Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s work through the state Office on Aging he oversees and a private nonprofit the office set up named Senior Shield are raising questions about whether Bauer is exploiting elderly South Carolinians in an attempt to advance his political career.

Certain answers to the questions suggest a darkly cynical ploy by Bauer to win favor with the most numerous, wealthy and civically engaged demographic group in the state as a springboard to the governor’s mansion.

By contrast, some observers contend that Bauer merely is reaching out to an underserved and overlooked population.

Although he has not declared himself a candidate for governor, Bauer, a Republican, is widely considered to be one.

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, seen here presiding over the S.C. Senate on April 28, oversees the state Office on Aging, which set up a private nonprofit entity named Senior Shield that operates outside the bounds of normal state procurement code and information disclosure requirements. Photo by Jonathan Sharpe

The plot of that political scenario thickens via Senior Shield. Ostensibly an effort to let older folks know which businesses they can trust not to take advantage of them, Senior Shield operates outside the bounds of normal state procurement code and information disclosure requirements, and with sloppy, eyebrow-raising paperwork at that.

“I think we have a lot of questions about Senior Shield,” says Ashley Landess, president of the South Carolina Policy Council, a Columbia-based nonpartisan think thank with a statewide focus.

Landess describes Senior Shield as bad public policy.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that.

Senior Shield also finds Bauer currying favor with another potent political force in South Carolina — Spartanburg businesswoman Karen Floyd, who has landed some no-bid contract work for the program and, as it so happens, has also done some recent political work for Bauer. His campaign disclosure form for the first quarter of this year lists nearly $20,000 in payments to a public relations firm Floyd owns. The money paid for fundraising, printing, events and rent.

Floyd came within a horse’s nose of winning the state superintendent of education office in 2006, losing to Jim Rex by fewer than 500 votes out of more than 1 million cast.

Now, Floyd looks to be a shoo-in as the next head of the South Carolina Republican Party because she is the only high-profile contender for the job.

Hundreds of GOP delegates from across the state plan to descend on Columbia on May 16 for the state party’s convention. The gathering will include the delegates electing a new leader to replace outgoing Chairman Katon Dawson.

Meanwhile, another explanation for all of this holds that Bauer, acknowledged if not credited even among his critics as a hard-working elected official, is simply doing just that — yeoman’s duties for a population that no other agency or high-ranking officeholder of state government is truly concerned about serving.

“It’s almost like a red-headed stepchild,” Wayne Bell, president of the State Retirees Association of South Carolina, says of the Office on Aging. “Nobody wanted it.”

Nobody, perhaps, but Bauer. Or at the very least, he did not object when it was transferred to his shop a few years ago.

Bell gives Bauer props for taking on an unwanted function. “And I think he has been a real strong advocate for the elderly in South Carolina.” Bauer, he says, has done a good job trying to make sure senior issues are in the forefront in the state.

Indeed, a youthful, ambitious politician, Bauer has been a steady news item locally and across South Carolina courtesy of his outreach through the Office on Aging. It has involved everything from him distributing free blankets to seniors to helping them manage their money better. And it all has helped burnish Bauer’s image after a few years in which he couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble in the headlines, from run-ins with law enforcement to a sweetheart real estate deal with the S.C. Department of Transportation to a plane crash that nearly took his life.

Until Senior Shield came along, that is. Now, the questions it raises have provoked a debate about Bauer’s motives.

As for the lieutenant governor himself, he did not avail himself for an interview for this story, despite repeated requests more than two weeks before it was published.

Instead, Bauer let his spokesman, Frank Adams, and chief of staff, Jim Miles, do the talking.


Service or Scam?

For a fee of $175 per year, or $15 per month with a 12-month minimum, Senior Shield will
certify a business as “senior friendly.”

“There’s the problem,” Landess says, “if you don’t write a check, by inference, you are not senior friendly.”

The Senior Shield web site says “a comprehensive business evaluation is performed annually and at least one employee/owner must be background checked. Additionallly [sic], we encourage companies to have background checks performed on employees that come in contact with seniors or their possessions.”

Each additional worker background check costs $40 per year or $3.50 a month with a one-year minimum and “all fees are due at the time the application is submitted and are not refundable.”

