He said, she said, Part 1: Sorting out fact from spin in the District 46 Senate race

State Sen. Catherine Ceips and former governor's chief of staff Tom Davis have been busying themselves with a drawn out game of he said-she said in the lead up to the June 10 Republican primary for the Senate District 46 seat representing Beaufort County.

Amid the all the digs, third-party sourcing and contextual gaps, figuring out what's what is no easy task. Here's a breakdown of the candidates' rhetoric on three key issues with fact-checks and missing context.

State spending

Every year, the state budget planning begins with the governor's proposed budget. That budget is vetted and amended for months by the two chambers of the legislature before it is returned to his desk for final approval. Gov. Mark Sanford has repeatedly used line-item vetoes to trim spending from amended budgets, which the legislature has repeatedly overridden.

Davis said: Ceips has helped override Sanford's budget vetoes and contributed to an unsustainable state spending increase of 40 percent in the last four years.

Ceips said: Davis' figures overstate the growth in state spending. General fund spending grew at a 3.9 percent rate from 1994 to 2007, a rate close to the very benchmark the governor uses to define responsible growth.

The real deal: Davis' math actually understates the short-term growth in state spending. He incorrectly added together annual percent increases in state spending to come up with the 40 percent figure. The state spent $5.1 billion in the 2005 budget year and budgeted $7.4 billion in spending for the current year, a 13.4 percent average annual increase and 45.9 percent increase overall.

Ceips' math is off a little, too. The state spent $3.8 billion in 1994 and $6.6 billion in 2007, an average annual growth rate of 4.3 percent. The governor's benchmark she referred to is the sum of the rates of population growth and inflation. It should be noted that Ceips wasn't a member of the state legislature until 2003, the same year Sanford became governor.

Spending figures were drawn from state fiscal surveys published by the National Association of State Budget Officers.

Education funding

Over the past several years, the Beaufort County School District has received less and less of a $1.6 billion pot of money earmarked for the state's 85 school districts. The allocation for the current budget year was about $2.5 million, down tens of millions in just a few years.

Under the Education Finance Act of 1977, a complex formula that governs the pot's disbursement, the Beaufort County School District would technically owe the state almost $3 million by June 2009, though the numbers were tweaked to make a zero balance.

The pot's disbursement formula is based in part on how much property tax a district can collect and pupil populations; districts with a lot of quickly appreciating, high-value second homes like Beaufort County are hurt by the formula and must rely more heavily on local taxes for funding.

He said: "Six years in Columbia and she hasn't lifted a finger to fix the flawed education funding formula that forces Beaufort County taxpayers to fork over millions of dollars to schools in Greenville and other parts of the state. And now that she's in the Senate, she won't even stand up to protect the few table scraps we are supposed to be receiving."

She said: This year, Ceips said she filibustered the Senate for several hours in an attempt to recover the $2.5 million and cosponsored "groundbreaking legislation" to create a study committee that will recommend comprehensive changes to the state education funding system.

The real deal: Ceips and Democratic Sen. Clementa Pinckney filibustered the Senate for six hours April 16 in an attempt to restore a House budget amendment the Senate stripped that would reverse all school districts' year-to-year losses under the Education Finance Act, including Beaufort County's $2.5 million. They recovered $60,000 for Beaufort County.

The next day, the Senate introduced a joint resolution to create the study committee. The entire Senate signed on as cosponsors, but the legislation did not make it out of a House committee in time to be passed this year. At least two other state education task forces have been formed in recent years to study and recommend comprehensive changes to state education funding.

Ceips fought for similar "hold harmless" budget amendments dealing with education funding in the past, but aside from April's joint resolution, hasn't sponsored legislation to fundamentally change the funding formula.

Ports Authority nomination

A few months ago, the governor nominated Doug Robertson, a Bluffton Republican, to the nine-member board of the S.C. Ports Authority. Historically, appointees have sailed through Senate confirmations with the support of their local senators, though Robertson's nomination was stalled in a closed-door session.

Robertson said he'd been told the rationale for his stalled nomination was a $3,500 donation he had made to the group ReformSC, a political organization that has backed the governor and opposed Ceips in the past. The group seeks to reform state government by unseating entrenched politicians.

He said: "There's absolutely no question" Ceips was working against Robertson's nomination.

She said: Ceips said she vouched for Robertson and that another senator held up the nomination. The Senate was "quietly working out" some issues about the nomination until it was publicized and used it as "a political football ... and made my job three times harder."

The real deal: Robertson was confirmed two weeks ago. Republican Sen. Jake Knotts, a vocal Sanford critic, took responsibility for the hold-up, arguing that the Senate should not be rubber-stamping nominees associated with ReformSC.