AS COLUMBIA City Council nears a vote on asking Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott to oversee the Police Department, Mr. Lott makes a good point in saying it doesn’t make sense to waste time crafting a detailed plan to address the finer points of an arrangement that might never happen.

But it’s also true that it doesn’t make sense for City Council to make such a weighty decision without council members, city officers and the public understanding key details of how things would operate under Mr. Lott. There are stark cultural differences that would have to be worked out; this first-of-its-kind arrangement would drastically change how city police service is delivered.

As much as we believe that this could improve police protection and accountability as well as promote further city-county cooperation, it would be unwise and irresponsible for City Council to enter into an agreement blindly.

There is a middle ground. City Council has completed a series of public input meetings and is preparing to deliberate. If the council gives initial approval to contracting with the sheriff, it should delay a final vote until Mr. Lott produces a detailed plan. The plan won’t cover every minute detail, but any matter of substance should be addressed.

ABOUT THE ONLY thing more ridiculous than the fact that our Legislature would pass a law to create license tags with a cross-emblazoned stained-glass window and the words “I Believe” was the idea that such a law could survive a court challenge; after all, the courts had deemed it unconstitutional for the Legislature to create “Choose Life” tags without also creating abortion-rights tags.

And about the only thing more pathetic than the fact that anyone would actually spend time and energy filing a suit to stop the plates from being issued was the fact that the state would fight that suit. So after the opponents did what we all knew they’d do and the federal court did what we all knew it would do, it’s welcome news that a peace of sorts seems to have been reached.

We don’t say this because Attorney General Henry McMaster has declared the proposed new license plates constitutional; he has no credibility on this topic, having defended the tags we all knew a federal court would strike down. Rather, it’s because unlike the earlier plates that were specifically authorized by an act of the Legislature, the new tags would be produced under a law that allows virtually any nonprofit to have plates printed up with its name, as long as it puts up enough money to guarantee the state will break even. We also are encouraged because the people who sued over the first tags have acknowledged that they have no legitimate reason to be upset about the new tags, since any group religious or not could use the same process.

Encouraged, but still unsettled.

PRETTY MUCH everyone who has looked at the matter in the past few decades has concluded that South Carolina is not spending enough money to maintain its highway system, and one big reason is our gasoline tax, which is now the third lowest in the nation. A subcommittee of the Taxation Realignment Commission was no exception.

In a report to be taken up by the full TRAC today, the subcommittee recommends that the Legislature either raise the tax to 23 cents from 16.75 cents per gallon or else restructure it using a convoluted formula that would leave the tax rate where it is but allow it to be adjusted upward for inflation at least annually.

If we were simply trying to increase the amount of money the tax brings in, merely increasing the rate would do the job. For now.

But the whole idea behind the TRAC was supposed to be to fix a broken tax system. To identify and correct systematic problems. Setting the tax rates should be a secondary matter, and a pretty simple one once the heavy lifting is done.

UNLIKE OTHER traditional animal practices that society has come to consider unacceptable, bear baying does not routinely result in death or great suffering, of the bears or the dogs, for very practical reasons: At least part of the purpose of letting loose a pack of dogs to run at a tame, declawed, chained-up bear is to train them not to touch the bear, but merely to make it rear up on its hind legs, or bay, and keep its belly exposed so that, in an actual hunt, their owners can shoot it. And captive bears are a prized commodity that are of no use if they’re badly injured.

Moreover, the days of legal bear baying already are limited. A 2005 compromise that attempted to reconcile competing state laws allowed owners to keep those bears already in captivity but prohibited them from acquiring any more. So when the 24 remaining bears die out, it will not be possible to engage in this practice legally.

In short, South Carolina has much bigger problems than bear baying. In the realm of animal cruelty alone, this is far less significant than cockfighting, a barbaric blood sport that remains widespread in our state because the laws against it are so pathetically weak that people face charges only when federal officials are inclined to pursue them.

But the fact that we allow worse things to continue doesn’t mean we should condone this practice, which is banned either outright or through laws prohibiting bear ownership in all 49 other states — and which Attorney General Henry McMaster says violates animal cruelty laws in our state, even though a different statute specifically allows it.

WHILE THE city elections brought renewed hope for increased cooperation between Columbia and Richland County, the governments’ inability to collaborate on a large sewer project in Lower Richland illustrates just how far they have to go.

