Collins' difficulty in getting information from the agency is similar to that of potential clients in Horry, Georgetown and Williamsburg counties, at least some of whom say they've been promised services they've never gotten. Nor is it much different from media inquiries about what should be routine matters and Grate's apparent disdain for the state's open meetings law or state overseers' questions about what the agency was doing to comply with requirements to correct inappropriate actions found in a March audit of the board.
Now, the pile of unanswered questions and the board's repeated closed-door sessions may lead to the floor of the General Assembly.
S.C. Sen. Yancey McGill, D-Kingstree, is considering legislation that would ensure the board conducts its business openly and legally and that it complies to the letter of the state's open meetings law.
Sen. Dick Elliott, D-North Myrtle Beach, said he would support the bill if current state laws can't enforce open meetings mandates.
"If we need to change some state laws," Elliott said Thursday, "then that's where we must go."
If a bill is introduced, it would be the second time in a year that area legislators have intervened to try to rectify problems with the agency's board. Last spring, they asked board members to voluntarily resign so the board could be reconstituted with those who would comply with actions the state said were needed to ensure that problems found in the audit were resolved.
The majority did so, but those who stayed included two - Grate was one of them - who the audit found were improperly interfering in the agency's day-to-day operations.
Grate refused to schedule an interview with The Sun News before the first of the year to talk about the agency and his stewardship of the board. He is designated as the only official spokesman for the board.
The board has had numerous closed-door meetings questionable under the S.C. open meetings law; taken actions that are in conflict with the board's bylaws; and spent nearly $80,000 on legal fees in large part to avoid compliance with state directions to correct inappropriate board actions.
The agency gets about $15 million in federal money each year for programs in Horry, Georgetown and Williamsburg counties, including Head Start, weatherization of houses and assistance in paying utility, rent and mortgage payments. It has served more than 20,000 low-income clients in the three counties this year, in part aided by additional funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Clients can have an income no greater than 200 percent of the federal poverty level to receive the assistance. In 2010, the federal poverty level was $10,830 for an individual and $22,050 for a family of four.
The main problem?
More than one former board member said that Grate is the source of the board's illegal actions. Ruby Rogers, the former board treasurer who resigned at legislators' request, told new board members at a recent meeting that they would never resolve problems at the agency until Grate was gone.
"He never did do things quite the way a chairman should do," said former board member Ulysses Dewitt, also a former Horry County councilman.
Former board member Richard Smith, an attorney in Georgetown County, puts it more bluntly.
"He runs the board as a dictatorship," Smith said.
Dewitt said he repeatedly challenged Grate about holding illegal closed sessions and soliciting board members' votes on impending issues by telephone, which is also illegal.
"He made jokes about it in front of me," Dewitt said.
He said that in debates over agency business, Grate would allow speakers who supported his opinion to speak as long as they wanted while those with opposing views were limited to just one minute at the podium.
He said that Grate told him the chairman could do anything he wanted, regardless of any law, as long as he had the support of 51 percent of the board members, one instance of which is recorded in minutes of the board's Dec. 29 meeting last year.
Smith, according to the minutes, argued that Grate couldn't announce at the meeting that the election of board officers would be held that night. Smith had previously objected to Grate's cancellation of the November board meeting, when board bylaws say the elections must be held.
"Mr. Smith said that the problem was that the Board Chairman chooses to conduct some business of the board by only calling on certain members of the board," the minutes read, "and once he gets enough to constitute a majority, then he acts upon it. He ignores other members of the board and then takes official action based on those calls that he has made."
Further, Smith said the bylaws require a 10-day circulation of board agendas before any action can be voted on, the rule that disallowed officer elections that night. Grate replied that the board could do whatever it wanted as long as the majority of the board voted to do so.
Selective information
Grate and his board allies also dispense information selectively to board members, even though the withheld information may have a direct impact on votes.
New board members didn't know, for instance, how much they were paying for back attorneys' fees when they voted to pay them at a meeting in Georgetown a couple of months ago. The vote on the fees followed a three-hour closed door meeting in which items not legal for a closed session were discussed, according to Susan Sedja, who had just joined the board.
Nor were board members told when they voted at a subsequent board meeting to uphold the firing of former executive director Beth Fryar that Fryar and her attorney had appeared and given taped testimony at a grievance hearing that was later rescheduled because of a lack of a quorum.
Henrietta Golding, Fryar's attorney, said she formally objected to holding the original hearing, which had been called by the board's personnel committee, because of the lack of a quorum. But the hearing continued at the direction of the members present and was taped. Board attorney Ralph Wilson was present during the taping, and Golding said she interpreted the situation as an official statement that the need for a quorum had been waived.
Golding said she was notified a week later that a new hearing would be held because of the lack of a quorum at the first hearing and decided neither she nor Fryar needed to attend.
