'Progress is pain': Hard Scrabble Road work crawling along. Here's why.

Don Hillyard and his wife, Betty, moved from Long Island, N.Y., a decade ago to semi retire in the sunny south.

The Hillyards purchased a home in Lake Carolina, where he continues to work part-time as a psychotherapist while Betty telecommutes with her insurance firm in New York. They pick their times to leave the sprawling subdivision in Northeast Columbia, and rarely venture out during rush hour, when the overworked two-lane Hard Scrabble Road becomes a parking lot.

Commuter headaches have deepened as workers widen seven miles of the road from Kelly Mill Road to Farrow Road into a five-lane thoroughfare that will become the major north-south artery tying Clemson Road to Farrow Road in the sprawling Northeast suburbs.

"Timing is everything," Don Hillyard said. "But when it is done we'll have this beautiful five-lane highway. Progress is pain."

The price tag for the project, begun last October, has risen from $85 million to $92 million. Of that, $30 million is being provided by Richland County's Penny Tax for road improvements (a set amount that has not risen) and the rest with federal dollars administered by the Central Midlands Council of Governments.

While all rights-of-way have been purchased and cleared, motorists haven't seen much in the way of road building, just yet.

The reason for the price increase and the snail's pace?

"Utilities," said Derek Frick, project manager for the S.C. Department of Transportation.

Hard Scrabble is a former country lane that now connects three of the Northeast's busiest commuter routes — Clemson Road, Kelly Mill Road and Farrow Road. It also is a main feeder to two of the Midlands largest subdivisions — Lake Carolina and The Summit.

Unlike a highway widening project, the two-lane road is lined with utilities of all kinds — water and sewer lines, power lines and telecommunication lines including fiber optics, standard telephones lines and cable television. All of those have to be moved without interrupting service, Frick said.

"This is a nine-month utility relocation project alone," he said.

And to make matters more difficult, every sign, from traffic signs to signs advertising the local Publix and CVS, also have to be relocated, all without limiting access to scores of businesses in strip malls being built up and down the road.

"So you think you don't see a whole lot of progress," Frick said. "But there is."

Some residents questioned the roll-out of the project, choosing to take on the full seven miles of the road instead of breaking it down into sections.

Karen Young, who lives just north of the project, wrote to The State that workers should have tackled two serious Hard Scrabble Road bottlenecks at Clemson and Farrow roads first, then moved on to the rest of the project.

"If they had done these 2 intersections maybe the rest would not have been necessary or could have been done later," she wrote.

SCDOT Program Manager Jennifer Neckor said while that is true, the decision to do it all at once was a matter of time and economics.

"The answer is efficiency," she said. "But I can understand people asking that question."

If the department decided to do the project in sequence, as it is called, the entire project would last much longer and cost much more, Necker said.

"If we phased it, it would take longer to get to the ultimate goal," she said.

Necker said she didn't know exactly what the time or cost overrun would have been.

"There would be added costs of coordination between contractors," she said, "and the tie-in points could cause problems down the road."

So in the meantime, Northeast residents will just have to knuckle down and endure the delays.

"We understand the burden that it puts on people who drive that corridor every day," Frick said. "So we ask for patience and people to bear with us."

Construction on Hard Scrabble Road will keep traffic tied up for another two and half years. But when finished, the two-lane rural lane will become a major five-lane artery through the northeastern suburbs tying Clemson Road to Farrow Road.

This story was originally published June 3, 2018 at 7:00 AM with the headline "'Progress is pain': Hard Scrabble Road work crawling along. Here's why.."