This past Friday, March 27, 2025, the South Carolina Administrative Law Court issued a ruling in favor of the City of Aiken in the business license tax dispute between Ed Woltz, Holly Woltz, and their real estate company S & C Properties LLC. (The case did not involve Ed Woltz in his capacity as an Aiken City Council member.)
Three background stories leading up to this ruling are as follows:
Ed Woltz’s Business License Citation, which reported on the legal dispute process from a criminal citation in November 2021, to an appeal to Aiken City Council in September 2022.
A Hearing on Business License Taxes, which focused on a June 2023 administrative hearing before the City of Aiken’s designated hearing officer.
Nineteen months after an appeal was filed with the South Carolina Administrative Law Court (ALC) by Ed Woltz, Holly Woltz, and S & C Properties LLC (Petitioners) regarding a business license tax dispute with the City of Aiken, the ALC has finally issued a ruling in favor of the City, and ordered the Petitioners to obtain a business license for all of their real estate rental businesses and pay any back taxes (1) for the years 2017-2021.
The appeal hinged on two contentions by the Petitioners regarding the application of the business license tax Ordinance to rental properties; with the central issue being the differences between owners of a single residential rental property vs owners of multiple residential rental properties. (2)
First, they argued that the Ordinance was unconstitutionally vague and ambiguous “because it fails to define the point at which rental of residential properties constitutes doing business;” and that the breakpoint of property ownership was itself arbitrary.
Secondly, they argued that the City’s “failure to treat them similarly to owners of a single residential property amounts to an (unconstitutional) equal protection violation;” that the City’s policy of allowing one tax-free rental was inconsistent with the actual Ordinance; which draws no distinction between number of rentals.
The City’s defense was that the Ordinance provides for administrative discretion by its Business License Official in the enforcement of the Ordinance. In this case, the City maintains a policy dating to the 1980’s to not mandate a business license for owners of a single residential rental property. The policy is based on the assumption that a single rental, such as an inherited property, does not constitute a business activity.
On the issue of “vagueness,” the Court simply ruled that any reasonable person can discern that a landlord owning more than ten properties, as the Petitioners do, constitutes a business.
On the issue of unequal treatment, the Court applied a more complex “rational basis test” to determine whether the distinction between single-home landlords and multiple-home landlords was rational.
The Court decided that the City’s approach is rational, and that there was no disparate, or unequal, treatment because the Petitioners fell within a different business class than single home landlords. The Court concluded that the Petitioners did not meet the burden of proof showing disparate treatment because a “rational basis review of a government classification does not look for disparate treatment vis-a-vis other classes created by the government’s distinction; rather it examines whether there is a disparate treatment within the designated class.”
More simply put, because there was no disparate treatment within the multiple-homes landlord class, there was no overall disparate treatment and therefore no constitutional violations.
Footnotes
(1) According to court documents, the Petitioners paid $13,086.56 in back taxes and penalties in September 2022, but did so under protest. The next day, an appeal was filed, as allowed by City statute, with the Aiken City Council.
It is unclear whether additional payments are due, but since the Court did state that the Petitioners did not challenge the total tax levied by the City it appears the bill is satisfied.
(2) The appeal also included arguments regarding the levying of business license taxes on properties outside of the City’s jurisdiction. Those contentions went unaddressed in the ruling.
The City of Aiken’s business license tax dispute involving an Aiken business that is co-owned by an Aiken City Council member is now entering its fourth year. The core issue is the constitutionality of a municipality taxing property outside of its jurisdiction. The case is scheduled to be heard by the State of South Carolina’s Administrative Law Court on January 21, 2025. Since the case involves a complex, uniform business license tax Ordinance, the administrative court judge’s ruling could affect municipalities across the state.
As of October 31, 2024, the City’s legal fees for the case have exceeded $80,000.
The case of City of Aiken vs Edward Woltz began in November 2021, when Aiken resident and businessman Ed Woltz was quietly cited by the City with a business license violation for failure to pay business license taxes on some of his rental properties that are situated both inside and outside of the City of Aiken, and for not possessing a business license for those properties. Mr. Woltz is an Aiken City Councilman who had been reelected to a second term just a few weeks prior to the citation. His current term ends this year.