Columbia and Richland have dragged their feet for nearly four years while residents endure failing septic tanks and developers sit in limbo, waiting for sewer lines so they can build thousands of homes the county already signed off on. This is unacceptable.

City and county officials must work through their differences.

Ultimately, the debate spins on questions such as who would bear the most costs, who would reap the most benefit and who would collect tap fees and monthly user fees, as well as who would dictate how the area develops. Those are legitimate issues. But none should overshadow — and ultimately kill — this opportunity for the city and county to collaborate on a worthwhile project that will help shape a large swath of unincorporated Richland.

COLUMBIA residents in upscale Woodcreek in Northeast Richland found out belatedly that they would be getting a new neighbor — a 1,500-employee call center that was built under county rules but that wants to be annexed into the city — and are worried about the effects it will have on traffic and property values. Developers given the county’s blessing to build hundreds of homes in Lower Richland are perplexed that there’s no sewer system to serve them, and the city and county don’t see eye to eye on how to solve the problem.

Situations such as these occur because of a lack of planning and cooperation between Columbia and Richland County. The simple answer is to merge planning operations to ensure that there is better, smarter land-use planning and more overall coordination as the city and county develop. Although city and county officials have discussed the concept for years, they have failed to set aside petty turf and political concerns to get it done.

But with new members of City Council, including Mayor Steve Benjamin and Councilwoman Leona Plaugh, bringing renewed emphasis on city/county cooperation, and the biggest opponent of such efforts, former Councilman E.W. Cromartie, having resigned, now is an opportune time to revisit combining planning departments and planning commissions.

Some question whether this could work because of politics and significant differences between the city and county. As for the political concerns, city and county leaders need to get over themselves and do the right thing. Concerns about how differently the city and county approach planning are legitimate, but not insurmountable.

SUSAN SMITH offered to plead guilty to drowning her two young sons and then leading the nation on an agonizing search for a fabricated kidnapper, but prosecutor Tommy Pope refused because he was determined to seek the death penalty. That decision was roundly rejected by a jury that took just 21/2 hours to sentence the pathetic and conniving young woman to the two life sentences she could have received without using up the time of Mr. Pope and his staff and the courts or forcing taxpayers to pick up a $200,000 tab for her defense.

What those jurors understood was that you don’t execute a mother who, though legally responsible for her actions, clearly was driven not by malice but by emotional problems. On the most basic level, such a person is not a threat to society. From a legal and a moral perspective, we can’t justify executing one mother who behaved in a spectacularly deceptive way after killing her children, while not even giving a life sentence to — much less executing — hundreds of mothers and fathers who kill their children every year in the quiet of their homes.

Although the murder of any child is agonizing and unforgiveable, what Ms. Smith did was actually worse than what police say Shaquan Renee Duley did earlier this month, when she pushed her car into the North Edisto River after strapping her lifeless sons into their car seats: Ms. Duley smothered her children; Ms. Smith pushed them into a lake alive to drown. Police say Ms. Duley claimed she had a wreck and quickly confessed her crime; Ms. Smith fabricated a story about a black man stealing her car and her children, and maintained that story through 10 days in the national spotlight. Ms. Duley couldn’t take the pressures of raising her children without their father and with no job; Ms. Smith wanted a man.

So it’s disturbing that Solicitor David Pascoe is considering following in Mr. Pope’s misdirected footsteps and pursuing the death penalty against Ms. Duley. We hope that he isn’t seriously thinking about such a wasteful and inappropriate pursuit, but simply keeping quiet about all aspects of the case while emotions are running so high.

WHETHER Columbia officials contract with Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott to oversee the Columbia Police Department or not, they must take some aggressive action to put this floundering department back on track.

Simply hiring another police chief with the hopes he alone will whip the department into shape and restore the luster lost by what was once the city’s pride is not enough. While the department’s struggles are in part due to inconsistent leadership at the top, it also has suffered from missteps by the rank and file, a lack of manpower, inadequate training and high turnover.

The troubles raise questions of whether the Columbia Police Department still can keep residents safe — and are part of the reason some want Sheriff Lott to intervene.

