South Carolina Statehouse Blog

As you know, South Carolina’s state legislature has just ended its 117th session a couple of weeks ago. Therefore, no new bills will be coming out until the next session starts in January. In order to pass the time, we here at SC Statehouse Blogs have decided to interview some of the legislators about how they felt this past session went. For this article, I was able to interview Representative Paul Agnew and the following is based off of that interview.

The Good

To start the interview, I asked Representative Agnew about which bills he was glad to see become law. One such bill was House Bill 4662 which mainly eliminated the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT). The elimination of the PACT will allow for a new test to take its place “that will give quicker results and useful diagnostic information to help teachers meet the needs of students.”

“Teachers have longed asked us to eliminate the PACT and find a more responsive and useful test,” Agnew continued, “We feel that we accomplished that and responded to their needs.”

Another piece of legislation that Rep Agnew is glad to see pass is House Bill 3496 that tackled DUI enforcement reform. This bill enhances the penalties of driving under the influence while getting rid of a lot of technical requirements that make enforcing this law difficult for police officers.

One of the biggest issues tackled this year by South Carolina’s legislature had to deal with illegal immigration. While there were several bills that came up during this session that dealt with this issue (including Rep Ballentine’s), House Bill 4400 was the main bill that everyone focused on.

Though this bill was a fairly large bill, there was one part in particular that interested everyone and that was the part where this bill required employers to check and see if their employees are here legally. Though many people thought it wouldn’t happen this session, this bill did eventually get signed into law.

Even with H. 4400 successfully becoming law, Rep Agnew believes more needs to be done.

“I’m hopeful that the Federal government will address this issue in the future because it is a growing concern.”

The Bad

During this past session, Rep Agnew also felt that there were several bills that should have become law. One in particular is House Bill 3567, which would have increased the cigarette tax from $.07 to $.57 a pack.

The fact that South Carolina has the lowest cigarette tax in the nation and it hasn’t been changed since 1977 were a couple of the reasons why Rep Agnew supported this tax increase. To give some perspective on the issue, Rep Agnew stated that the national average was about $1.13 a pack.

Representative Agnew continued to explain that half of the revenues from this tax would have gone towards premium assistance for employees of small businesses while the other half would have went towards Medicaid to insure low income families and uninsured children.

“Estimates suggested that we would have insured an additional 200,000 South Carolinians under the plan who cannot afford health insurance,” Agnew stated.

Though this legislation passed both the House and the Senate, Governor Sanford ended up vetoing this bill. The House was unable to get the necessary two-thirds votes to overturn what Agnew described as a “misguided veto.” However, Agnew is hopeful that they will be able to address this problem come next legislative session.

Another bill that Agnew wished would have passed was Senate Bill 398 which dealt with payday lending. Though this bill passed in the Senate, it stalled in a House subcommittee, thus killing the bill for this session. Agnew felt that this bill was needed in South Carolina to protect its citizens.

“Other states have banned outright the practice [of payday lending],” Agnew explained, “I would have liked to seen us take some action to either limit it or ban it outright.”

The Conclusion

Rep Agnew pointed out that even though this was a tight budget year, they were able to get some good things done. For example, the legislature was able to fully fund the Education Finance Act along with giving state employees a 1% pay increase and fully funding their insurance increases.

“We did many good things on limited dollars to better education, increase job opportunities and improve the quality of life for our citizens here,” Agnew explained, “It was a year filled with many successes but also some disappointments in that we did not pass some legislation that we would have liked to see succeed.”

Representative Agnew is running unopposed in the November election and is “honored that [his] constituents have seen fit to send [him] back to continue to represent their interests.”