In early September 2022, an agreement was reached to dismiss the criminal case in return for Mr. Woltz paying the back taxes. A tax reassessment for 2018 through 2022 was sent to Mr. Woltz and payment of $11,477 was made, but under protest.
The Aiken law firm of McCants and Nance was then hired to represent Mr. Woltz, his wife and business partner Holly Woltz, and their rental company S&C properties in an appeal of the assessment. At that point, the case became Edward Woltz, Holley Woltz and S&C Properties vs City of Aiken. Subsequently, the Columbia law firm of Robinson, Gray, Stepp, & Laffitte, LLC was hired to represent the City.
A hearing on the case was delayed until June 8, 2023, when a day of testimony was conducted in Aiken City Council chambers. Two weeks later, Aiken City Council’s designated hearing officer Kelly Ziers issued a ruling in favor of the city.
The Zier ruling stipulated that the Woltzes and S&C Properties owed $13,086 for four years of back taxes and penalties for ten properties within Aiken city limits, and an undisclosed amount for the more than dozen properties located outside of the city that are not subject to a business license tax by any other government body. Zier also ruled that because the Woltzes operated their rental business from within the City, the City was within its rights to collect taxes on all properties, both inside and outside of the city limits.
The appeal reiterated two of the arguments advanced during the city’s hearing; that property owners with only one residential rental unit are not required to obtain a business license, and that many of the Woltz’ rental properties are located outside of the City of Aiken—thus “taxing real properties which are not located within its jurisdiction or its lawful right to do so.”
In response, the City filed a Motion to Dismiss, contending that the Administrative Law Division lacks jurisdiction because the Woltzes were challenging the constitutionality of portions of the business license tax Ordinance.
The Motion to Dismiss was denied in December 2023, with Chief Administrative Law Judge Ralph King Anderson III writing, in part, that
“This court has subject matter jurisdiction in this court…Petitioners do not argue the Ordinance is unconstitutional in all of its applications; rather, they argue it is unconstitutional as applied to their particular circumstances as owners of more than one rental property in, and outside of, the City of Aiken.”
In other words, the administrative court ruled that it can hear challenges on the parts of the Ordinance applicable to the Woltzes case, though not the entire Ordinance since most of it does not directly pertain to the case.
Since the denial of the Motion to Dismiss, the contested case hearing date has been pushed back three times, the most recent due to Hurricane Helene. It is presently scheduled for January 21-22, 2025.
According to invoices obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, the City of Aiken has paid more than $80,000 in legal fees to the Columbia law firm of Robinson, Gray, Stepp, & Laffitte, LLC. between September 1, 2022 and October 1, 2024
Nearly one quarter of the fees, $15,760.20, was charged during the month of June 2023 (Figure 1), when the first hearing was held. A nearly equal amount was spent preparing and defending the City’s Motion to Dismiss at the end of 2023. At this rate, the case will likely cost the city more than $100,000 for a case involving just a fraction of that amount in disputed rental properties back taxes.
Figure 1: Portions of the June 2023 invoice, the most expensive month for the city in the appeals case.
Footnote:
* Robinson, Gray, Stepp, and Latiffe monthly invoice amounts and hours billed for the Woltz business license appeal, for period of September 1, 2022 through October 1, 2024. Data obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
In a subsequent July 5th Memorandum of Law in Support of the Motion to Compel, Plaintiffs argued that the City “has not even tried” to respond to discovery requests—a statement supported by the fact that a mere nine records had been produced by the City—six of which were already public and one of which had been privately published in late 2022 after it had been made public.
The City’s stiff resistance to the discovery process included a few nebulous tactics; such as frequent non-specific referrals to the its document repository—essentially telling Plaintiffs to find relevant records within an expansive public domain; all while refusing to provide nonpublic records.*
Another tactic was to refer Plaintiffs to another party for documents, described in the Motion as “Go ask someone else.”