The sequence of events was not brought up in a 11/2-hour closed-door meeting just prior to the vote to uphold the firing, according to new board member Tommy Mitchum. All members heard before the vote was that neither Fryar nor her representative showed up at a scheduled grievance hearing.
"Just about every board meeting I've been to has been chaos," Mitchum said.
Lawyers get $80,000
The agency spent $79,374.41 on lawyers, including Wilson, in the seven months following the March audit, $51,632.57 of which went to the Sasser Law Firm in Conway, according to information provided to The Sun News under the Freedom of Information Act. Of that amount, about $30,000 was approved for lawyers' bills in the vote at the Georgetown meeting, according to information the agency sent to the state Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversees much of the money the agency spends.
A good deal of the legal fees were accumulated as board members who didn't resign at legislators' request apparently tried to find ways to avoid taking the actions the state said was needed. They said publicly that the state had no authority to require the board to do anything and that Louise Cooper, executive director of the state office, was conducting a vendetta against board members.
The board eventually complied with the actions the state demanded, but not without months of wrangling, tens of thousands of dollars spent for legal advice and the threat by the state that noncompliance would result in closure of the agency.
Posh lodgings
Smith questioned Grate's decision to hold a board retreat at the upscale Charleston Place Hotel in Charleston, saying that it didn't seem to him to mesh with the agency's mission to help poor people.
The outing left some board members with lodging bills that were more than federal guidelines would permit them to expense back to the agency. Grate declared that the cost not covered under federal guidelines would be reimbursed with agency funds, Smith said.
"I think they do not believe they are governed by law, and they set their own rules," Smith said.
He said he attended the meeting in Charleston, but didn't spend the night at the hotel.
The agency remains on at-risk status, which means it must send financial reports to the state office twice a month. The state has found no evidence in the reports or annual financial audits of any misspending of the millions of dollars in federal grant money the agency gets to help thousands of low-income residents in the three-county area.
But the state doesn't oversee the expenditure of about $5 million the agency gets each year for Head Start programs. That money is monitored by the federal government.
Some of the new board members have shown an independent streak, unlike longer-term members who rarely initiate discussions. Mitchum, for instance, called for a primer on the agency's finances at an upcoming board meeting, a discussion he said will answer many questions board members have.
Mitchum also said he believes Grate would give him any information he asked for, but added that he has asked for little.
In another instance, new board members Jerry Harper and Willie Sparkman successfully engineered a vote to continue audio taping board meetings despite an attempt by Grate to quash it.
Harper said he doesn't want to speak about his impressions of the board's work so far, but he said that at least some members are working to straighten out problems at the agency and will speak publicly when that happens.
Sparkman, too, refused to comment on board matters, including Grate's leadership, but he said that he has an independent mind and does not automatically follow anyone's lead when making decisions.
Legislators worry
McGill said last week he's not yet sure what may be the target of a bill, should he introduce one. He said he and other legislators in the three-county EOC area were concerned that the board's actions detailed in the state audit could cause the federal government to withdraw its grant money.
Smith said he would like to see an easier way to remove rogue board members. The process set in the bylaws is lengthy and cumbersome, Smith said, and indicated that a quicker route could be more effective.
He and Dewitt also suggested that if all else fails, the state should dissolve the agency and give its business to another of the state's community action agencies until a new agency can be created for Horry, Georgetown and Williamsburg counties.
Regardless of the resolution of these problems, board members likely will face another significant battle.
The firing of Fryar, who former board members praised, was done without allowing her to meet with the board to discuss what she might have been doing wrong, said Dewitt and Horry County Councilman James Frazier, another former board member.
The first time she was fired, which caused Smith to resign from the board, it was done without the proper notification as an agenda item, and the state made the board rescind the action. The second firing vote came after a pre-meeting closed door session at a board gathering in Hemingway.
But when the second vote was cast, Fryar was officially on family medical leave. Federal law says it is illegal to fire anyone while they are out of work under the Family Medical Leave Act.
Golding, Fryar's attorney, said that board members who voted to fire the former executive director may have to pay from their personal funds and assets to settle the liability they've incurred.
A promised letter
Standing amid the turmoil are people such as Collins, who still awaits his response from the agency.
He's particularly interested in the federal tuition assistance because it means that former jail and prison inmates could train for jobs that would give them a shot at going straight.
"Nobody ever asks a barber if he's an ex-con," Collins says, alluding to the difficulty former offenders can have finding work.
Grate told Collins the reason for the tuition turndown might be because there's a conflict of interest due to his wife's part-time employment at the agency.
But Collins won't give up trying.
He says his determination to help offenders came because of a former prospective student who hoped the education would let him earn the money for food and shelter without having to resort to crime. The night before the man was to enroll, Collins said, he was shot dead as he broke into a home trying to get the last of the money he needed for tuition.
"Somebody will look into it and get back to you in writing," Grate told him.
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