RESTRUCTURING PLAN KNOCKS OUT NUMEROUS UPPER LEVEL BUREAUCRATS
Catherine Templeton isn’t running for Congress … but she has unsheathed her ax.
The director of South Carolina’s largest government agency announced a major administrative overhaul this week – one which will place pink slips in the boxes of forty-five upper level bureaucrats, according to multiple sources at the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC).
“Forty-five employees riffed,” one of our sources at the agency said, referring to the latest reduction in force to take effect at the agency Templeton took over last March.
Another fifteen administrative positions at the agency will not be filled, we’re told, meaning Templeton has shaved sixty jobs from her 3,200-person agency. Total “savings” to taxpayers? An estimated $7 million.
Sources close to the director – who was one of S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s five finalists for the U.S. Senate seat ultimately awarded to Tim Scott – declined to confirm those numbers.
According to our sources, Templeton is replacing upper level bureaucrats with lower-level functionaries – i.e. people who actually do something to earn their paychecks. In fact Templeton may hire as many as fifty new employees as part of her restructuring effort – at a cost of $5 million to taxpayers.
So assuming our South Carolina math is accurate we’re really looking at a net “savings” of $2 million … or at least we would be assuming there were real “savings” in state government. Sadly, because lawmakers refuse to create a “taxpayer rebate fund” (and put money like this into it), any cash “saved” at a state agency is really spent someplace else in state government.
Still, if Templeton is cutting fat and adding muscle – and doing it with $2 million less of our money – more power to her.
Obviously we wish she would be more aggressive in cutting her agency – and in pushing for the long-overdue restructuring/ consolidation of our state’s health care and environmental bureaucracies – but she’s certainly doing more than most people in leadership positions in this state.
***
62 comments
Sounds like a little age discrimination going on….
i suggest you don’t need to hire anyone.
those jobs a redundant
Haley hit another HR…
Good job, Gov…You’re doing all the things Sanford SAID he’d do…
HR? Under Haley, this state has forced taxpayers into spending tens of millions.
Lewis Cromer is smiling today. Wait and see how much this is going to cost the taxpayers.
Yeah: Firing Worthless Government Regulators, who make BIG salaries…
You must be the Genius of the Obama Administration who told us a $6 Trillion Increase was a cut…Dumb@$$….
A lot less than those damn paychecks.
DHEC tried doing this around 20 years ago – didn’t work well at all. People that kept their jobs (and promotions) had no clue what to do, and all the brains and professional expertise of the department retired or went to another agency.
Most of the DHEC staffers she’s RIF’ing have retired, TERI’d, and are back on the payroll once again for just a couple of years, followed by a couple more, followed by being found dead at their desks after 50+ years of loyal service.
How won’t this deadwood die? By refusing to train anyone to replace them, thereby making themselves out to be irreplaceable. Templeton has finally said “enough” and is going to prove that the agency can survive without these sad dinosaurs who have no life outside of their “work.” Will there be bumps in the road? Hell yes. That’s called the learning curve, which is going to come sooner or later anytime a dinosaur finally becomes extinct and is replaced by someone who is not double-dipping or triple-dipping from the state coffers.
Well, that’s the way it’s been for many years, and at most of the state agencies I’ve dealt with. Good post.
Excellent post. I’ve always said it will take a jackhammer to pry their asses off the seats. No more TERI nonsense. No more double dippers, triple dippers. How about this: if anyone doing TERI is reading this, please know that your coworkers hate your guts.
There is many a “Lillian McBride” wandering the halls over on Bull Street. Clyburn and the Democrats will be all over this in about 10 seconds.
Has she submitted her application yet?
Haley and Wilson have already taken those sorry son of a b!*#hes to court one time, and won…Let’s DO IT AGAIN!!!…
I Love Kickin’ Leftwing @$$….
— and we love hearing from you, bigt
Should do same at SCDOT.
This was just in one part of the health side of DHEC. She should do the same elsewhere in that agency. There is plenty of management fat left for the trimming.
The net loss/gain (depending on your point of view) is negligible.