Due to the City’s failure to adhere to rules of discovery, on October 14, 2024, State Circuit Judge Maite Murphy ordered the City of Aiken to answer all submitted questions and produce all requested records; as well as produce a log of all documents deemed as potentially privileged and confidential.
Included in the order are instructions to release, within ten days, all requested records that “are not privileged and reasonably calculated to lead to relevant evidence,” and conduct a broad electronic search, dating back to August 1, 2019, for fifteen key words or phrases; including “Project Pascalis,” “Ray Massey,” “WTC,” and “Hotel Aiken.” In the process, The City cannot “refer to another party as having those documents as an answer to these requests.”
Even without the privilege log documents, Wood and Verenes have already produced 1,318 pages of documents related to Project Pascalis—more than 10X the volume of records produced to date by the City of Aiken. (Because the 1,318 pages of records have yet to be placed in the public domain via a court filing, a FOIA request has been submitted to the City of Aiken for their release).
A hearing on the Woods/Verenes Motion to release records listed in the “privilege log” is scheduled for December 5, 2024, at the Aiken County Courthouse.** To date, attorneys for the City have not filed a response.
These latest developments will be topics of discussion at an Aiken City Council closed-door Executive Session this coming Tuesday, November 12th. The session is being held to receive legal advice and a legal briefing specific to the Pascalis lawsuit.
The Executive Session will be a test of Mayor Teddy Milner’s straightforward campaign platform of increased “accountability and transparency.” After years of stonewalling efforts to get to the heart of the Pascalis project workings, Mayor Milner and the rest of Council have the opportunity to quit playing information games— as the City did with Freedom of Information Act requests***—and comply with South Carolina’s rules of discovery in civil cases.
(Update: The prepared order, which was provided in the earlier version, was not the signed order until November 13th. The City of Aiken has until November 23rd to comply with the order.)
The order governs the production of Project Pascalis documents, which the City of Aiken claims to exceed 121,000.
Because the City’s review extended beyond the deadline to produce documents that was ordered in November 2024, an agreement was reached that will “allow the Plaintiffs to gain access to the Subject Documentation as soon as possible” while allowing “the City to preserve all privileges that may apply to the Subject Documentation.”
The way it will work is the City of Aiken will designate material as being “under review,” those documents will be provided to the Plaintiffs within two days of this latest order—meaning the documents should have been produced by now. All documents received will be treated by Plaintiffs as confidential until a final review is completed within 90 days.
If the City of Aiken deems that a document provided should be considered privileged, it can “clawback” the document. Once the City issues its opinion, the Plaintiffs can challenged it within seven days by filing a Motion to Compel. If there is a successful challenge, then the materials may be used in filings and depositions.
It appears in this case that the City has the upper hand and the cost of the burden of proof regarding privilege will be borne by the Plaintiffs. The City can err on the side of caution and/or resistance and the Plaintiffs have only seven days to file a Motion to Compel challenge.
Figure 1: Efforts to obtain key information pertaining to Project Pascalis.
Footnotes
* In fact, the website for one set of relevant records in the public domain, that of the Aiken Municipal Development Commission, was surreptitiously removed by City officials sometime this past summer.
** The Courthouse is at the intersection of Park Avenue and Chesterfield Street. The Hearing is scheduled to be held in Courtroom 4. It is the 8th of 14 Motions scheduled to be heard. The first hearing is at 9:30 am. Each hearing lasts for 15-45 minutes. Check the Civil Roster for any updates.
*** Previous stories related to the City of Aiken’s “information games:”
The City of Aiken’s Information Games, Part One; which documented the effort to charge three different parties an identical $5312 involving exactly 332 hours of labor in response to three distinct, separate FOIA requests pertaining to Project Pascalis over a two month period from March 18 to May 12, 2022.
The City of Aiken’s Information Games, Part Three; which documented the redaction of legal invoices that had already been publicly released in nonredacted form—including censoring the very term Project Pascalis.
Three Missing Pages. See Footnote 1 for a discussion of how the City brazenly attempted to charge a $599 FOIA fee for what turned out to be a single document.