Police chief Tandy Carter was fired after two years because of his inexplicable and unacceptable refusal to call in an outside law enforcement agency to investigate a car crash involving Mayor Steve Benjamin. The department’s poor handling of the matter was a political and PR fiasco. Coming on top of several other concerns in recent years, city leaders decided to consider an arrangement with Mr. Lott rather than launching an all-out search for a new chief. Consider:

WE’RE GLAD that the FBI and the State Law Enforcement Division are investigating the Columbia Police Department’s conduct in Five Points more deeply.

We don’t know enough to say that the Police Department is out of control — at least not yet. But ever since the troubling arrest of Horry County attorney Jonathan McCoy on Oct. 17, we have wondered just what is afoot.

Mr. McCoy’s arrest and police officers’ apparent fabrication of details surrounding it are inexcusable. Mr. McCoy walked up as police were arresting a friend outside Sharky’s bar on Harden Street and ended up in handcuffs as well. In a lawsuit filed in federal court, Mr. McCoy said he was exercising his right to question police about why they were arresting his friend. He also said police filed an inaccurate report.

The lawsuit filed on Jan. 19 says that Mr. McCoy went outside to check on his friend and saw the three police officers throw him to the ground. The suit says that when Mr. McCoy asked why his friend was being arrested, the police told him to “Shut up! Keep walking! It’s none of your business.” Mr. McCoy continued to ask about his friend, and the officers arrested him on charges of “interfering with an officer.”

TUITION IS going through the roof, and yet colleges are forging ahead with ambitious building plans. USC is working to double the size of its medical school, with no regard for the objections of the state’s premier medical school, the Medical University of South Carolina. S.C. State is struggling to explain why it hasn’t been able to get an $80 million transportation program off the ground after 12 years, and how to account for the money, while its bickering board of trustees runs a revolving door for presidents.

The common thread isn’t runaway spending, as some suggest, but rather the lack of any sort of oversight beyond the colleges’ boards of trustees, whose focus is solely on their individual institutions, and who act too often more as cheerleaders (or, in the case of S.C. State, wrecking crews) than as regulators.

The result is that we have a public college system that isn’t a system at all. Each college is an island unto itself, cooperating and coordinating with other colleges when that suits its needs, going it alone when that suits its desires.Unfortunately, the proposal Gov. Mark Sanford recently trotted back out — placing a moratorium on construction by colleges — won’t even solve the tuition problem, much less the overarching problem of lack of coordination and prioritization. Although he is right that someone besides the colleges needs to decide what they can and can’t build, that doesn’t mean that the answer always should be “no.” Some building projects are indeed questionable; others are necessary — and often funded from private sources that simply aren’t going to put their money toward tuition relief.

Tuition caps are an even worse idea. While it’s true, as Charleston’s Post and Courier recently reported, that a small portion of tuition increases underwrites excesses at some colleges, the fact is that because of woefully insufficient state support, almost all of the tuition is necessary to keep the amount of money the schools spend per student in line with spending in most other states. We doubt parents want to send their children to a school that spends significantly less per student than its peer institutions.

IT’S ENCOURAGING TO SEE chambers of commerce from across the Midlands join the effort to increase regional cooperation.

Chamber and economic development officials from 12 counties met recently to explore the possibility of working together. The meeting comes not long after area mayors — led by Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin — met and decided to lay aside turf, political and other differences to work on common goals in an effort to boost the Midlands’ competitiveness, economic development and quality of life.

The fact that local chambers are poised to join the movement suggests that this latest effort at regionalism might be for real. And it needs to be if the Midlands is to compete with the Upstate and Lowcountry as well as communities in other states in attracting jobs and industry. Just as important, a united Midlands will provide ways to address pressing issues such as airline service, transportation (whether roads or transit) and air pollution.

The driving force behind the renewed interest in cooperation is Southwest Airlines’ snub of the Midlands in favor of Charleston and Greenville. The wise and most productive response isn’t for Midlands leaders to talk down Greenville and Charleston — or even the airline — but to get their acts together and form effective alliances that better position this region to compete, whether for a low-cost carrier or the next BMW or Boeing.

IT’S OUTRAGEOUS THAT the city of Columbia will pay a private firm $65,000 to handle public information duties for the North Main Street construction project.

Taxpayers already fund a public relations office, whose director is paid more than $100,000 annually. Despite some city officials’ flimsy excuses, there’s no reason the city’s public relations office shouldn’t be doing the work PJ Noble Associates of Columbia outlines as its focus.

