SPEAKING FREELY ABOUT SALLY HEBERT, CANDIDATE FOR STATE HOUSE DISTRICT 94

While lawyers and businessmen are perhaps a necessary component of our State Legislature, we would be much better served as a society if more educators, nurses, doctors, artists, social service workers, journalists and others from diverse professions contributed to the legislative process.

From this perspective, Sally Hebert’s candidacy for South Carolina House District 94 comes as a breath of fresh air.

Hebert brings three unusual professional credentials to the table. 

First, while at Appalachian State in North Carolina as a political science major, she discovered the allure of journalism by volunteering at the campus newspaper.  After graduating in 1991, she spent four years working for various bi-weekly and small daily newspapers in North Carolina.

From this experience, Hebert says, “I learned to ask good questions.  I am not hesitant to hold powerful people to account, and I can learn new material quickly.” 

She proved her mettle, for example, by writing a series of articles for the Shelby (NC) Star on a proposed local bank merger.  As a result of her reporting, the merger fell through, allowing Shelby to keep its community bank while costing the local bank president his golden parachute.  For this work Hebert won an award for Investigative Reporting from the North Carolina Press Association.

She added a second skill set when a mentor in North Carolina recommended she take the opportunity to work in public affairs at COMNAVBASE Charleston in 1995 as it was closing (as required under the Base Realignment and Closure process).  Her job was to develop a rapport with her military bosses, understand their language, and then translate it for the members of the public and the press who had questions.

After a stint in the technical writing world, Hebert developed a third competency when she was unanimously appointed Administrative Assistant to the Dorchester County Council in 2011.  She then was elevated to the position of Clerk, which she held until 2016.  “I had a front row seat to observe the legislative process at work,” Hebert says.  Given this experience, she will not be surprised by how South Carolina’s House of Representatives works, nor will she take long to get up to speed.

Hebert already has a long list of issues that need legislative attention.

Currently a substitute teacher, she was dismayed to learn of the $8 million shortfall currently facing Dorchester School District Two. 

Because of the bizarre way South Carolina funds its public schools (without any school tax levied directly on homeowners), District Two is at a great financial disadvantage.  Its population of homeowners who need schools for their children is exploding, but the business tax base necessary to help fund the schools is not.  Berkeley County has been benefitting from this business expansion, to the detriment of the schools in Dorchester. 

Hebert says a new state funding formula is necessary to help DD2, along with an entirely new approach to school funding.

A variety of health care issues are also on her agenda.

Hebert saw first-hand the burdensome cost of health care as she aided her aging parents in the end-of-life process.  “We have an unsustainable business model for the provision of health care,” she says.  “How are the baby boomers and the generations coming after them going to pay for this?”

In addition, she would try to convince Republican colleagues and the next Governor to accept federal money to expand Medicaid within South Carolina.  A result would be to reduce emergency room visits and chronic health problems.  This in turn would lower the overall cost of health care in the state.

She would work to stop her abortion-obsessed Republican colleagues from demonizing women and denying them access to quality health care.  “All women have a right to access medical care in a safe environment,” she says.

Because of the out-of-control national gerrymandering of election districts, Hebert will press for the formation of a non-partisan commission to draw those lines in South Carolina.  “Other states have already created a template for such a commission,” she says.  (The group includes Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana and Washington.)  “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  We can borrow from them.”

Hebert, 56, entered the race after hearing veteran Democrat Gilda Cobb-Hunter speak to the DCDP Convention in March.  Cobb-Hunter, a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, emphasized that if Democrats could flip just six seats in her chamber, it would end the ruinous supermajority now maintained by Republicans.  To help achieve this, Cobb-Hunter urged Democrats to field candidates in all 124 State House districts, something they have not done in modern political history.

Hebert knew that the current Republican incumbent in the 94th, Gil Gatch, had run unopposed in 2024.  She didn’t want to give him that opportunity again, so she jumped into the race.

Gatch is one of those lawyer/legislators who feathers his own nest by representing criminal defendants in front of the very judges his Republican colleagues in the General Assembly have chosen.   It’s a corrupt system that violates the separation of powers.

While two other Democrats have filed for this race, Hebert has clearly out-hustled her primary rivals with near-daily postings on Facebook, active engagement in the community, and a dominant fund-raising campaign. She intends to turn Cobb-Hunter’s challenge to “Flip Six” into reality. And the Democrats did indeed meet Cobb-Hunter’s challenge. Democrats are running in all 124 Assembly districts.

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