Deal puts spotlight back on Lexington County’s road woes. Auto owners may be charged fees
Lexington County Council has given initial approval to a new road maintenance agreement with the county’s municipalities, after some mayors were upset when council members voted at the end of last year to cancel the previous agreement.
The revised agreement approved Tuesday would allow the county’s cities and towns more flexibility to set their own standards for new development, a concern some officials had voiced about the county’s previous stance.
Lexington County Council voted 6-3 last December to cancel its more than 40-year-old agreement to maintain roads inside the county’s municipal limits, which would otherwise fall to Lexington County’s small cities and towns. Council members were upset by the prospect that planned developments that didn’t meet the county’s standards to restrict subdivision growth could still move forward if developers managed to get their properties annexed into nearby municipalities, which each have separate development standards.
Under the revised agreement, municipalities will be able to approve new developments within city limits in line with a town’s own chosen development standards. But if any unincorporated area is annexed into a municipality, any new development on that site must comply with Lexington County’s regulatory standards. Otherwise, the county can decline to perform road maintenance in the new development — a potentially major handicap for smaller towns that lack their own capability to maintain roads themselves.
County council members say the move is necessary to limit the impact of rapid development in the county, even though it caused friction with municipal leaders when the county voted to unilaterally cancel its 1978 roads maintenance pact with cities in December. The cancellation is slated to take effect at the end of February whether a new agreement is in place or not.
The terms mean Lexington County can decline to take the responsibility for maintaining roads inside new developments annexed into neighboring cities, even if the roads themselves meet county standards but the surrounding development broke the rules it would have to follow if it were in the county.
County Administrator Lynn Sturkie told council members Tuesday he had met with municipal leaders to hammer out the terms of the new agreement. As part of the deal given unanimous initial approval this week, any new “planned unit development” communities — involving multiple homes and potentially other construction within a single development site — would need to be discussed in a joint session of the county and town councils, Sturkie said.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, council members were presented with proposals for a new road user fee to pay for future county road projects. Sturkie said Lexington County could raise between $5.8 million and $11.6 million annually if the drivers of almost 300,000 registered vehicles in the county were required to pay a new annual fee of between $20 and $40. The council took no action on the proposal Tuesday.
Lexington County Council initially began discussing a road user fee last year, after voters in 2022 rejected a one-cent sales tax that would have raised an estimated $500 million over eight years for road work in the county. Without voters’ approval to implement such a tax, county officials have been trying to find other ways to keep county roadways in shape.
A recent study suggested as much as 70% of Lexington County’s roads could be in “fair” or worse condition by the end of the decade unless major action is taken to repair or maintain them.
Councilman Todd Cullum said more people need to understand what it is going to take to get the county’s road issues resolved, and also give voters some more incentive to consider the problem seriously.
“You say, next cycle, if the penny passes, this fee goes away,” Cullum said.
This story was originally published February 15, 2024 at 10:56 AM.
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