Color some South Carolina budget hawks surprised after Gov. Nikki Haley unveiled a state budget plan for 2015-16 that increased government spending by $200 million, up from the current year $6.7 billion.
Virtually missing in action in the 664-page framework: The governor’s plan to deal with state road and bridge infrastructure. During the recent gubernatorial campaign, she promised to release a plan after the campaign to deal with the $40 billion in state road and bridge needs over the next three decades.
Haley’s budget plan (Section 84, page 506) seeks just 4 percent of the $1.5 billion that the state Department of Transportation says it needs every year through 2040 to fix and improve roads. The only two transportation items in Haley’s new budget plan: $61.4 million from the state motor vehicle tax to be permanently allocated to road maintenance and $433,300 from the Capital Reserve Fund to maintain the state’s road salt infrastructure.
Meanwhile, legislative leaders have been putting infrastructure at the top of their 2015 to-do list with proposals ranging from increasing the user fee on gas to raising the sales tax by a penny to tolls on some Interstates.
While significant road funding doesn’t appear to be a part of Haley’s budget priorities, she offers several ideas to provide more for education.
“Although 2014 was deemed ‘the year of education,’ my promise to the people of South Carolina was to make progress on our schools every year,” Haley wrote in her budget letter. “This budget delivers on that promise.”
Included among education ideas in the proposal are ways to:
- Help teachers repay student loans;
- Offer supplements for rural educators’ salaries;
- Fund teacher mentors;
- Provide simpler funding to boost base student costs;
- Pay more for reading coaches and their certification; and
- Spend more on technology and public charter schools.
Click here to see the governor’s proposed budget (6.9M PDF)
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