House Tackles Roads & Bridges, Adds Reforms to Senate Blueprint

Under the leadership of Rep. Heather Crawford (R-Horry) and Rep. Shannon Erickson (R-Beaufort), the South Carolina House of Representatives took up a Senate version (S.831) and its own version (H.5071) of comprehensive infrastructure reform legislation on Wednesday. They chose to amend and pass the Senate version to speed up the progress to the finish line for this incredibly important legislation.

The core content concerns the state agency responsible for roads and bridges in South Carolina, the Department of Transportation.

Because there is considerable overlap in the two bills, we recommend our analysis of the Senate version for an understanding of the many features of the reform.

There weren’t significant text differences in the Senate and House versions, except for these House additions:

1. State DOT Commission. DOT governance reform somehow got left out of the various government restructuring efforts that have taken place since the Campbell Administration. The Department essentially reports currently to a Commission of citizens rather than to the Governor. The House version completes the march to reform by cutting the role of the Commission, empowering the Secretary of Transportation, and providing the Governor with appointing authority and oversight of the DOT.

2. Local Transportation Commissions and “C” Funds. The House addresses longstanding concerns about local roads committees by adding felony crimes for Transportation Commission members who violate the public trust by taking care of their friends in the prioritization of local roads spending. A more aggressive piece that would have created a funding process for shifting state roads to subdivisions (local governments) was significantly modified from the version that was reported out of committee, but that compromise led to a shocking unanimous vote in favor of the Senate bill .

Both bills do a good job addressing turnpike and tolling authority, public-private partnerships, the transferring of roads from the state network to localities, speeding up city approval processes, and waivers of immunity that will allow the state to take over environmental engineering responsibilities from federal oversight, which will shorten the environmental review timeline from an estimated 20 years to 3 years.

Neither bill allows for the tolling of an existing road or raises taxes.

Again, fuller explanation may be found here.