South Carolina celebrates another interstate expansion after influx of money to crumbling system

Associated Press

7 hours ago

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The leader of South Carolina 's roads agency has been to so many groundbreaking ceremonies for highway projects that he has the whole routine down.
Signs were printed, fancy shovels were readied and, since it's the middle of August, an air-conditioned spot — the welcome center in Hardeeville — was booked for Thursday's celebration of an $825 million project on Interstate 95 to untangle another traffic mess in one of the fastest growing states in the U.S.
Justin Powell has been around for a half-dozen of these in his nearly seven years at the South Carolina Department of Transportation.
A much different road agency than a decade ago
Powell oversees an agency whose reputation and results have turned around in the past eight years. An influx of money raised the gas tax 12 cents under his predecessor Christy Hall, pushing it up to 28 cents a gallon.
SCDOT was spending $2.7 billion on roads then. The agency is now about to pass $7 billion in highway construction.
It's a far cry from 11 years ago when the DOT secretary before Hall — who continually told lawmakers his job was to 'manage the decline of the state highway system' — resigned after being pulled over for driving under the influence at 8 a.m. on a weekday. He was the third director in two years.
'Thanks to the trust from the General Assembly in 2017, we've delivered what we were asked to do,' Powell told The Associated Press in an interview in his office.
Orange construction barrels everywhere
Thursday's ceremony marks the start of a 10-mile (16-kilometer) project to widen I-95 to three lanes in each direction and replace the bridges over the Savannah River at the Georgia state line, a bottleneck that often stalls traffic.
Elsewhere, crews are working on a $2 billion project to iron out the place where Interstates 20, 26 and 126 all meet in Columbia. Work has started on projects that will eventually expand 70 miles (113 kilometers) of I-26 from Charleston to Columbia to three lanes in each direction. And soon, the state plans to reconstruct the Interstate 526 half loop around Charleston, which could cost up to $7 billion.
And it isn't just interstate work. A decade ago nearly half the pavement on the 41,000 miles (66,000 kilometers) of roads was in poor shape. Since then, more than a quarter of South Carolina's roads have been repaved.
And, thousands of bridges built in the 1950s and 1960s are now reaching replacement age.
As Powell's agency finishes digging out of the hole of decades of neglect, he is well aware South Carolina has added 1.5 million people over the past 25 years. Many complaints he hears have moved from rough roads and potholes to congestion.
'This is not little ol' South Carolina anymore,' Powell said. 'The interstate system was built back when South Carolina had about 2.5 million people. We've got this dual challenge of maintaining what we have and dealing with significant growth pressure.'
Accountability instead of horse-trading
The highway agency has long been dogged by corruption and horse trading where favored legislators got road projects that were funneled to their friends. In 1935, the governor sent a militia armed with machine guns to the highway commission after the board refused to seat his appointees.
Today, Powell and his agency have received unprecedented support from lawmakers who changed the agency's structure.
But, there are still DOT critics. The conservative Freedom Caucus said the agency isn't spending money wisely enough and wants to use artificial intelligence to overcome what it calls burdensome regulations without a lot of details.
The group also wants to turn roads over to counties. South Carolina is the 40th biggest U.S. state in area, but has the fourth largest state-maintained road network. The state controls three times as many miles of roads as Florida.
Powell gets the idea, but said unwinding nearly a century of state control would be difficult. Counties would need money and many would need an influx of new machinery and knowledge.
'It took us 90 years to get here,' Powell said. 'It would probably take us that long to find our way out.'