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Mr. Hill's indictment

February 26, 2006 12:50 am

UPON HEARING that it had voted to secede from the Union, a South Carolinian said of his state that it was "too small for a country, too large for an insane asylum." Sometimes it seems that Spotsylvania County is on its way to a similar characterization. A county GOP that apparently gets its "big tent" advice from the Khmer Rouge, free-roaming killer dogs, deputies who leave car-payment-size tips to alleged good-time girls and now a school superintendent under criminal indictment.

If convicted of violating state election law in the matter of some political fliers, and of obstructing justice during the probe leading up to that charge, Superintendent Jerry Hill could serve almost two years in prison and pay fines of $5,000. This would be an outrage, and nobody really expects that Mr. Hill will be making license plates in Mecklenburg. But it's a minor tragedy that this whole mess wasn't avoided--and parts of it are a cracking good mystery, too.

For example, several School Board members have popped up to shout "I'm Spartacus!" and admit that they directed Mr. Hill to produce the fliers, which blasted the Board of Supervisors for allegedly stinting the school system in a bond issue. Why weren't those members indicted, too? Only prosecutor Matt Britton knows, and he isn't talking. Those of us in the mushroom patch don't necessarily want to see School Board members on trial; we just can't figure out why Mr. Hill is taking the fall.

To be sure, a "political" element exists in this fracas between the two boards, but some School Board partisans have misdefined its nature. The Hill indictment isn't fueled by low politics, but by principled ones. It has to do with the question of which board has budgetary authority. The answer is the one that has authority to tax, and the concomitant duty to be careful stewards of public money. That isn't the board with which Jerry Hill is connected.

One can scarcely blame Spotsylvania supervisors for chafing when School Board members try to use a slanted publicity campaign to in effect get their hands on the budget reins. (The fliers, aimed at parents, made no mention of the millions in identified school-system waste that the supervisors wanted stopped before opening the spigot wider.) And the fact that an independent prosecutor and a grand jury are putting Mr. Hill in the dock suggests there's a larger issue here than petty turf defense.