“Templeton may hire as many as fifty new employees as part of her restructuring effort”
She’s hired a barista (part time) in Charleston for weekends. Wonder if one of them is planned for Columbia office.
Funny how this breaks while a nice chunk of the state press corps was tied up at a funeral.
So now she has a crystal ball? Notice about meeting was called before Davenport passed away. Try again.
And the news of what was being unleashed at this meeting broke when? Amazing how many twitter feeds of journalists after the funeral. Agaihpn, I said when th news broke, not when the decision was made.
Still wrong. Release of info tied to time of meeting. No crystal ball.
Good for her, that agency is like St Petersburg people are setting in Gods waiting room. Get rid of the TERI crowd. Get some new blood and hopefully new ways to work smart.
Would be even better if she took her “axe” to the whole department and shut down DHEC. Over paid, under worked, overly pompus and many at DHEC act and feel they are God’s gift to SC. Using the if a tree falls analogy, if DHEC was shut down today would anyone miss it on Monday?? Would we even care?
You would care when you started drinking brown water.
You would care when your drinking water is no longer safe, or there is sewage standing in your yards or better yet, in children’s playgrounds. Would you care if the next time you went to a restaurant, you and your family spend the next week in a hospital recovering from a food borne illness? Where would you get your birth certificates and death certificates from? Does you care if we keep up with births or deaths, what good is that? Do you swim in public swimming pools? Does it not matter to you if the hotel/motel keeps the pool safe to swim in? Apparently not. What about children’s immunizations? Do you care if children become sick due to illnesses that they could have received a shot for and prevented. Or that someone at DHEC actually checks to make sure that children have had shots to attend daycare and school. I guess that’s not at all important to you. It would be so much better and cost effective to hospitalize them after the fact and then try to cure them right? Do you care about babies that need food supplements and are able to get them through DHEC. I guess if you care nothing about the health and safety of the citizens of South Carolina, then you shut down DHEC. Afterall, you wouldn’t miss them at all, you would? At least not until you needed to call them.
Poppa Tom sounds so dim, he must be from Lexington County.
In the Lexington hinterlands they may not even have accepted germ theory yet.
You’re an idiot
Here we go again.
How did that work out when the let the DSS finance guy go? Not too good, seems DSS was running a phantom $30 million deficit until they brought some experenced people back. Governor’s whiz kids ain’t really worth a shit.
How did that work out when they let the Dept of Revenue IT go? Not too good, seems every fucker’s personal information in the state got hacked. Gov’s whiz kids suck at real work.
So now Tipsey Templeton will save $2 million by ditching $7 million worth of experience and promoting and hiring $5 million worth of new whiz kids.
Yep. Expect attorney Cromer’s phone to ring off the hook — and where is Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell and the Office on Aging when Tipsey and Trikki Nikki start fucking the old focks with blantant age discrimination?
poppa tom you are on to something. The old fucks should have retired years ago and let the lawyers work out the details. I would bet that there isn’t a half dozen cases.
Someone should post her letter to staff. (I was shown a printed copy.) It’s quite good. It states straight out the “what and whys” and says this comes mainly from staff suggestions. I cannot remember the details well enough to trust my memory in repeating the specific points, other than many complaints apparently regarded bloated management and its constant interferences.
Just to set the record straight on DSS, the fool they rehired in budgets is the same guy who caused the problem in the first place. So DSS rehired the same problem and just used the excuse about firing someone in the know to explain how the 30 mil was no longer a problem. My spies tell me he is playing with money at DSS as we speak. No one has a clue how that agency is operating because they have no clue what is in any account.
So, how about the Dept of Revenue situation?
As to DSS, the re-hire of the old fart was a solution that was good enough for Trikki Nikki to take DSS off the list of Cabinet agencies running deficits
One thing that floats whatever is shit.
I give Catherine a lot of credit; as a staunch critic of dhec, she has shaken up this agency quite a bit- its long overdue.
Thank you Catherine.
And she hasn’t even gotten yet to the environmental part.
These “savings” calculations seem a bit hyped to me. You RIF 45, hire 50, you pay pension earlier or unemployment, you pay for training/transition of new-hires, in a few years you have fifty people making about the same salary as the 45 old-farts you let go. Think with your other head, Willie.