Keeping Up Appearances… ; which documented how the AMDC’s public version of the $10 million bond issuance for the Pascalis properties omitted key sections from the entire version.
by Don Moniak October 9, 2024 (Updated October 10, 2024)
Adam Crow died after hanging himself in the Aiken County Detention Center (ACDC) on May 16, 2017. The series of events preceding his death are chronicled in a consolidated wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family, and involving as Defendants the Aiken Regional Medical Center (ARMC) and its parent company United Health Services; members of the ARMC staff; the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO); and the Aiken County Detention Center (ACDC) and its former health care provider Southern Health Partners.
After drinking a pint of liquor that morning, Mr. Crow drove to the Aurora Pavilion Behavioral Health (Aurora) mental health facility to self-commit. His path to Aurora ended when he ran a red light and collided with another vehicle.
“Because he appeared to be heavily intoxicated,” Crow was brought to ACDC by a Highway Patrol officer, and later was confirmed to have a blood alcohol content of 0.225.
Once at ARMC, where he had been previously diagnosed as suffering from various mental illnesses and labeled as having suicidal ideation, Crow was placed under a suicide watch. Two hours later he was discharged and transported to the Detention Center, instead of to Aurora for treatment.
Once at the jail, Crow underwent a meager five-minute intake process, followed by detainment in a holding and observation cell. Three hours later, he manually covered the lens of the video monitoring camera in his cell, an action that went undetected by jail employees.
One hour later Adam Crow hung himself by his pants. His body was not discovered until an hour later, and only after another prisoner alerted the ACDC staff. (The video footage showing the moments leading to his death was included in a December 4, 2023 WRDW feature story.)
None of these facts are in dispute. What is in dispute is whether ARMC and the Sheriff’s Office–and therefore the Detention Center and its former health provider Southern Health Partners–were negligent in their treatment and care of Adam Crow, whether its actions rise to the level of gross negligence, which could lead to a determination of wrongful death.
The wrongful death lawsuits that were filed on July 30, 2020, one against the health providers and one against the Sheriff’s Office and its Detention Center, have slogged through the courts for more than four years. The developments in the cases since that time, beyond the Defendants’ denials of culpability and negligence, have included the following:
November 30, 2022: The Plaintiff made a settlement offer of $250,000 to the Sheriff’s Office. That offer was rejected in a similar manner as in the Owens vs. ACSO et al and the Rhoads vs. Southern Health Partners et al cases. In both cases, juries eventually went on to award Plaintiff’s far greater amounts than those offered to the County.
December 29, 2024: A Motion to Compel that alleged an ARMC doctor provided “evasive and non-responsive” to interrogatories submitted two years earlier.
April 30, 2024: Southern Health Partners settled for $25,000. The company’s role was less obvious given the fact that Crow was only held during the intake process for five minutes.
August 26, 2024: The Plaintiff filed a Motion to Compel ARMC for key information that would provide sufficiently complete information on his medical history.
In the Plaintiff’s most recent Motion to Compel, or in the alternative a determination of spoliation, the point of issue is an audit trail of Crowe’s treatment and medical history, one that would include three audit logs that “record the activity of people accessing a patient medication record and maintain a record of what parts of a patient’s medical record are opened and closed.”
According to an email from the ARMC defense team, the Audit Log records that were requested “cannot be stored for very long. We are talking hours, maybe a day or two at most, not weeks or months, and certainly not years.”
In their Motion, Plaintiff’s attorneys describe an ARMC statement, that it has already produced an audit trail, as “simply untrue” and should cause the court to “view the remainder of ARMC’s defense with a high level of skepticism.”
The attorneys go on to assert that, if the audit trail is missing, that absence constitutes a “spoliation of evidence,” meaning the record was deleted after the lawsuit was filed, an action that the Plaintiff’s lawyers described in an email to ARMC’s defense team as potentially “nefarious:”
“It appears this was a sentinel event and to delete a document as important as the audit trail under those circumstances makes no sense, other than for nefarious purposes.”
In support of their Motions, the Plaintiff’s attorneys submitted several exhibits detailing that federal rules and law dictate that such electronic records be maintained for up to ten years.
