Charleston County Council members voted Tuesday night to request that the state Department of Transportation (SCDOT) continue its work on an Interstate 526 extension project after county voters rejected a sales tax referendum by a large margin on Nov. 5. The half-penny tax in the referendum would have funded the county’s $2.3 billion share of the project.
“The public sent the clearest possible message,” council member Larry Kobrovsky told the Charleston City Paper on Nov. 20. “I don’t know how it could have been clearer, and I don’t know how the rest of council came to the conclusion that the vote didn’t matter and that they should go ahead with this letter.”
Council members voted 6-3 Tuesday to approve sending a letter to SCDOT to request continued support for the project. Council members Henry Darby, Rob Wehrman and Kobrovsky voted against the measure. They have been outspokenly against the Mark Clark Extension project for months.
In the letter, County Council Chairman Herb Sass wrote: “The county respectfully requests that the South Carolina Department of Transportation continue with its project development activities in order to fulfill the commitments from 2023, including … any activity that may be necessary to get to ‘shovel ready’ status for this regionally significant project.”
Under the county’s current contract with the state Transportation Infrastructure Bank and SCDOT, the county is responsible for any costs over $420 million. But with the county’s sweeping rejection of the sales tax extension, the county has no clear path to pay for its portion of the cost. There is talk, however, of a new referendum to be put on the ballot in two years.
The 2024 referendum would have brought in $5.4 billion for transportation projects across the county, with the Mark Clark extension project highlighted as the priority project. It was rejected by every precinct on James and Johns islands, where about half of the funds from the referendum (about $2.3 billion) would have gone to the highway extension project, including more than $600 million to pay interest costs on a tax-backed loan worth $1.8 billion.
County Council Vice Chair Jenny Costa Honeycutt said in media reports that council understood voters rejected the referendum, but considered that to have been more to do with the funding, not the project itself. In addition, if the county were to give up on the project, the infrastructure bank could call for the county to repay up to half of the state funds spent so far, according to its contract.
County leaders are hoping to re-negotiate the terms of the contract, Kobrovsky said. But, he said, now is the time for the county to move away from the highway project and begin to regain the public’s trust after the failed referendum. The day after the election, he told the City Paper that he thought the “depth and breadth of the opposition” to the referendum would give county leaders pause.
To further muddy the waters, the council discussed the plan in an executive session, which Kobrovsky opposed. He said that if the county wanted to continue to push the highway project, it should do so in the open, so it could start gaining the public’s trust in the project and develop a plan that better addresses the county’s needs.
“I thought strongly that it should all be in public, that anything we do should be in public,” he said. “We lost that fight, and I contemplated not participating in the executive session, but I wanted to know what they were talking about.”
This is a developing story, follow Charleston City Paper for updates.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