Except the new hires may be doing some useful work.
Or not… don’t get too caught up in the stereotype, especially when it come to new-hire state employees.
The reason there are more hires than RIFs is because many upper-management positions have been left unfilled, which means no person to RIF. Otherwise the upper-management staff has been cut in half.
Everyone of the RIFS, even though retired, are eligible for Unemployment.
Presumably the new hires are front line do-the-job type positions, while the cut managers are, well . . . middle managers, and you know what that means.
Look at your paycheck this week…and remember that these Government Workers (like FITS was) are the reason Obama is Robbing us blind w/ all of his new and Extreme Taxes….
Government workers better GTF out my face. You’ll pay for what Obama and his Dumb@## voters are doing to our families…
Filthy Scum…
Correction/MISPRINT!!!
750,000 (thousand) Baby Boomers developing Stage 3 Alzheimers’ not 750,000 “million”
My bad!!!
But the storm is still coming and it will be a bad-assed tsumami come 2015-2020!!!
And not a damned thing is being done about it…………
Fine with me.
The last time DHEC “reorganized” all the talent left for private companies and the groundwater got so fucked up the state hired outside talent (like myself) to come in and design treatment systems to begin the process of recovering the polluted groundwater.
Keep it up South Carolina dumbasses!!!!!
Groundwater pollution has been so poorly prevented and addressed in South Carolina, at least overall, that your kids may have secure longterm jobs in the field of clean up. The gasoline pollution program especially has largely deteriorated to an “assume it will all go away eventually” (“model it away”) prediction program, with actual work done only where it can’t be covered up by such divining of tea leaves. It and other types of ignored groundwater pollution will slowely get discovered by property buying precautions, likely for decades.
No shit:
I’ve been to sites in this state where the fucking Sharpe “Permanent” ink DISSOLVED on the sample labels.
Another site where the fucking sample bottles EXPLODED due to outgassing of the groundwater samples
But to read and hear South Carolinians say/post: Get rid of DHEC!!!
Fine. If this drought continues there will be hell to pay and people like FITS and BigT will ignore the facts till the shit REALLY hits the fan.
Like I posted, I was recruited to come down here and start to straighten out this mess but you dumbfucks are so far behind in everything you are lucky there are 3rd world countries to look behind and see you are not in last place
Some of you are such fools……………
The shit will hit the fan around 2015-2020 and you will regret all the conservative cavalier bullshit that is prevalent in South Carolina.
Plus when about 750,000 million baby-boomers develop stage 3 Alzheimers. What are you going to do..
Kill them????
I don’t want to hear no fucking wise cracks either.
The storm is coming and this fucking state is not prepared one fucking bit.
DHEC serves a valuable function to us all in S.C.they really use to care.
So far the new board has done more for Georgia
I’ve been there too but too sleepy to provide commentary.
The best thing Queen Catherine could do is find a middle or upper manager that was there when Prince Michael and his “temporary” successor fired all of the competent supervisors (some ‘chose’ to “retire” bach in 1970 – 1973).
These were generally good, honest folks that helped the Aycock-Jarrett investigators from SLED ‘discover’ the “official misconduct” for which both were convicted and had a wrist-slap by Aycock’s father’s good friend the “senator-then-Judge” Bristow ($500). All eventually suffered ousting one way or the other, and DHEC went quickly downhill under the “temporary” administration of one Tom Brown – who has disappeared from the face of the earth.
Any one of these people can quickly inform the Queen of where the problems lie, and with a “temporary” or “consultant” hire for a short time, can help her REALLY get a hold on the problems within the agency.
Truth hurts, but not as much as falsehoods provided by those who have a vested interest about staying.
Most of the people she needs to consult are now in their late 70s or older, but are the faithful cadre that kept DHEC operating long after the John West disaster of combining the old State Board of Health and the Environmental Quality Coltrol agency in the early 1970s.
I’ve been told that was a major, major mistake and screwup.
Can you give us any more hints?