The brief argues that “for the Court to not compel a complete audit log production (or, in the event that one cannot be provided, not to find for spoliation of evidence) would defeat one of the primary purposes of the federal government’s push to switch to electronic health records;” and concludes that “a complete audit log is critical in allowing Plaintiff to identify whether the medical record is accurate and complete.”
October 10, 2024 Update on the Hearing.
The Motion to Compel was heard on October 9th at the Aiken County Courthouse, in the Court of Common Pleas of the State of South Carolina’s Second Judicial Circuit.
Plaintiff’s Attorney Robert Philips began his argument before Judge Brian Gibbons by stating, “This is not a fishing expedition. We have a fish on the line and we do not know what fish it is;” referring to records that should exist, but which ARMC had refused to fully divulged.
Philips explained that, after his death, Adam Crow had been returned to ARMC. By then his lab results had shown the high blood alcohol content in addition to “active benzo and active THC.” The portion of the audit trail that was provided showed that Crow’s chart was modified at 1:30 a.m. to indicate he was coherent upon discharge. The details of that modification are what is being sought.
Philips finished by repeating that the Plaintiff’s were “not on a fishing expedition,” adding this time that “there is something going on here.”
ARMC attorney Denny Major began his argument by stating “I feel like a third-string quarterback covering this. This is the first time I’ve seen this.” He later would state “I am completely in the dark,” “I am not prepared to speak to that,” and “I haven’t had a chance to go through it.”
He argued, in part, that HIPAA was “for the insuring of the integrity of records, not designed to retain records for tort cases.”
Judge Gibbons then granted the Motion to Compel, while declaring the issue of spoliation was “not ripe,” but could be brought back. The Defendant ARMC was given fifteen days to produce the requested records.
On July 8, 2019, Aiken City Council met for their bi-weekly work session. According to the meeting minutes, the session opened with City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh informing Council that “this morning Kyle Hartley, an employee, was hit while he was working on the back of a solid waste truck. He is in the intensive care unit at University Hospital. He asked that we keep him, his family and his co-workers in their thoughts and prayers.”
According to two separate but nearly identical lawsuits (1) filed eight months after the accident by both of his parents, 17-year-old Kyle Hartley’s injuries from that day—when he was assigned to work the back of a garbage truck without any training and in defiance of his parent’s wishes—included a severed right leg, mangled right arm and right side of his face, and back and brain injuries; “among other serious and permanent injuries.” Ultimately, Kyle Hartley’s right leg had to be amputated.
The accident happened on one of the busier stretches of York Street, along the same curve where, in 2014, a driver struck two pedestrians who were walking peaceably on the sidewalk—killing one of them. In this case, the truck and Hartley were struck by a minivan.
According to a story by WRDW News of Augusta, three pedestrians had been struck by vehicles in the previous year, Aiken Public Safety warned that drivers “forget that York Street is a major highway,” and “Aiken’s city manager says he’s noticed the high volume of accidents out on York Street and is working with SCDOT to see if anything can be done to stop the speeding and reduce the accidents.”
York Street was definitely a more dangerous setting for traditional trash pickup involving workers riding on the rear steps of rear-loading trucks; and a much better candidate for the only single-operator, automated garbage truck the city owned and operated at the time. But for whatever reasons, one of the three older style models was operating on that stretch of road, and an inexperienced 17-year-old minor working at a seasonal job happened to have been improperly assigned the task of riding the rear step and assisting with unloading trash bins.
Later that evening, at the tail end of the Council’s regular meeting, Mayor Rick Osbon asked again that the city “hold our young employee who was injured today in our prayers and his family, and the crews who were working with him.”
The Mayor’s comments followed a brief tribute to the city’s safety record, during which Mr. Bedenbaugh described payments back to the city from its insurance fund, the South Carolina Municipal Insurance and Risk Fund (SCMIRF).
“Mr. Bedenbaugh stated that ‘Aiken belongs to the Municipal Insurance Pool. The Cityreceived a surplus check of $144,689 due to the overall favorable performance of the city employees. We were notified that the City can expect to receive a check in June 2020 for $144,458. The City of Aiken was one of the founding members of the Insurance Pool in the early 1980s. It has paid dividends a lot of years…,I would like to complement our Risk Manager, Lex Kirkland, and our supervisors and department heads. They take safety seriously.”
