Reporter Avery Wilks of The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper has a story up about the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff (SCORS) making a totally tone deaf staffing decision. Specifically, the agency has rehired a “watchdog” to do a job he previously (and spectacularly) failed to do.
According to Wilks’ report, SCORS is paying $4,000 a month to its former director Dukes Scott “to provide institutional knowledge” to the agency.
Really?
Scott is one of a host of politicians and regulators who was asleep at the switch for over a decade while crony capitalist utility SCANA (now owned by Virginia-based Dominion Energy) and government-run utility Santee Cooper blew $10 billion on the botched construction of a pair of since-abandoned nuclear reactors in Jenkinsville, S.C.
S.C. House speaker Jay Lucas demanded Scott’s resignation in the aftermath of this scandal – although Lucas was one of the politicians who enabled the fleecing in the first place.
Lot of that going around in Columbia …
The fleecing refers, of course, to NukeGate – a command economic intervention that has wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of Palmetto State ratepayers. Scott was one of the bureaucrats who was supposed to be watching out for those ratepayers.
He failed …
(Click to view)
(Via: Provided)
Lucas (above) blasted Scott’s rehiring, saying in a statement to Wilks that “I hope (SCORS) did not bring him back to assist them in continuing the previous, failed culture.”
Lucas added that “drawing on previous poor choices” would not make the agency an effective advocate for ratepayers.
We concur with Lucas, although he and his colleagues certainly made no shortage of poor choices during the NukeGate debacle – including voting for the special interest sop that socialized nearly $2 billion of the investment risk associated with this boondoggle. In other words, while we believe SCORS’ decision to bring Scott back is a slap across the face of ratepayers … legislators like Lucas (and liberal Senate leaders Hugh Leatherman and Luke Rankin) are the ones who initiated the debacle Scott failed to stop.
Of interest? An early version of the Scott story published by Wilks was pulled from The State’s website shortly after it was originally published on Thursday. It is not immediately clear what prompted the paper to pull the story and replace it with the report that was published early Friday.
-FITSNews
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