Pat Noble of PJ Noble prepared a document for the city that said her responsibilities include maintaining a contact list of residents, businesses, elected officials and others; facilitating six meetings for the North Main Street Improvement Project Advisory Committee; participating in up to five neighborhood association and interest-group meetings; developing and sending out newsletters with project updates; issuing news releases; resolving conflicts between neighborhood residents and contractors; and representing the community’s concerns in project meetings.

There’s nothing in that litany of duties that city staff shouldn’t be able to perform. If they can’t do this job — and we’re not suggesting that is the case — then the city should hire someone who can.

THE TIME AND energy Lexington County Council is wasting exploring its own transit system to serve the elderly and disabled would be better spent supporting the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority.

Why reinvent the wheel? It’s highly unlikely that the county can start a program for the elderly and disabled that is less costly and more efficient than the transit authority’s DART service. The authority offers DART along with overall bus service in a limited part of Lexington County, including Cayce, West Columbia and Springdale.

It only makes sense for Lexington County to work with transit officials to keep the current DART and bus service with the goal of future expansion. This growing community needs a viable regional transit system to support economic development as well as to take people where they want to go, whether to shop, work or visit the doctor.

Lexington County decided to consider dropping bus service and establishing its own van program for the elderly and disabled after the transit authority said it would end all service on July 12 unless the county came up with $193,000. The authority had planned to end the routes on Oct. 1, but decided to move the date up and use the savings to upgrade service in Richland County, where future service would be concentrated if Lexington governments, which never have shown interest in a long-term relationship, opt out.

STATE OFFICIALS always have insisted that they have to do economic development deals in secret, lest they scare off would-be investors and hurt our chances against other states. In fact, it’s only in recent years that we’ve been able to pry loose details of how much we’ve spent luring companies to our state after we’ve closed the deals.

But Caterpillar challenged that thinking last month when it picked Winston-Salem, N.C., over Spartanburg and Montgomery, Ala., to build a new heavy-equipment plant. Unlike South Carolina and Alabama, North Carolina has a law that requires incentive offers to be made public, in real time. That means everyone knew before the deal was sealed that N.C. officials were offering a package worth up to $73 million.

Bob Orr, a former N.C. Supreme Court justice and current director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, told The Greenville News that huge corporations don’t make decisions based on incentives — but that they do use bidding wars between states to drive up the price of those incentives.

It’s true that transparency has the potential to drive the price up even more, but secrecy makes it a sure thing. Mr. Orr cited Dell Computer, which North Carolina offered a $300 million incentive package, only to find that other states had offered far, far less. It’s not hard to imagine how much less states might be able to spend to essentially buy economic development if businesses were not able to use this secrecy to their advantage.

WE NEVER were crazy about the idea of having two medical schools in a state this small, but the fact is that we have two, and both are serving good purposes that one school alone might not be able to accomplish so well: The Medical University of South Carolina is producing outstanding researchers and specialists, and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine is producing the primary-care, emergency, psychiatric and obstetrical doctors our state needs — and they are staying in state to a much greater degree than doctors trained in other states.

Here’s an equally important fact: A 20-year ceiling on the number of doctors being trained in our nation is combining with the aging population and an anticipated influx in patients due to the federal health law to create a critical shortage of physicians. And in a nation with a projected 30 percent shortfall of doctors, South Carolina ranks 43rd in the number of primary-care physicians per capita, with a particularly acute shortage in rural areas.

It is against this backdrop that USC proposes to open what critics are calling a new medical school at the Greenville Hospital System, where a quarter of USC students already receive their third- and fourth-year training.

This would be a massive expansion, increasing the class of first-year medical students from 85 to 185; and the number could rise to 250 if preliminary discussions for a similar expansion with Palmetto Health officials proceed as expected. The Greenville campus alone would surpass MUSC’s 160-student classes and increase the number of doctors being trained in our state by 40 percent. The fact that USC is proceeding unilaterally with plans to consume the state’s capacity for new medical students, rather than working in consultation with its sister medical school, gives us some heartburn.

IN AS MUCH AS a proposed agreement that would place the Columbia Police Department under Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott’s control provides an excellent opportunity to test the waters for a possible merger, provide more accountability and improve safety and security, it’s not a matter that should be entered into lightly.

