Lexington County dumps road fee. But more funding is still needed to fix county’s roads
Lexington County is walking away from a plan to charge car owners for road repairs, even as county officials remain committed to moving forward with another attempt at a penny sales tax to help address pressing road maintenance needs.
The county council voted Tuesday to postpone any further action on a proposed road user fee, likely ending the controversial proposal for the foreseeable future.
“My recommendation would be to postpone it indefinitely, and start marketing the penny tax for two years from now,” Councilman Scott Whetstone said in making the motion, which was approved unanimously. “The $30 coming out of this is not the way to go.”
The council had been considering a $30 road maintenance fee to be assessed on every resident’s annual vehicle tax, a measure meant to go some way toward addressing the county’s road needs. Lexington County began considering the fee after voters rejected a 1% sales tax to fund road maintenance in a 2022 referendum.
The fee would have raised an estimated $8 million annually, compared to some $500 million expected to be raised during the eight years of the penny tax.
Most of the county residents who spoke about the proposed fee at a public hearing were vehemently against paying any new fee. Speakers at that meeting were nine-to-one against the idea.
One speaker said the fee was likely illegal under a 2021 state Supreme Court decision that knocked down a similar fee in Greenville County. That decision said a government fee has to offer a specific benefit to the person paying it, and not a service to the general public. Spartanburg County dropped a similar fee after the court’s decision.
Instead, the council is moving to put another penny tax proposal on the ballot for voter approval in 2026. The council has already voted to put together the commission that would evaluate projects a future penny tax could fund.
Council chair Beth Carrigg pointed out that the only other funding available for road maintenance is the state gas tax, out of which Lexington County only gets a limited allotment. Earlier in Tuesday’s meeting, the council voted to spend $9.84 million of this year’s gas tax allocation, which Carrigg said would pay for about eight miles of roadway in total.
One of those projects would pay for improvements to Longs Pond Road between Two Notch Road and the interchange with Interstate 20, at a cost of $1.37 million.
“I wish we could play that on a loop over and over,” Councilman Todd Cullum said of the proposal. “$1 million for a quarter-mile, two-lane road improvement.”
Another $3.2 million will be spent on improvements to Charter Oak Road between Highway 378 and Augusta Highway. Because of the size of that project, the county would likely have the S.C. Department of Transportation manage the project — which council members did not see as the best possible solution, since DOT has a long list of road projects it needs to get to across the state.
“The law says we have two years to spend the money, then we give it back to them and it could take five years before they do anything,” Carrigg said. “That’s a scam set up by the state.”
Lexington County’s road needs are only expected to become more severe. A 2023 study found that that 38% of the county’s roadways were in “fair” or “poor” condition, and that by the end of the decade 70% of the roads would be in such condition without action.
The size, and cost, of the challenge, led Councilman Larry Brigham to say the road user fee would barely make a dent.
“It sucks up all the funding in one year,” he said, comparing it to the amount the penny tax would be expected to raise annually. “$8 million is not comparable to $58 million. It’s desperately needed if we’re going to do anything.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
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