After years of delays, when will Richland County finally start widening Atlas Road?
After years of delays, Richland County is hoping to finally break ground on widening Atlas Road by the end of the summer, an official said this week.
The new deadline comes after a projection from last summer that Atlas Road widening would begin February 1.
The $36,299,000 project is part of the county’s $1 billion penny tax program, which has experienced cost overruns, potential conflicts of interest and misspending. Like many penny tax projects, the Atlas Road widening, originally supposed to be done by April 2020, ran $26 million over budget shortly before construction was supposed to start. The road widening was initially supposed to cost $17. 6 million when voters approved the penny tax referendum in 2012, The State reported previously.
After the project ran over budget, Richland County reduced the scale of the project, said Richland County Assistant Director of Transportation Allison Steele.
The project previously called for widening the portion between Garners Ferry and Shop Road to five lanes and the portion from Shop Road to Bluff Road to three lanes, said Jeff McNesby, who manages penny tax projects for Richland County. Now, only the portion between Garner’s Ferry and Shop Road will be widened to five lanes. The entire road from Garners Ferry to Bluff Road will have pedestrian sidewalks, McNesby said.
Aside from budget concerns, Richland County is not widening the portion of Atlas Road between Shop Road and Bluff Road because the area doesn’t need an extra lane and the extra lane was unpopular for a high-pedestrian area, where many people need to cross the street, McNesby said.
The delays in the project cascaded after the county opened the door to making changes to the project, Steele said. Once the county began tweaking the project, the S.C. Department of Transportation asked for additional tweaks, Steele said.
“And then once they did that the railroads came and said ‘well, while you’re making these changes, we want you to make these other changes for us too,’ and that has caused a little bit of a delay for us too,” Steele said.
Richland County has completed about 95% of the design work and is waiting on the city of Columbia to approve water and sewer easements, Steele said. Once construction begins, it will take 36 weeks.