What $415 million on South Carolina's roads means

COLUMBIA — If state lawmakers end up agreeing to spend $415 million this year on roads, the biggest chunk of it will go onto the state’s crumbling primary system, highway officials said Friday, but the amount is not expected to put a dent in the state’s overall infrastructure needs.

Until recently lawmakers had talked in terms of funding the state Department of Transportation with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue each year. In fact, a chart prepared for lawmakers earlier this year showing what would be accomplished at different funding levels was based on receiving the funding each year for at least a decade.

But with the House and Senate at odds over a roads bill this year, lawmakers are focusing on what can be done in the budget for the year beginning in July. The House has proposed spending $415 million, while the Senate, through its roads bill, has proposed $400 million.

DOT on Friday released to The Greenville News its plan on how it would spend the $415 million, some of which was designated by the House for certain uses, such as flood recovery.

According to that plan, $147 million would be spent on paving projects for the state’s primary routes, which carry about half the state’s traffic, and $65 million would go for paving projects on what it calls national routes, interstates and major primary highways.

State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall has argued the state’s primary system, what are known as U.S. routes, are in dire need of repair and if not addressed soon could cost exponentially more to fix.

Another $79 million would go for bridge work on interstates and primary routes, under the DOT plan, while $25 million would go to help load restricted bridges identified but not funded as part of the Act 98 program several years ago.

Of the remaining money, $49 million would pay for flood recovery work and $50 million would go to county transportation committees. Those committees last year received $216 million from lawmakers when the Legislature again deadlocked on a long-term road-funding solution.

To put the $415 million in perspective, a Legislative Audit Council official told lawmakers last week that it would take more than $12 billion just to improve the state’s roads rated as poor. If all $415 million were spent on poor roads each year, it would take 30 years just to improve those roads.

DOT Chairman Mike Wooten told The Greenville News Friday he is disappointed in what is now being proposed for road funding and the list of what could be accomplished on charts handed out earlier this year was based on additional funding each year for a decade.

“The question is what can you do with $400 million that is non-recurring,” he said. “What you can do is apply it basically to road repair, paving. You can’t plan with that money so anything else on that list is pretty much off the table.”

Among the state’s needs unaddressed in such one-time funding are the state’s capacity issues, such as widening interstates. DOT has estimated that a handful of such projects would cost billions, including the mammoth project addressing the convergence of Interstate 26 and Interstate 20 in Columbia, known locally as Malfunction Junction.

“Obviously, $400 million is a lot of money and it will be put to good use, and we’ll do the best we can to spend that money effectively in accordance with Act 114,” Wooten said. “I’m deeply disappointed that the Legislature and the Governor’s Office didn’t see fit to work together this year to come up with sustainable funding for the department.”

He said the agency has been maligned, with bad things being said about its management and waste and inappropriate spending “simply because our budget needs to be increased.”

“I feel like that (criticism) was a ploy to keep from having to do the hard thing,” he said.

He said a recent LAC report on DOT found no waste or fraud “and clearly indicated what we have been saying all along that we are woefully underfunded.”

“It’s just disappointing that yet another year is going to go by when obviously we are not going to be able to determine what the future of the roads of South Carolina is going to be,” he said.

The Senate’s roads plan calls for spending $400 million a year out of the General Fund on infrastructure. Senate Republicans balked at raising the gas tax or any fees when they learned the state had a $1.4 billion budget surplus this year.

The House, which passed its own roads plan last year, voted to change the Senate’s plan, after House members and leaders criticized the funding as unsustainable and the reforms as inadequate, given the LAC recommendations.

The House removed the funding issue from the bill, arguing it would have to be addressed in the budget this year. House leaders say they want to work with Gov. Nikki Haley on a sustainable funding plan next year.

Haley, who last year proposed raising the gas tax if lawmakers would cut the income tax rate, had praised the Senate plan and warned the House that changing it would doom the bill, as well as any chances of reform this year.

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