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CHATS approves long-range transportation plan
By Matthew French
Staff Writer
The Charleston Areas Transportation Study Policy Committee recently approved the organization’s long-range transportation plan, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars for projects over the next 20 years.
Included in the plan is the widening of many of the area’s overtaxed roadways, including Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant, Ashley Phosphate Road in North Charleston, and College Park Road in Berkeley County.
“All long-range plans benefit from a good implementation plan,” a draft of the CHATS long-range plan reads. “Taking action on the myriad recommendations in the Charleston Area Transportation Study will be contingent on several factors, not the least of which is the ability to secure funding. Transportation funds are scarce and competition for them is fierce.”
Charleston and Dorchester counties, the report notes, have helped themselves considerably by approving a half-cent and full-cent sales tax increase, respectively. Money from the sales tax increase will go toward road improvements and new road projects within the counties.
Towns and cities faced with ever-increasing roadway budgets are looking to find alternative funding sources, the report notes.
“Some municipalities are negotiating with developers to shift some responsibility for the ‘cost of growth’ to developers and eventually to home buyers and businesses,” the report reads. “It is expected that similar debates will occur in all communities within the region before the next update of this long-range transportation plan.”
Roger Henderson, a consultant with Kimley-Horn and Associates, a national engineering and land planning firm, says the group relied not only on the input from the various elected and traffic officials, but spoke at great lengths with members of the community.
“Everyone, from doctors to the media, is telling people to get out and exercise, but this area doesn’t seem to be conducive to walking around and getting 30 minutes of exercise per day,” Henderson says. “So we asked people in the community if they were to be given $100 to spend on transportation, how would you spend it. We found about $30 out of every $100 would go toward sidewalks, bikeways, etc.”
Since the public seems so overwhelmingly in favor of such expenditures, Henderson says the plan contains a provision for what he calls “Complete Streets.”
“The municipalities will create a regional pool of money and submit projects that compete against each other,” he says. “You can take money, say $1 million per year, and pay for enhancement projects. It won’t be federal money, but rather local and regional money to pay for local and regional projects.”
James Rozier, chairman of the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments and member of the CHATS policy committee, says getting public input is good, but relying on them to determine the future of roadway projects doesn’t make sense.
“If you asked me how I would spend that $100, I might say I’d like more hiking and biking, too,” Rozier says. “But they don’t see the whole picture. They can’t see that the money might be spent elsewhere.”
The long-range plan passed with the “Complete Streets” proposal intact, but can be amended at any time, according to policy committee chairman William Crosby.
Meanwhile, the town of Mount Pleasant had hoped to slip in a last-minute amendment that would give higher priority to a section of Highway 17 that runs between the Isle of Palms Connector and Highway 41. A plan is already included in the financial overview, which would see the road widened from four lanes to six. But the current plan falls into a category that will be paid for by the increased sales taxes approved by voters in November.
Brad Morrison, a transportation engineer for the town of Mount Pleasant, says the traffic benefit would be greater for Mount Pleasant if the long-range plan were to switch the Highway 17 plan with one that calls for the widening of Highway 41, also in Mount Pleasant, from Dunes West Boulevard to the drawbridge over the Wando River.
As it now stands, the CHATS plan has Highway 41 receiving $15.4 million out of a $111 million fund that has been earmarked for non-sales tax projects. The Highway 17 widening, meanwhile, is in the sales tax projects group, but has not yet received a specific price tag.
The problem, says Morrison, is that the $111 million represents committed funds, where the sales tax projects, which have been estimated to cost about $80.6 million, are not necessarily committed and will rely on the county collecting that money in additional sales taxes.
“(Widening 17) is the most important project in town,” Morrison contends. “It is the most needed project, but it wasn’t fully committed to be funded.”
Highway 17 will, over the next several years, see an end-to-end overhaul in Mount Pleasant. The town has already received a commitment of more than $25 million to widen the roadway between the Mark Clark Expressway and the Isle of Palms Connector. That work is scheduled to begin in September.
The policy committee rejected Morrison’s request, however, saying the issue would probably better be handled by the Charleston County Transportation Commission, which hadn’t been given an opportunity to comment on the work.
The committee also received an update on the status of state funding to conduct a feasibility study on the prospect of moving Interstate 26 to the east and bringing the elevated roadway down to ground level.
“We will receive some funding from the state to determine whether or not the proposal is viable,” says Ron Mitchum, executive director of the Council of Governments. “We are trying to stay on track with the Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental impact statement (for the South Carolina State Ports Authority), and don’t want to interfere with that permitting process.”
Mitchum says the Army Corps has indicated that it can do a supplemental or amended environmental impact statement if the study determines that linking the moving of I-26 to the construction of a port access road “has real value.”
Mitchum says he expects to have a better idea of how much the state is willing to fund the project by the next policy committee meeting in June.
Matthew French covers governmental policy for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.
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