To get Senior Shield up and running, the Office on Aging gave the project a $105,000 grant in July. The money came from a $125,000 account that went with the office when it was placed in Bauer’s hands, according to Miles. The grant request was for the full $125,000, he says.

As of Feb. 28, Senior Shield had spent about $85,000 of the $105,000, according to records the Office on Aging supplied to Free Times per a request under the S.C. Freedom of Information Act.

Working on taxpayers’ dime, Adams, who earns an annual salary of nearly $83,000 plus benefits, and Miles, who takes home almost $98,000 per year with benefits added on top, have logged many hours on behalf of Senior Shield.

The open-records request included a breakdown of how many hours.

However, Adams says, “We didn’t record them; can’t tell you. We don’t work 9 to 5 over here. It didn’t cost any extra to anybody.”

Thus, two well-compensated public employees have dedicated an unknown amount of their work time to a private nonprofit entity.

The Senior Shield record keeping leaves more to be desired than that, though.
Initially, Miles, who was secretary of state from 1991 to 2003, chartered Senior Shield in the secretary of state’s office as a for-profit limited liability corporation in April 2008.

“That has since dissolved,” says Renee Daggerhart, spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office. “That is terminated.”

Some seven months later in November — about a week before the launch of Senior Shield — Miles re-registered it as a nonprofit 501c3.

Both filings list the Senior Shield address as 1020 Marion St. in Columbia.

Moreover, the 501c3 application to the Internal Revenue Service, and a progress report on Senior Shield to Office on Aging interim director Tony Kester, were not completed and submitted until after Free Times made its Freedom of Information Act request, according to Adams.

Dated March 22, a financial rundown in the report lists about $115,000 in total revenue for Senior Shield — from the $105,000 grant and other sources — from its inception through Feb. 28.

Almost all of that $115,000, some $111,000, went to Floyd’s marketing, development and information technology firm, the Palladian Group, to promote Senior Shield.

The work was not put out to bid “and is not required to go through state laws regarding procurement,” Adams says.

Says Floyd, “We were requested to appear and make a proposal, and we did that, and we made a full presentation to a panel of individuals. And then we were contacted and told that we were awarded the contract. And then we submitted a contract and we performed all of the services that were outlined in that contract.”

Spartanburg businesswoman Karen Floyd, the only high-profile contender to be the next head of the South Carolina Republican Party, received some no-bid contract work from Senior Shield for her Palladian Group marketing firm. The company also has done some political fundraising for Bauer.

To whom did they make the presentation?

Adams, Miles and Kester, she says, adding that she cannot recall when.

Is Floyd’s company the most qualified to do the work at the best price? We will probably never know.

Similarly, Adams says a $5,000 job by Gilded Age Films of Beaufort was not put out for bid.

That could be legally problematic.

An invoice describes the job as “Andre Bauer TV spot/sponsorship on U Cook TV series.”

And a voucher lists the payer as the lieutenant governor’s office, which does fall under the state procurement code.

Landess says Senior Shield should not be considered a private entity “when it’s the state of South Carolina running it and controlling it” and to one degree or another funding it.
For Miles, his filings in the secretary of state’s office were not his first mishap with state-mandated paperwork.

Required to file an annual statement of economic interests disclosure form with the State Ethics Commission, Miles did not submit his 2008 version until four months after the deadline, and not until commission attorney Cathy Hazelwood contacted him to let him know it was late.

Such an infraction can result in a $100 fine that can quickly grow into thousands of dollars absent compliance.

But Miles was not fined.

Hazelwood says that’s because he is an appointed staff member rather than an elected official. Asked whether she showed him preferential treatment, Hazelwood says, “No, I didn’t.”

But shouldn’t Miles know better having occupied a state constitutional office for 12 years?
“You’d like to think,” she says.

In any case, if Senior Shield were a business it likely would be failing right about now.

Adams says he isn’t certain how many companies have signed on to the program but that it is probably fewer than 100. And one can call a phone number listed on the Senior Shield web site and ask, he says.

When such a call was made, an operator said she did not know, had no way of knowing and Senior Shield would not give out that information anyway.

