(South Carolina) House passes amended road-funding, DOT reform bill

Greenville News, 25 May 2016
Tim Smith

(Photo: Staff)

COLUMBIA — The House has passed and amended a Senate bill that would mean $4 billion for work on South Carolina’s crumbling roads and bridges as well as a new system of governance for the state’s highway agency.

The House on Tuesday passed the bill by a vote of 102-3 with five more days left in this year’s legislative session..

“Members of the House understand that the people of South Carolina expect their Legislature to pass a roads bill this year,” House Speaker Jay Lucas said in a statement afterward. “Although more effort must be made next session to find a long-term funding stream, this bill is a starting point that allows for adequate repair of deficient roads and bridges without raiding our state’s General Fund.”

The governance changes that would allow the governor to appoint all highway commissioners with the advice and consent of the Legislature, give the new board the power to elect a transportation secretary and limit commissioners’ service to two, four-year terms.

The project threshold for applications submitted to the state Transportation Infrastructure Bank would be lowered from $100 million to $25 million under the bill and that board would have to follow the same objective criteria in selecting projects used by DOT.

ON TOPIC:Roads funding

Many lawmakers had insisted on changing the way the state Department of Transportation was governed before handing it more money.

“DOT reform is a crucial piece to the road funding puzzle,” Lucas said. “The General Assembly should not give another penny to the Department of Transportation without certain accountability requirements in place to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. I am very pleased the House successfully amended the Senate version to include governance restructuring as an effort to promote efficiency within DOT.”

The bill would send about $200 million from vehicle sales tax revenue and from fees collected by the state Department of Motor Vehicles to DOT, which could then use them to send to the state Infrastructure Bank to issue more than $2 billion in bonds. That money in turn could free up other funding, for a total of $4 billion that could be used over 10 years.

Not everyone was happy with the new bill.

Rep. Ralph Norman, a Rock Hill developer who voted against the bill, claimed borrowing $2 billion would require monthly payments of $11 million.

And he said the findings of a recent Legislative Audit Council report on DOT showed flaws with the agency that need to be fixed.

“We’re going to be sending $2.2 billion to a group that has issues,” he said, advocating instead the Legislature take more time to work on DOT and then consider alternative funding sources, such as removing some state sales tax exemptions or raise the gas tax.

“We need to reform DOT before we throw a bucket of money at them,” he said.

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Rep. Gary Simrill, a Rock Hill Republican who has pushed road funding and DOT reform in the House, said he supports the bill.

“There’s a lot of complaining (by lawmakers) but the roads are still crumbling,” he said.

Simrill said Gov. Nikki Haley supports the bill, which he described as a funding mechanism for roads, not a bond bill.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for us,” he said.

Rep. Brian White, an Anderson Republican and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee which passed the bill with the DOT reform, said the legislation was not a permanent solution to the state’s roads.

“This is not the end all to fix all,” he said. “But we have to start somewhere.”

The House passed a road-funding plan last year along with governance reforms. But the Senate took no action on that plan until this year, when it changed it with its plan to spend $400 million from the General Fund, a plan it then jettisoned in favor of the latest plan to borrow billions. Senate leaders have characterized their plan as a stopgap measure meant to enact high-priority repairs.

State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told a House subcommittee recently that the Senate’s plan would borrow $2.2 billion using bonds, enabling the state to spend about $2 billion on interstates, $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion on pavements and $950 million on structurally deficient bridges.

The Senate plan would finish all three phases of widening and improving the Upstate’s Interstate 385, Columbia’s “Malfunction Junction” and eliminate every load-restricted bridge in the state within 10 years.

The bond money would be used on specific projects already underway by DOT, which would then use money freed up by the new funding to pay for even more bridge and paving projects.

There would be no tax or fee increases as the result of the bill.

The bill would hand DOT $1.5 billion from the bond money, which would use $200 million from its interstate program to complete all interstate projects started from Act 98, including Phase 3 of I-85 to the North Carolina border and Malfunction Junction, the massive project to fix the convergence of I-20 and I-26 in Columbia that has plagued motorists for decades.

(South Carolina) House passes amended road-funding, DOT reform bill

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