If there were any objections from Council to the lauding of the city’s safety record on the day of an accident in which the City’s safety system clearly failed at a massive scale, the meeting minutes and video of the meeting do not reflect concerns about the contrasting messages.
Aerial view of long curve on York StreetThe long curve on York Street
Nearly five years after the insurance rebates were announced, and four years after lawsuits were filed, Attorney David Morrison, who is representing the city but is apparently being paid by SCMIRF—which has a coverage limit of $1 million per claim and can rescind legal defense if that limit is reached (2)— filed a Motion for Summary Judgement in the Hartley vs City of Aiken cases.
The Motion came more than four years after the two Complaints that were filed by Kyle Hartley’s parents, Kristi and Keven Hartley, who sought redress through the courts for lost income, medical expenses, and mental anguish; with their attorney Jason Samuels (of the Samuels Reynolds Law Firm of Columbia) contending that:
“Plaintiffs [have] also suffered extreme mental anguish from the moment [they] became aware of [their] son’s accident and medical condition, watching as [their] son has endured the amputation of his right leg, many surgeries and during the process of caring for [their] son and making medical decisions directly effecting [their] son’s future.”
The Plaintiffs cannot establish that their claims of harm from emotional distress were caused by the City’s actions.
The City is protected by sovereign immunity.
The state’s Worker’s Compensation Act prohibits the Hartleys from recovering damages.(3)
There was no “objective significant physical injury as a result of the alleged emotional distress” to support their claims.
(The Motion was scheduled to be heard on August 21, 2024, but was continued until the next available date.)
From Prison Labor to Modern Trash Collection
In many ways, the Hartley case is more than eight years old; beginning at the end of the City’s decades of access to cheap, almost free, state prison labor for use in garbage collection. That reliance on prison labor was, arguably, one root cause of the Hartley accident. (4)
In March 2016 the State Department of Corrections announced it would be closing the Lower Savannah River Early Release Center on Wire Road. The Center had long provided prison labor to local governments for use in menial tasks such as litter pickup, sorting at the City of North Augusta’s recycling center, cleanup at the Aiken County Animal Shelter, landscaping and grounds maintenance, and riding the back of rear-end loading garbage trucks for the City of Aiken’s public works department. In total, approximately 100 early-release inmates worked across the county; 35 of which worked for the City of Aiken.
The cost to the City was $15 per day, or about $4,000 per worker per year, amounting to less than $25,000 for the four to six inmates used daily for trash pickup and less than $100,000 for the eighteen inmates who worked on landscaping operations. The replacement cost for hiring ten temporary workers for the entirety of Public Works was about $250,000–a figure that included replacing the inmates with only ten temporary workers. Instead of hiring full-time workers, the City opted for the next cheapest option to prison labor—which also guaranteed a less experienced workforce and chronic labor shortages.
For the next three years following the work release center closing, the City slowly charted a path forward from the prison labor workforce model to a safer, modern model involving robotic garbage trucks.
Kyle Hartley got caught in that transition from three-person trash collection crews involving prison-labor to a single-operator system utilizing automated garbage trucks. The labor shortages wrought by the use of low-paid temp workers contributed to the misguided decision by city management to place him in the knowingly dangerous position on the back of a garbage truck; one known to have a high rate of workplace fatalities as well as chronic injuries.
Hartley was a 17-year-old minor hired as a seasonal worker in the Public Works Department; what was to be a summer landscaping job before heading off to college. At the time of his hiring, there was only one single-operator truck and 3-4 rear-loading trucks requiring manual operations from a crew riding the rear of the truck.
When he was assigned to garbage truck duties in defiance of parental guidance, the hazards of riding on the back of rear-end loading trucks were well established; yet he was told to ride on the back of a truck without any training.
The small fleet of three new, remote-loading, single-operator trucks arrived just a few months after he suffered his debilitating injuries.
