By Andy Brack
Contributing Writer

As lawmakers ponder restructuring to achieve efficiencies and avoid duplication, they are also creating new kinds of structures that allow services to be delivered in spite of the very same lawmakers.

In 1997, the General Assembly approved creation of the state Transportation Infrastructure Bank, in part as a way to bring big highway and bridge infrastructure projects to fruition quickly instead of saving for years to pay for them.

To date, the bank has funded about $2 billion in projects, such as the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, the Carolina Bays Parkway in Horry County and the widening of S.C. -170 in Beaufort County.

Without the bank, those projects might still be pipe dreams.

More recently, state lawmakers approved another bank, the Conservation Bank, to allow a separate board to buy and preserve important state lands by leveraging $10 million of annual state money.

The program has worked with important projects, securing land from the Jocassee Gorges area of the Upstate to thousands of acres along the Cooper River north of Charleston.

Now there’s a proposal for a Rural Infrastructure Bank by non-metro lawmakers who want a new process to use state money to build water and sewer projects needed for rural areas to grow.

And in the coming weeks, key lawmakers will propose an Education Infrastructure Bank to direct money to poor and rural school districts to help them replace crumbling facilities because local tax bases aren’t deep enough for investments in new structures.

So while political rhetoric around Columbia is spinning about the need to consolidate programs and departments, what is going on with the quiet, insistent use of special banks and boards to accomplish specific kinds of projects?

In one sense, it is a legacy of the partisan bickering that has increased over the years.

You might remember that the U.S. Congress created the Base Closure and Realignment Commission to take the politics out of the base closure process.

But the move had a beneficial political ramification: It took the heat off congressmen and senators when “someone else,” commissioners appointed by them and the president, voted to close the bases.

But structurally, the existence of the commission was also proof that the political nature of Congress stymied the legislative process into inaction over base closures.

These new state project banks seem to have similar positive and negative aspects.

On one hand, the banks provide the state with more flexibility and allow needed projects to get done, according to Ellen Saltzman of the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University.

But because they are funded by earmarked appropriations, they take money away from the state’s general fund.

In turn, that could be bad for programs funded by formulas, such as some local government programs.

“If you take this money out of the general fund, you reduce the base from which other things are calculated,” she noted.

S.C. House Minority Leader Harry Ott, the Calhoun County democrat who is pushing the Rural Infrastructure Bank idea, said he believes infrastructure banks help take the politics out of the process, which would help rural areas that are more and more beholden to metro and suburban legislative power.

“It’s a more efficient way to make sure the funds are spent where the needs are because if you leave it up to the votes on the floor of the House, small, rural counties will never win,” Ott said.

It is much easier, he said, to make a case to a small board of a few commissioners who have a pot of money to help rural interests than it does to have to get full legislative approval for every single rural project.

So whether it is a bank that provides funding for roads that lawmakers can’t agree on, water lines for rural areas that they won’t fund, school buildings in poor areas or land for conservation, these new state funding banks make a lot of sense because they get things done in spite of lawmakers.

But their very existence may be proof that if you really want to get something done, the Legislature might not be the place to do it.

Andy Brack is the publisher of the S.C. Statehouse Report (www.statehousereport.com), a forecast of business developments in the South Carolina Legislature and state government. E-mail him at brack@statehousereport.com.

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