COLUMBIA — The director of the agency that provides services for South Carolinians with disabilities was fired Feb. 18 without explanation.
The board of the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs voted 5-1 to remove Director Mary Poole, effective immediately. The agency's chief lawyer, Constance Holloway, was named interim director.
When Poole was hired in mid-2018, the agency had already been under fire for years over financial problems, long waiting lists and allegations of abuse in its network of providers.
She replaced interim Director Pat Maley, who as state inspector general repeatedly investigated the agency. In 2015, he found that hundreds of disabled residents were collectively overcharged by about $2 million for their rent in group homes.
It's unclear what triggered the dismissal of Poole, whose salary was $171,400.
The vote came without any public discussion, following a closed-door meeting. The lone vote against firing her came from Chairman Gary Lemel of Fort Mill, who could not be reached after the meeting.
Commissioner David Thomas of Greenville, who made the motion to dismiss Poole, declined to say why she was fired from the 1,500-employee agency, saying it was a personnel issue.
"We think it’s for the good of the agency and the people we serve," Thomas told The Post and Courier. "Where I hope we’ll be in a few years is serving more folks and doing it diligently and systematically," said Thomas, a former state senator who was a chief critic of the agency while in the Legislature.
"I'm looking forward to bringing in some leadership that might continue to take us forward," he said. "When you have to take action, it hurts and nobody’s happy. It's best to do it and get it over with and move on."
Poole is the second state agency head fired in this month.
S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster axed Amy Cofield as director of the State Accident Fund on Feb. 8 and called for an investigation into whether she helped steer a $600,000 government contract to her husband’s company. Cofield said state procurement officials told her she could to hire her husband for information technology consulting work, as long as she did not directly influence the process.