According to the meeting minutes for work sessions from 2016 to 2019, City Council and City staff discussed and debated the merits of upgrading the garbage truck fleet versus staying the course. The former Public Works Director Tim Coakley urged the latter, while former City Manager John Klimm was the first to advocate for the former. Following are the highlights of those meetings. In all but a few cases when Klimm was manager, the discussions centered on costs and efficiencies, not safety.
May 9, 2016: City Manager John Klimm discussed an operational audit of the Public Works department, stating that “we are just about to get into another round of purchase of garbage trucks, and the question is whether this is the time for us to take a look at some of the technological changes that have occurred over the last 5 or 10 years such as robotic trucks and that type thing. With the news about the possibility of losing the inmates, we have an even more interesting aspect. The first phase of the study, which is in draft form, does show there would be cost savings. There would not be huge cost savings because the new trucks cost a lot of money.”
Public Works Director Tim Coakley explained how “the state had closed us off from inmates a couple of weeks ago and shipped them to the Trenton (correctional) facility,” and that “$250,000 had been placed in the Public Services budget for temporary labor for next year.”
City Manager Klimm described the status of the Public Works audit, describing again how, “Many, many areas across the country have gone to robotic trucks…He said we have three people on each truck currently while other areas have one person on the robotic trucks. He said the bottom line is there was merit in looking seriously at robotic trucks. The savings were relatively modest, but when you put in the fact that inmates are not going to be available anymore, then it substantially changes things.”
Public Services Director Michelle Jones made the case that the City should take a phased approach to upgrading to robotic trucks that require only one driver-operator. She also raised the issue that modern automated trucks “would eliminate two potential risks” by replacing three-person crews per truck and going to one person per truck.
John Klimm also spoke about safety, stating that “traditionally worker’s comp claims are high for cities for garbage collection employees, but this is not the case in Aiken at this time, but could be in the future…there is concern about the present system where two employees hold on to the back of the truck. There is concern about their safety.”
Council opted to add the purchase of a single robotic garbage truck to the budget.
There was another discussion about the garbage collection labor situation and the existing fleet of trucks; with complaints regarding increased labor costs continuing two years after the loss of prison labor. The discussion focused on efficiency and costs.
At one point, Councilman Dewar asked about the experience with the single-operator automated truck. City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh replied that “it is working, but City-wide, it would be difficult to implement because of some of the tight spaces in older neighborhoods with a lot of old-growth trees and above-ground utilities.”
Mayor Rick Osbon then stated the single-operator trucks “work in Aiken Estates and Gem Lakes;” two neighborhoods with substantial tree canopies.
At the end of the discussion, Tim Coakley stated that he “would not recommend purchasing another single-operator truck. “
Tim Coakley addressed the single-operator system, stating, “It has not performed as staff would like. There have been several breakdowns in the first year…there are a lot of neighborhoods where the one-man truck cannot be used.” He pointed out that the truck “cannot run in Kalmia Hill as it is too tight and there are a lot of cul-de-sacs.” He also described residents “not putting cans out correctly” as another disadvantage for a single-operator system.
When Councilman Ed Woltz inquired as to the cost of new equipment, City Manager Bedenbaugh responded with a figure of $1.4 million.
City Manager Bedenbaugh informed Council that there were enough funds in the Depreciation Account to replace four trucks. The subsequent budget approved for Fiscal Year 2019-2020 contained funding to buy four new single-operator, automated garbage trucks.
One week into the new budget year, Kyle Hartley suffered his injury while riding on the back of one of the old garbage trucks.
July 8, 2019:
Mention is made of the Hartley accident and injuries, with thoughts and prayers offered.
Lex Kirkland, who had recently replaced Tim Coakley (5) as the Public Works Director, told Council that three new single-operator trucks had been purchased and were in use, and that “the process is getting faster every day. (Crews) hope to pick up more than they were able to pick up with the rear loaders as they get used to them…citizens are becoming accustomed to putting the cans out correctly.”
Year and value of three Peterbilt automated, single-operator garbage trucks approved for purchase by City Council in June 2019, and purchased in 2019 after the July 8, 2019, Kyle Hartley accident. From: City of Aiken’s 2022 Insurance Coverage Contract with the South Carolina Municipal Insurance and Risk Fund (SCMIRF), a division of the Municipal Association of South Carolina (MASC). The inventory shows one 2004 model rear-end loading garbage truck remains in the fleet as a backup.