In what could be perceived as a transparent attempt to bolster Senior Shield’s numbers, beginning in July the Office on Aging plans to require parties listed in SC Access, a longstanding database of aging and disability services information that the office maintains, to join Senior Shield or be independently verified as licensed, bonded, insured and crime and consumer complaint free, according to Adams.

He says nonprofits in SC Access will be offered Senior Shield verification at no cost and others in the database will be offered a discount as an incentive to join.

But those that opt against enrolling in Senior Shield and do not receive independent verification will be dropped from SC Access, he says.

Given the existence of SC Access, isn’t Senior Shield something of a duplication of services?

You make the call.

Curtis Loftis, director of the Office on Aging from March 2007 to July 2008, calls the mandatory linking of them a shakedown.

“SC Access is a wonderful effort by the state that has served tens of thousands of citizens and Senior Shield is unproven, expensive and unsuccessful,” Loftis says.


The Power 
and Politics of Aging

On its face, the premise of Senior Shield stems from an ugly truth about American society.

“I do think there is a need for something like that,” Bell says. “I think the potential for some pretty serious fraud and abuse is out there.”

Yes, despite progress on many fronts, ageism arguably remains one of the few socially acceptable isms in this culture. It plays out as an insidious form of soft bigotry in everything from denigrating comments to the warehousing of elderly people in group homes.

But it happens to the best of us, and the worst: Wake up in the morning. Look in the mirror. Grow old.

The aging process also happens on a generational level, and this country is experiencing it on the order of a tsunami that will not crest for many trips around the sun.

“One year from now, the oldest of America’s 77 million baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — will turn 62, becoming eligible for Social Security retirement benefits,” says a January 2007 news release on the web site of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service bureau.

For their vast numbers and other reasons, the retiring boomers are the most affluent age group in the United States. “Most wealth accumulation happens rapidly and late in life — after the kids leave, when income is high, debts drop, 401(k) accounts fatten and home equity swells, according to [Federal Reserve Board] data,” says a May 2007 article in USA Today.

In their third prong of power, it is well known that seniors turn out on Election Day at a higher rate than any other voting bloc.

Against that backdrop, enter the Office on Aging and Senior Shield.

Under a one-year provision of the state budget, the office was moved out of the S.C. Department of Health and Human Services, an agency of the governor’s Cabinet, and placed under Bauer’s control in 2004.

That proviso remained a part of the annual budget until 2008, when the General Assembly codified it permanently.

In the run-up to the relocation of the office, Bauer had been looking for ways “to enrich his office,” Adams says.

So, when a group of state senators and advocates for seniors approached Bauer about the idea, he was all for it, his spokesman says.

Gov. Mark Sanford and others? Not so much.

“He’s very much against the move,” Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer says.

Why?

“It can be used to build and grow a political constituency,” Sawyer says. He says he cannot speak to the rationale for moving of the Office on Aging, but it “certainly appears to be politically motivated.” Likewise, Sawyer says he is not sure how to rate Bauer’s management of the office. “But he has certainly used the office very effectively from a political standpoint.”

Sanford vetoed the budget proviso every year, Sawyer says, and the Legislature overrode the veto each time.

Sawyer’s perspective lends credence to an assessment that the questions about Bauer’s work through Aging and Senior Shield are not partisan. After all, Sanford is a Republican, too.

Similarly, consider the Policy Council. Hardly the mantra of liberal lefties, the think tank concentrates on limited government, free enterprise and individual liberty and responsibility.

“I do think the Office on Aging is a much more natural fit with one of our social service agencies,” Landess says.

Agreed, says Bell, a retiree who put in nearly 30 years at the state Department of Social Services. “From my perspective, having a service delivery agency in the lieutenant governor’s office is crazy,” he says.

Bell says he cannot think of another state in which aging services are housed in the lieutenant governor’s office. “I doubt there is one,” he says.

Sawyer: “It just doesn’t make sense from a structural standpoint.”

Bauer tours a display of propane-powered vehicles at the S.C. State Fairgrounds in Columbia on March 18. Photo by Graeme Fouste

Publicity 
Good and Bad

Perhaps, but it certainly makes for good publicity for Bauer:

• “Bauer challenges seniors to embrace healthy living” reads the headline of an April 24 dispatch by The Associated Press in the Charleston Post and Courier.

