Myrtle Beach SC highay sales tax nixed

Myrtle Beach SC highway sales tax nixed

Voters in Horry County, South Carolina voted early March by 2 to 1 to reject proposals for a one percent additional sales tax which would have been used to finance an extensive highway building program. Horry Co. covers the Myrtle Beach resort area on the northern coast that has extensive retirement, weekender and vacation homes and it is serviced in the main by 2 lane roads around which large sprawling vacation townships have grown, and travel is painfully slow.

The state has broken ground on a long Conway bypass on SC-501 the main highway in to the area from I-95, but says it will take 25 years to build this 28 mile expressway with its present funding sources and that no extra major roadworks can be done in the area without local funding.

In response to this state and local officials produced a plan for simultaneous construction of nearly 60 miles of new expressway, the 28 mile $450m Conway bypass to be built in 3 years, a coast-parallel 31 mile $650m Carolina Bays parkway and doubling to 4 lanes of two existing roads (SC-541 and SC-9, and extensive paving of local roads, at an all-up cost of $1.3 billion. The major roads would not work as toll roads, state officials said, because tolls of $6/trip for the Conway and $9/trip for the Bays parkway would be required to support the capital costs. People wouldn’t pay this much to escape the congestion on the in-town 2-laners.

An Area Council on Transportation supported by local businesses promoted the idea of one cent sales tax increase and a one percent hospitality (hotel and motel) tax which together would have raised the $40m/yr needed to service the $1.3b roads bonds.

The local newspaper reports the campaign leading up to the negative vote was “intensely emotional,” stimulating hundreds of letters to local newspapers and that “bitter arguments broke out among friends.” Ashby Ward president of the Myrtle Beach chamber of commerce told us a no-growth element in the local community was the major force stopping the projects. They built on sentiment that people already paid for their roads in gasoline taxes and should not have to pay extra for their groceries and other products. He says by contrast local environmentalists by and large supported the projects.

Major reason for the vast expense of the projects was the environmental requirement that the new roads be built over much of their length as bridging rather than on fill because they traverse wetlands. Ward said expressways in the area built as bridging on piles cost over $20m/mile compared to about $3m/mile for pavement on fill. So the arithmetic for 60 miles of wetlands expressway was 60x$20m= $1.2b bridging versus 60x$3m=$180m on fill.

The bridging solution to building in wetlands clearly won’t fly — either economically as a toll road or politically as a ‘free’ road. Ward told us: “Quite frankly I cannot see where the money for these roads is going to come from. We will have to completely rethink our plans and scale them down.” He says the chamber of commerce had estimates showing that local residents pay more in wasted gasoline sitting in traffic jams than they would have paid in the tax, but that they didn’t want to listen. (Contact: Ashby Ward 803/626-7444.)