Footnotes
(1) The case file in sccourts.org is skimpy. For example, there are no portions of the deposition transcript associated with any Motions, and there are no Memorandums in Support of or in Opposition to the May 2024 Motion for Summary Judgement. The most recently scheduled hearing was deferred to a future date.
(2) Like many other personal injury cases asserting negligence or other undue actions on the part of the City, injured parties are more likely to face its insurer, South Carolina Municipal Insurance and Financing Fund (SCMIRF).
SCMIRF, though, is not actually insurance, nor is it subject to state insurance laws.
The City of Aiken’s insurance coverage for property and liability through SCMIRF is described in the city’s policy as:
“a statutory pooled self-insurance liability fund established pursuant to Section 15-78-140 of the South Carolina Code and by intergovernmental agreement. By statute, SCMIRF is not insurance, nor is it subject to state laws regulating insurance. Nevertheless, Section 15-78-140 requires SCMIRF to provide multiple lines of coverage.”
The following question was posed during a February 2023 City Council meeting following the publication of an Aiken Chronicles update on the case.
“Who pays the attorney costs for these personal injury cases against the city? Is it the insurance company or is the city? Is it the insurance companies that hire the lawyers for personal injury cases that are going to involve possible settlements greater than a hundred thousand dollars?”
City Attorney Gary Smith answered,
“Don’t hold me to this. The city manager would be able to answer this question better than I can. But we do have insurance through the municipal Insurance risk fund and there are cases from time to time where they will take up the cost of litigation and they’ll take up the cost of the Judgment if there is one. There are some cases where the city has to fund its own legal expenses. I believe this is one being funded by MIRF but I can’t promise you that.”
A FOIA request for all of David Morrison’s legal invoices to the City of Aiken for 2022 and most of 2023 revealed no billings for the Hartley case. SCMIRF is clearly picking up the bill.
This makes perfect sense, as the City’s insurance policy states that “SCMIRF has the right and duty to defend any Suit asking for Money Damages.” (below)
Click to enlarge.
The General Conditions clause further states that “it is agreed that SCMIRF shall make all final decisions regarding the legal defense of claims, regardless of whether the Member elects alternative premium financing option, including but not limited to a deductible or individual self-insured retention.”
What is unclear is to what extent SCMIRF has the final say on settlements.
A major settlement or jury award could temporarily trigger the end of SCMIRF’s duty to defend or settle future lawsuits. According to the City’s 2022 Insurance Coverage document, “SCMIRF’s liability for any one Incident is limited to $1,000,000 per Member.”
As reported in Fencing After the Fact, the City’s self-insurance is for up to $100,000 per incident.
The City of Aiken should identify its role in the decision-making on a final settlement should be identified.
Should the case go to jury, the City and SCMIRF are undoubtedly aware that two recent jury awards to prisoners injured while at the Aiken County Detention Center have added up to $1.1 million. Jurors are much more likely to be symphathetic to the plight resulting from horrific workplace injuries suffered by a healthy, 17-year seasonal landscape work unnecessarily performing dangerous trash collection duties.
(3) The Civil case has crawled through the judicial system for more than four years while Kyle Hartley’s concurrent, complex worker’s compensation case was litigated.
SC Worker’s Compensation law, SC 42-9-10, requires workers with “total disability” to receive two-thirds of average weekly wages for up to 500 weeks. If the disability is partial, it would be for up to 340 weeks.
If the injured worker becomes paraplegic or quadriplegic, or who has suffered from brain damage, then the benefits are for life.
No matter what the case, the benefits for Kyle Hartley would be scanty.
If his wage was the current starting pay of $11.50 per hour, a worker’s compensation payout would be only an estimated $308/week.
If his wage was ~$9.50 per hour, which was typical at the time, the payout would only be $254/week, or merely as much as $125,000 and as little as $86,000 for the loss of a leg while performing work for which he was no trained.