• “SC Lt. Gov. Bauer giving blankets to seniors” says the title of another AP dispatch, posted March 9 on The State newspaper’s web site.

• “Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer Promotes New Program to Protect Senior Citizens and Their Money,” declares the banner of a September 2005 news release by the South Carolina chapter of HOPE worldwide, a nonprofit that works to combat poverty.

His bewilderment about the location of the Office on Aging notwithstanding, Bell says he is unconcerned about whether Bauer’s efforts on behalf of seniors are politically driven. It is fair for elected officials to point out their accomplishments, he says. If it were him, Bell says, “I’m going to say, ‘Seniors, look what I’ve done for you.’”

Be that as it may, Senior Shield also has generated publicity for Bauer in far less flattering ways.

The Post and Courier took a hard look at the program in a Nov. 12 report, two days before Bauer hopped on a state-owned airplane and flew around South Carolina with Josefina Carbonell, then assistant secretary of aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They stopped in Charleston and other cities to promote the launching of Senior Shield.

“The head of a Columbia-based taxpayer watchdog group says state agencies need to be careful about providing seed money to ventures that will compete with small businesses,” says the Post and Courier article. “‘I’ve got a concern with that,’ said Don Weaver, president of the South Carolina Association of Taxpayers.”

But for the most part, scrutiny of Senior Shield has been limited to the confines of inside baseball in the world of state politics — happy hours, cocktails parties and so forth — and the Wild West media universe of blogs.

Anything but a paragon of progressivism, a heavily South Carolina-focused news and politics blog named fitsnews.com has sardonically sounded off about the program and the players behind it.

Relying on its staples of anonymous sources, reporting by legitimate news outlets and postings with no byline except that of the site, fitsnews wrote on April 15 that Bauer “has a task force to investigate ‘senior fraud’” and “maybe he needs to investigate his own office.”
The Office on Aging “has stunk to high heaven ever since Miles and Floyd got involved,” reads the broadside.

Then there was this Nov. 13 gem by fitsnews: “It’s also pretty obvious from the Post and Courier report that the dim bulbs Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer hired to run his outfit got caught with their pants down … ”

Asked about Senior Shield, S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom describes it as “off the books.” Eckstrom, the state’s bookkeeper, answered the question during an interview for a March 11 story in Free Times about his transparency project, an effort to record all public spending in South Carolina in an online database on the comptroller general’s web site.

In a follow-up inquiry, Eckstrom spokesman Rod Shealy Jr. says the CG’s concern about Senior Shield is that it does not lend itself to transparency and accountability.

Sawyer says the governor’s worry about the relocation of the Office on Aging as it relates to politics has proven true. “We’re not even sure they can point to statutory authority for awarding a grant to Senior Shield in the first place,” he says. “I mean the whole thing just doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The question is, Sawyer says, what’s the end game?

Landess wonders the same thing.

“What you have essentially is the state telling businesses we will certify you as senior friendly if you write us a check,” she says. “And you’re also going to have to open up your employees to background checks and your business to that kind of scrutiny.”

Senior Shield also represents a duplication of services, Landess says, citing law enforcement and organizations such as the Better Business Bureau as examples of existing resources that can fulfill the role of the program. “If a business is indeed perpetuating fraud on senior citizens you have avenues in place already to deal with that.”

Adams counters that the Legislature passed a resolution urging greater protection of seniors in South Carolina.

Introduced in the House right around the time Miles first incorporated Senior Shield as a for-profit LLC, the resolution calls on the lieutenant governor’s office to coordinate state resources “to shield our senior citizens from fraudulent businesses and individuals who seek to take what seniors have worked hard their entire lives to obtain.”

Referring to Senior Shield, Adams says, “So far we haven’t had one soul come up with a better idea.”

Except SC Access, that is.

Bauer, who turned 40 in March, is a long way from being a senior himself. And he is certainly a survivor, both physically and politically. But his overtures vis-a-vis the Office on Aging and Senior Shield in the context of his would-be political future suggest there might be an ulterior motive behind them. And the operation of Senior Shield thus far is only fueling that possibility.

Let us know what you think: Email
 news@free-times.com or editor@free-times.com.