Lexington County voters axed a penny road tax. Now car owners may foot new fee instead
If you drive a car in Lexington County, you may soon be asked to pay more to use the county’s roads.
Lexington County Council on Tuesday discussed charging a road user fee on vehicles registered in the county in order to fund improvements to county roadways.
The user fee would raise a fraction of the revenue that a proposed 1% penny sales tax would have funded for road improvements in the county. Voters rejected that proposal in a referendum last November by a 10-point margin, 55% to 45%.
Council members did not settle on an amount road users would have to pay, although Chairwoman Beth Carrigg said other counties in South Carolina with a similar fee charge anywhere from $10 to $50.
Currently, the county collects a $1 processing fee on vehicle registration applications, which last year raised $238,000. Lexington County has around 323,000 registered vehicles, but not all drivers are charged the processing fee, including people who pay for their registration in person, council members heard.
Councilwoman Debbie Summers did some quick math and decided that a middle number — $35 — would end up raising $8.3 million a year.
“That’s one-seventh of what we would have gotten with the penny,” Summers said. “It would take seven years of this fee to get what we would have got in one year of the penny.”
The penny tax would have raised around $500 million over eight years, county officials estimated at the time. That proposal would have levied a 1% tax on various sales in the county, regardless of if the buyer had a registered vehicle or even lived in Lexington County.
“We tried to get a penny tax passed twice, and they didn’t want it,” Councilman Darrell Hudson said, referencing a similar proposal rejected by voters in 2014. “And we told them we have to do something... We need to come up with a fee and some formulation for how it’s going to be spent.”
While most council members who spoke Tuesday were open to a fee, how the money raised would be spent was a point of contention. Councilman Todd Cullum said he wouldn’t support a fee that would only be spent on county-maintained roads.
“85% of my district is on the state road system.” said Cullum, who represents the Cayce area. “They wouldn’t see any benefit from that at all. It sounds like a subsidization system to me.”
Hudson suggested that however the fee ends up being spent, it should be tiered based on the vehicle being registered in the county.
“A tractor-trailer would pay a larger fee than a motorcycle,” Hudson said. “A dump truck should have a larger fee than a pickup truck.”
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