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ISLE OF PALMS —It’s been over three years since the city committee tasked with reviewing budgets and spending for the barrier island has met.
Isle of Palms’ Ways and Means Committee last convened in June 2022.
That summer evening, the members talked about the city’s general fund balance, where revenue streams were up and where they were down. They spent one hour and 13 minutes receiving updates on drainage projects, pickleball courts and undergrounding powerlines.
They adjourned at 6:13 p.m. And haven’t gathered since.
Now, leaders have moved to revive the defunct body to better scrutinize the city’s spending and reporting just as the time to pay for high-dollar projects like the city’s $32 million beach renourishment approaches.
The departure from the Ways and Means Committee happened officially in 2024. A change to city law took the number of standing council committees from six to three, Mayor Phillip Pounds said.
The change came after council voted to temporarily suspend all committee meetings for six months in 2022, and only have certain ones gather through 2023 and 2024.
From that point forward, the three committees covered administration, public facilities and public safety topics, plus a monthly workshop that addressed budget discussions previously held in Ways and Means.
Here, they’ve condensed the information they would have talked about at various standing committees into one. Those discussions were offloaded to the workshop and the remaining three standing committees.
Pounds said the reasoning behind eliminating the Ways and Means Committee was to streamline the structure, and to him, it was effective.
At workshops, he said, members could “take a breath” and spend more time on issues without the lingering pressure of a vote.
“At a council meeting, you’re kind of running through things fairly quickly and hitting a whole lot of topics and voting on a whole lot of issues,” Pounds said.
But some councilmembers have said that city finances aren’t discussed as thoroughly as they need to be.
David Cohen, a newly-minted council member who previously served on the city’s planning commission, said budget talks have taken a back seat to other issues at city workshops. Having a confident, working knowledge of the city’s finances is a major responsibility of council, he said.
City residents lost out, too, on understanding spending decisions, Cohen said. For residents curious about how their city was utilizing their tax dollars, they’d have to scour through agendas and meeting minutes spread out across various committees, workshops and council meetings.
To Councilwoman Bev Miller, another new face to the city council, the lack of a finance committee was odd.
“To me, it was very unusual,” Miller said. “Everything we do seems dependent on how much money there is.”
There’s nothing in state law that says a council must have a set number of committees or deal with a certain subject matter. Councils have the authority to create, and eliminate, committees, said Charlie Barrineau, a senior field services manager with the Municipal Association of South Carolina.
But finance and Ways and Means Committees are the most common throughout the state, he said.
The neighboring town of Sullivan’s Island has a finance committee that meets at least once a year to prepare the town’s operating budget. Mount Pleasant’s finance committee meets several times a year, and Charleston County’s Ways and Means Committee typically meets twice a month, meeting minutes show.
“Everyone does it a little differently,” Barrineau said. “There’s no rhyme or reason, and there’s no right answer.”
Still, with several projects with high price tags on the way, like the beach renourishment, Miller said it’s crucial for councilmembers to understand the full picture of the city’s financial standing.
“We need a focused forum with staff to…make sure those decisions align with a healthy future,” Miller said.
The Isle of Palms moved on Jan. 29 to reinstate the committee and eliminate the monthly workshops.
“We need to have more transparency of our finances. We need to be looking at the total pictures and we need to get in front of things instead of reacting to things,” Councilman Scott Pierce said before making a motion to revive the committee.
The motion will require at least another vote to revive the committee, as it requires a change in the city’s laws.
This time around, it will be a committee of the whole, meaning the full council will take part in the discussions about budgets and review financial reports. Pounds said he expects the committee will have its first meeting in the spring, likely April.