State may try to shift some state roads to counties
By Bill Davis, senior editor | State legislators are toying with an idea of how to fund the state’s ailing roadways: have counties pay for some of it. And the counties aren’t too excited.
With close to 40,000 miles of roadways, South Carolina has the fourth largest state-maintained highway system in the nation, behind North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. One of the main reasons that the state system is so large is that legislators in Columbia dating back five-plus decades have been orchestrating political favors to constituents and friends in the guise of roads, according to multiple sources in and around the legislature.
“Parking lots. The state owns and maintains parking lots,” groused state Sen. Paul Campbell, a Berkeley County Republican who serves on the Senate Transportation Committee.
South Carolina is also currently facing a $41 billion tab over the next 25 years to bring its roads system up to a “good” rating, and the legislature has not been in a big hurry to start paying it down.
Campbell said it was easy for travelers to figure out when they’d crossed over into South Carolina from Georgia or North Carolina: “It’s when the roads go to hell.”
How we got here
Two legislative sessions ago, the state bonded a total of $500 million for roads improvements, but has bogged down since then. During the 2015 legislative session, the House passed a road funding bill over to the Senate that included a provision that, if passed, could leave counties on the hook for as much as one-fourth of the state’s roads.
The bill, worked on for the better part of a year, would also increase fees for drivers license and other smaller items.
State Sen. Tom Davis (R-Bluffton) blocked the measure in the Senate, delivering a late-session filibuster that effectively killed action on the bill for this year.
Campbell said the bill has been placed on the committee’s agenda for the next legislative session in January.
It would increase the state’s gas tax over four years and pass on money to counties for them to maintain the state’s smaller, less traveled roads, he said. It would also combine state pass-through dollars to counties with General Fund dollars to provide the estimated $1.4 annually needed to shore up the state’s roads, Campbell said. And by getting counties to do some of the work, it would create a big job boost across the state, he added.
The state, Campbell said, should focus on the “Seven percent of roads that handle half of our state’s traffic” and pay the counties to take care of the rest.
Nice idea, but …
But the state legislature hasn’t had the best record of sending all the money counties require to provide other needed services.
Consider public K-12 education, where the legislature has rarely sent along the legally-required, full amount of per-pupil funding. Outside of a handful of times over the past 25 years, the legislature generally crafts special one-year laws, called provisos, which allowed it to skirt fully funding schools.
Another example: The General Assembly hasn’t fully funded its Local Government Fund for the past seven budgets, which historically has set aside 4.5 percent of the state’s total annual budget for counties and other smaller political organs.
Joshua Rhodes, a lawyer at the S.C. Association of Counties, said what is being discussed is forcing counties to solve a problem that the current legislators’ predecessors created. And, referring to the aforementioned funding cuts, he said the state’s “credit don’t look so good.”
Rhodes’ fellow SCAC lawyer Owen McBride said that fighting the handing off of roads to counties is one of their organizations top agenda items.
Roadwork would be even harder to accomplish, McBride said, because of the legislature’s limiting of taxation sources for counties, like placing millage caps on private property.
McBride said he understood legislators who were considering this move: they want to take care of roads but not deal with the political fallout of raising taxes in an election year like 2016. Legislators would like to keep their jobs at the expense of county politicians’ jobs, Rhodes said.
McBride and Rhodes said allowing counties to opt out of the deal could help, from their perspective, and pointed out that many larger, richer counties are already doing roadwork.
But smaller and poorer counties like Allendale, they said, wouldn’t have the ability to do any of it and would likely end up contracting out the jobs through the state Department of Transportation.
Increasing the gas tax
State Sen. Marlon Kimpson (D-Charleston), who also serves on Transportation, said he would be fine with voting for an increase in the state gas tax. But he wondered whether he would get the chance to debate the issue, referring to Davis’ filibuster.
Kimpson laid the blame for slow movement on Republicans, who control the state legislature numerically. He said the Senate had plenty of time nearer to the beginning of the session to adequately deal with the gas tax and roads, but instead Republicans “chose to debate abortions for 21 days.”
Kimpson also wondered why his business-friendly Republican colleagues were deaf to calls from the trucking and manufacturing sectors for better roads, considering the estimated 4-to-1 return on roads projects via jobs, increased investment and expansion.
Kimpson said he would be open to discussing passing off some of the roads to counties on a “supplemental” level, as long as the legislature seriously tackles the issue. He said that Davis’ filibuster suggestion to use future leftover annual state funds to pay for roads does nothing to address the “gaping sore” that the state’s roads are becoming.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!