soda tax.

A 2016 study found a decrease in soda consumption and an increase in people turning to water. Research in 2019 documented a sharp decline in people turning to sugar-sweetened drinks. And earlier this year, Berkeley researchers documented that sugar-sweetened beverage purchases declined dramatically and steadily across five major American cities after taxes were put in place.

The penny-per-ounce tax on beverages, which is levied on distributors of sugary drinks — who ultimately pass that cost of doing business on to consumers — is an important means of communicating about health with the public, Madsen said.

Researchers tallied more than 700 media stories about the taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages during the study period. That level of messaging was likely a major force in driving public awareness and norms.

It’s also something Madsen said future public health interventions must consider. It was part of the progress made in cutting cigarette smoking and seems to be working with sugary drinks. And it’s those interventions that can lead to individual action.

“If we change our behaviors, the environment follows,” Madsen said. “While policy really matters and is incredibly important, we as individuals have to advocate for a healthier food system.”