6 hours Ago
The Coastal Conservation League urges Charleston County residents to vote "no" on both questions involving the transportation sales and use tax. The Conservation League is committed to helping find solutions to the environmental, climate and overdevelopment challenges that Charleston County faces. We can have sound roads and safe sidewalks without a destructive expressway barreling through West Ashley’s neighborhoods and Johns and James islands' historic and rural communities.
With smart investments in effective traffic solutions, we can clear congestion choke points without permanently altering the rural landscape where Sea Island communities thrive. When you go to the polls, we implore you to think about the irreplaceable natural resources that would be torn asunder if you approve local questions 1 and 2 on the ballot. We encourage you think about neighbors in West Ashley and Sea Island communities who have invested their livelihoods and their families’ futures in homes and businesses that will be in the pathway of a destructive interstate extension, overwhelmed with the new traffic that overdevelopment will bring.
We ask you to consider that under this imbalanced referendum, we will have a far lower portion of total resources supporting the Greenbelt Program for the next 25 years to help us mediate the environmental and community preservation harms that come with rapacious overdevelopment. This referendum is designed to fund one priority project — the Mark Clark extension. This extension to Johns and James islands will destroy vital natural resources that we cannot afford to lose.
Forging two new bridges over the Stono River would wipe out 38 acres of wetlands, and the road would seize almost 50 acres of James Island County Park, taking away important recreational opportunities and essential protections for our wildlife and communities. The Post and Courier outlined it well in its Oct. 12 editorial, “ Don't be fooled by claims Charleston County tax referendum is pro-greenbelt .
" The referendum decreases the portion of funds committed to the Greenbelt Program by half compared to the 2004 sales tax, although real estate acquisition costs have tripled in the past 20 years. This will inhibit the Greenbelt Program from meeting our increasing need to conserve wetlands, green space and tree canopy coverage that support our community’s ability to be resilient in the face of the increased flooding, rain bombs and extreme heat we experience in today’s climate. In 2016, county voters approved a sales tax to make traffic improvements.
On our Sea Islands, projects such as the southern pitchfork and the Main Road flyover were designed to resolve traffic choke points. Instead, $75 million of those tax proceeds were diverted to help fund I-526. While a substantial balance from the 2016 sales tax proceeds lie idle in county coffers, folks continue to idle in traffic at Main Road and Maybank.
In fact, only one of the 17 projects from the 2016 referendum has been completed to date. At a recent County Council hearing, the Charleston and Hilton Head Area Home Builders Association executive officer asked council to support the referendum in the name of “safe and sound roads for our children and grandchildren.” But the referendum ballot question makes no mention of specific projects, nor commits to start or fund any safety projects.
The county proposes 12 other projects, totaling nearly $1.2 billion worth of “potential” traffic and safety projects that could be funded through the referendum. However, the fine print on the county website warns that “only a portion of the potential projects presented will be funded.
” By funding the I-526 extension, the county’s plan allocates only $800 million for these other “potential” projects. Indeed, if the Mark Clark extension encounters the same rate of cost overruns as the Main Road flyover after nine years of political and construction delays, the entire allocation for the “potential traffic and safety projects” could be wiped out. The $2.
3 billion price tag for construction and debt service on the Mark Clark extension is extremely high, but the impacts it will have on our community would far exceed that price. Almost 100 homes, businesses and land parcels would be taken, in full or in part, by the government. The Conservation League worked with a planning expert to look at primary, secondary and tertiary impacts, revealing that, in addition to these direct impacts along the extension, a wide expanse of properties would suffer substantial secondary and tertiary impacts as well.
The road would plow through West Ashley neighborhoods and Sea Island settlement communities such as Geddis, Ferguson Village and Cross-Cut. As we witnessed at the Mount Pleasant terminus of I-526 in the Four Mile settlement community, things became less safe as families contended with eminent domain takings, hazardous road construction, decades of road widening and dangerous intersections with intense traffic. We encourage you to vote "no" because the costs to our fiscal security, natural environment and community well-being are too high.
Faith Rivers James is the executive director of Coastal Conservation League..
