New Lottery Director Should Resign, Permit Proper Search

When the S.C. Lottery was approved by voters in 2000, it was pitched as a “Lottery for Education.”   In fact, the pro-lottery campaign – which was run by a guy who is now serving time in a federal prison – used black-and-yellow school buses as part of its effort to convince South Carolinians that the money would be going to K-12 public schools.

Of course, the ethically-challenged politicians, consultants and bureaucrats selling this fiction knew all along that the “Lottery for Education” was really nothing but a scam to funnel money into our state’s research universities – specifically the so called “Centers of Economic Excellence” (or CoEE), which has reaped the lion’s share of lottery proceeds.

The CoEE, you’ll recall, is an integral cog in the “Pillars and Pyramids” plan, a massive taxpayer-funded boondoggle being pushed by South Carolina’s research universities and “Republican” legislative leaders that would effectively put government in charge of economic development in the Palmetto State.

How’s that plan working out so far?

Yeah … not so well.

Take the so-called Innovista “research campus” at the University of South Carolina, which has sucked up nearly $150 million in public funds to produce absolute squat in terms of the new jobs and private investment promised by leaders like S.C. Speaker Bobby Harrell, USC President Harris Pastides and Columbia, S.C. Mayor Bob Coble.

In fact, Innovista’s ongoing implosion is cited by many as the main reason Coble chose not to seek a sixth term as Mayor of Columbia.

Or take the S.C. Research Authority, which felt compelled to rip off an entrepreneurial tax credit fund last year in an effort to keep feeding our research universities’ spending addiction.

Intimately linked to all of these scams, though, is the CoEE – which was founded in 2002 to invest “in talent and infrastructure at South Carolina’s three research universities to drive economic development.”

You know, since our universities aren’t even remotely focused on educating future generations anymore.

And who, pray tell, is the board chairman of the CoEE?  None other than Paula Harper Bethea, who this week was named the new executive director of the S.C. Lottery (where she will draw a salary of $226,000 a year).

In addition to her role at the CoEE, Bethea (who is known for the rat-tail she occasionally sports), is also a board member with the New Carolina Collaborative, a pseudo-socialist assemblage of “New Bolsheviks” who advocate incessantly for higher taxes and more government spending.

Needless to say, having Bethea in charge of the S.C. Lottery is a coup for this leftist community – as well as the so-called “Republican” legislative leaders who keep inexplicably supporting their failed policies.

But was Bethea’s hiring appropriate as Lottery Director appropriate?

Not according to her, it wasn’t.

According to a post from the Palmetto Insider, the official blog of the S.C. Policy Council, Bethea told The State newspaper back in 2002 that the Lottery Commission should not appoint then-Senator Ernest L. Passailaigue without first conducting a proper search.

“I’m not saying that Ernie may not be the perfect person for the job,” Bethea, a Lottery Commissioner, told The State at the time. “We’re going to have to put this through the proper search. I feel strongly about that.”

Apparently she doesn’t feel strongly about it anymore, though.

Prior to hiring Bethea on a whim this week, the S.C. Lottery Commission was supposed to conduct a national search for Passailaigue’s replacement, but didn’t.  The commission also didn’t explain why it failed to conduct the promised search.

Passailaigue, you’ll recall, left the S.C. Lottery amid a legislative audit and a could of scandal.

Looks like his replacement is beginning her tenure under a cloud as well.

Bethea should resign her post pending a thorough national search for a lottery director.

More importantly, the S.C. Lottery Commission should rethink its fundamental mission and determine whether or not the lottery revenues it collects are going toward what the people intended them to go toward.

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