It’s imperative that Columbia City Council study this matter carefully and openly — and get buy-in from residents. By all indications, the council intends to do just that. It is offering citizens an opportunity to have their voices heard by offering several public hearings.

This is a very important issue. Police protection is arguably the most important service the city offers. Residents move into the city and willingly pay higher taxes with the expectation that they will receive a higher quality of services, particularly police protection.

Considering that, there’s no reason why every one of these public hearings shouldn’t be standing room only. This is the public’s opportunity to express their support or concerns and help shape the eventual agreement or influence the council to withdraw from the process.

THE IRMO Town Council’s prolonged debate over a smoking ban mirrors the process Lexington County Council went through before it did the right thing and adopted strong restrictions to ensure that workplaces are safe.

Lexington County Council spent a year and a half grappling over this issue. The Irmo Council is well past that mark. County Council went through a number of variations and votes. So has the Irmo council. Before wisely settling on a ban, County Council members nearly opted to do essentially nothing other than require that owners post signs to alert patrons if they continue to allow smoking. The Irmo council rejected a similar proposal last week.

So, the next logical step for the Irmo Town Council is to step up and approve a ban that protects the health of captive workers. Indications are that a ban will come up for a vote once again in the coming weeks. When it does, council members should approve it.

Some Irmo council members — like some on County Council — have wrestled with this issue so long because of ongoing debate over whether business owners’ preferences should take precedence over workers’ health and the public health in general. Just as government long has protected workers’ safety in other ways, it should prohibit employees from being unnecessarily exposed to tobacco smoke. The U.S. Surgeon General has said there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke.

HERE’S HOW you know that a tax reform proposal is a legitimate effort to fix our antiquated, special-interest-driven tax system, and not just another attempt to package a tax cut or a tax hike as “reform”: It targets the $300 sales tax cap on cars, the sorest thumb of a tax code that’s all thumbs.

Here’s how you know that a tax reform proposal is going to have practically no chance of making it through the Legislature intact: It targets the $300 sales tax cap on cars.

Thus you have the good news and the bad news about the Taxation Realignment Commission’s proposal to eliminate $700 million worth of sales tax exemptions and lower the sales tax rate from 6 percent to 5 percent so it neither raises nor lowers overall tax collections.

Actually, we’ve known from the start that the TRAC proposals would have a hard time, because lawmakers emasculated the panel, by striking the requirement that they take an up-or-down vote on its recommendations. (That’s the only mechanism anyone has proposed to combat their habit of ignoring or gutting any serious effort at balanced, comprehensive tax reform.) What we didn’t know was whether the commission would make a serious effort to improve our tax system anyway.

WHILE THERE’S no debating that arts groups in Columbia need to cooperate more, taxpayers should not have to foot the bill to make that happen.

City leaders indicate that they intend to move quickly to hire a full-time cultural affairs director as part of a plan to strengthen the city’s support for the arts. But they should take it slow and seriously consider whether it’s taxpayers’ responsibility to pay for such an endeavor. We submit that it is not.

The idea comes in response to a recommendation from Mayor Steve Benjamin’s transition committee, which said the city needs a central office with “dollar allocation responsibility” that can execute a strategic plan and assist organizations seeking help. The panel said the office could be a voice and a unifying force for the fragmented arts community.

But that’s not the city’s job. If arts groups and other individual and corporate members of the community desire such an outcome, they should make it happen. And it’s about time they did.

WHILE THERE are some throw-away ideas in the 101-page report generated by Mayor Steve Benjamin’s transition team and committees, there are also some very good ones that the city should not only give further consideration but implement.

The recently released report — compiled by a 209-member committee divided into eight subcommittees — recommends a number of key structural and operational changes that this editorial board has long promoted as ways to make city government more accountable, efficient and affordable. For example, the most common theme that emerged was the need to consolidate city and county services, which was a key element of Mr. Benjamin’s campaign platform.

Here are some of the good recommendations — and there are many others — city leaders should pursue:

•  The city should switch from a council-manager form of governance to one run by a strong, full-time mayor. We’ve long noted that the slow, plodding nature of the city’s inefficient, unaccountable system is an impediment to progress. A mayor empowered to act swiftly and decisively and who answers directly to voters should run the day-to-day affairs of the city, not an unelected, unaccountable city manager.