The forever mayor of North Charleston. His son has had a bevy of political positions, thanks to daddy.
In 2020, while chairman of Charleston County Council, Summey was plucked from his job in real estate and hired to serve as the CEO of the Charleston Aviation Authority, a job with a $300,000 per year salary, plus perks. The agency took flak from local residents and transparency advocates for not conducting a national search to replace Paul Campbell, the former energy executive and state senator who retired from the post. Summey’s father is the longtime mayor of North Charleston.
Describing the power of political might as a motivator, Sanford wrote some people are good, but “in other cases, people are just crooked. They want what they want because they want it. Take for instance our airport authority in Charleston.”
After describing the airport’s top job as a post for “political folks” intent on “juicing their retirement” by spending their final years of government work in a high-paying position, Sanford launched into Summey:
“But why wait when you can just do a coup d’état? That’s what happened little more than a year ago in Charleston. In this case, Elliot [sic] Summey, a board member and coincidentally the son of the mayor where the airport sits, worked with others to appoint himself to the $300,000-a-year job as airport director. Did he have any experience in this? Did he have any experience running a large organization? Did the board conduct any interviews for someone who might? The answer is no to all the above, though it’s hardly unreasonable to believe that public boards should operate in the public interest, and that public money should be handled through a public process. But this is just another example of the way politics too often works, and why so many of us become disillusioned by it.”
https://charlestoncitypaper.com/sanford-says-airport-hiring-was-coup-detat-summey-fires-back/
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