School Board Member Fails in Partisan Politics
Veteran State Senator Mike Fair ended Tommie Reece’s bid for the state senate by trouncing her by a vote of 24,614 to 10,761 and taking 69.24 percent of the vote to Reece’s 30.27 percent.
Reece was a petition candidate who attempted to convince the public that she was a Republican. The attempt obviously failed. She was challenging the choice of Republican voters in a hotly contested primary.
With the retirement of Ralph Anderson and David Thomas from the senate, Fair, who is chairman of the Greenville County Legislative Delegation, is the senior senator serving Greenville County. Seniority is important in the senate and Fair is in a position to represent Greenville County well.
Ironically, Reece represented the most conservative district in the county for more than a decade on the Greenville County School Board. She won the District 17 seat with less than 100 votes more than the incumbent. It was the election that downtown special interests spent unprecedented thousands of dollars to sweep conservative Christians from the board.
Reece and others elected at that time were the board that approved the plan to circumvent the state constitution’s 8 percent limit on debt. They created a dummy corporation governed by a board of former school board members appointed by the school board, and left the county taxpayers with a debt of more then one billion dollars. The sequence of events that led to what became known as “The Greenville Plan” were incredible and could not have happened without the ;involvement and support of the dominant local media. It was not surprising that the chairman of the school board at the time the plan was conceived and the individual who devised the plan for the board formed a corporation that was awarded a multi-million dollar contract to manage the building program. The contract award was challenged by other bidders, however, after a judicial flim-flam, the school board was allowed to select their original choice to get the contract.
Adoption of the Greenville Plan rapidly began to spread throughout the state. Seeing that the scheme could bankrupt the state, the legislature quickly passed a bill and the governor signed it into law making the Greenville plan illegal in South Carolina, but not before at least two more counties had implemented it. The law was not made retroactive, partly because of political pressure from beneficiaries of the program. The plan is being carried out fully in Greenville County, yet few citizens know the seriousness it poses for property owners as the economy slows and taxes increase during the next four years.
Only three of the Greenville Plan board members remain on the board. In District 19 Debi Bush was reelected and Crystal Ball O’Connor was elected to represent District 27 for the next four years.
School board candidates are not required to reveal their affiliation with a political party. That, along with a multi million-dollar public relations program, explains why the current makeup of the Greenville County School Board can vote to raise taxes virtually every year and stay in office. It also explains why school board members can lobby lawmakers against their constituents, implement NEA indoctrination programs and govern the education and indoctrination of children in a majority Christian, conservative, Republican County.