I worked there for many year, though not that far back, and never heard a whisper of this. There are other hidden skeletons and lumpy rugs of course.
I want to sincerely apologize to all FITS readers/posters for my rant last night.
That was the 5 shots of “Jack” doing the talking.
It is just that I do care deeply about the environment (and NOT in a “tree hugger” kind of way either). I have 2 degrees in the environmental field and have worked in pollution control systems (mainly water/wastewater treatment and ground water remediation recovery systems) for over 30 years. Since the Clean Water Act (which was established under Nixon – a Republican) was established in 1970, I have seen the great strides made in water quality for all United States citizens and it is something we should all be proud of. Lake Erie which was once basically ded has recovered due to the efforts of water quality professionals and the backing of US citizens.
Under the fractured/polarized/ignorant culture we now live in, it is doubtful that such an act could be created today and most certainly, here in South Carolina as soon as someone even mentions “Environmental Controls” or in my home state of West Virginia where the mention of strip mining brings out strong feelings (I still have relatives working in the mining industry and am first generation non-coal miner; my dearly departed father retired from the mines). So I think I have a lot experience in environmental matters and I care very deeply about keeping or maintaining a quality of life for all our citizens.
That being said, the cavalier postings of some from the right will come back to haunt you some day and future generations very well might hate you for having that attitude and mindset if/when there are water shortages (and the other problems that come with it) and only the elite/privileged enjoy what everyone in this great country enjoy today.
The US military has already identified water shortages and climate change as one of the more likely scenereos for military conflict. They have for a number of years.
Our children and grandchildren deserve better from us.
Think about it…………..
….. read and initialed
Great post!
I have a new respect for you, for your heartfelt “rant” and for the apology too. You obviously know your shit when it comes to water quality and safety. thanks for caring. I’ll pay attention when you post.
South Carolina is almost devoid of any real knowledge, assessment, or planning for future water needs and competition. It is far behind other states. What little it done mainly regarded negotiating contentions over river flows, these triggered mainly by dam relicensing rather than by any responsible state interest in assuring water for the future. Even in the publicized disputes about overpumping near Savannah and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina is being outplayed by Georgia and by a long. Prepare to lose.
. . . long shot.
And the post was supposed to be a reply to SparkleCity
When I was in engineering school in the 70’s, we studied water rights in my sole environmental law course. I remember my professor tell the class that one day water right issues that have been commonplace in the western states for many years would occur in the “water rich” south. That class was in 1976 if memory serves me correctly.
The abundance of water was one of the main(not the ONLY reason)reasons textile milles relocated from New England to the southern Piedmont.
Your references above and the Supreme Court case of SC vs. NC two years ago over the Catawba River Basin (which I followed closely) is proof that he was right. I remember his words clearly: “One day water right issues will be a factor in the south”
He was spot on.
The problem will only compound itself…………
The Supreme Court decision basically said: “get together & work it out.” Which is exactly what has happened with South Carolina really not gaining anything except making the case for “kinda/sorta” sharing data for water entering the Wateree lake region. It is all tied into Duke power’s concerns anyway……….
No major water source (i.e. river) originates within the confines of the state of Sourh Carolina. This state is dependent on the “kindness” of its neighboring states to share water rights. After the attitude exibited by some in this state, I can understand why other states might say “kiss off” if the situation became critical.
If NC, Tennessee,Virginia and yes, West Virginia wanted to dam up its rivers to divert even more water for their states needs, that is nothing South Carolina could really do to stop them unless they went to court. South Carolina really didn’t do so good the last time………..
The only alternative would be desalination (either destillation or reverse osmosis) which is much greater than the cost of conventional water treatment and the cost of distribution from the coast to other parts of South Carolina would be unbelievable.
Remember a few years ago, Atlanta was no BS down to 30 DAYS of water available. I was there and the leaders were really scared.
“Going Dry”:
You are absolutely correct.
The SC legislature would rather worry about fronting light bulb or in-state firearms factories for sole sale in South Carolina, nullification issues or hoarding gold underneath the state house.
The only person I care about is the idiot that was in charge of the TB crisis – does she still have a job???