By Bill Rauch
Check out the tape. You’ll conclude, as I have, that the Beaufort County Council voted against themselves on this one. And, as a result, Beaufort’s Waterfront Park repairs will likely stay in slo-mo, traffic on S.C. 170 and on U.S. 278 will probably get worse before it gets better, if it ever does, and the potholes on Hilton Head will likely get worse before they get better too.
You think a peanut roundabout’s a mess? Listen up.
In 2018, the voters passed a Beaufort County transportation penny sales tax that included $30 million for intersection improvements on Lady’s Island. By 2024, those improvements had not yet been made. It was generally agreed after the 2024 vote that it was because the 2018 penny’s improvements had not yet been made that the 2024 transportation penny went down hard. The voters wanted to send this message: when we say we’ll pay for improvements, make the improvements!
The doomed 2024 measure would have raised $950 million over 10 years. Now, at this writing, the 2018 Lady’s Island improvements still haven’t been made, but the county is coming back to the voters this November with a new penny for roads list, this one for $780 million over nine years.
Really?
Council said exactly that to one another at their pivotal September 22, 2025, meeting that was held in the gym at Burton Wells Park. Half the council members present (Bartholomew, Cunningham, Tabernik, Dawson and Reitz) reiterated at that meeting that until the county completes the 2018 penny-funded road improvements, the voters are unlikely to vote to authorize the county to raise more money for roads.
But then – at the same meeting! – council voted to initiate the steps to put just such a proposal before the voters when they voted 10-1 (Glover voted “no”) to shut down the possibility of a 2026 transportation and infrastructure penny (as proposed by Councilman McElynn) and they replaced it with the more narrowly drawn transportation penny sales tax approach. The projects to be funded – if the 2026 transportation penny passes this November 3 – are online (https://bit.ly/4xx2rxN).
This is not a list that is likely to move the voters who reside north of the Broad River, especially those who live on Lady’s Island, in Burton and in Beaufort whose numbers (32,876) are roughly equal to the number of registered voters in Hilton Head (33,266) and Bluffton (39,750).
This is not to say traffic – especially on the S.C. 170 corridor – isn’t increasingly aggravating. It is, even in Beaufort where the city council has in general tried to control growth. Nor is it to say mistakes have not been made.
Mayor Stephen Murray let condominiums be built on the proposed right-of-way where the second phase of “the parallel road” was planned to go. The parallel road was proposed in the City of Beaufort’s 2006 Boundary Street Master Plan as a local street that would run parallel to Boundary Street, thus relieving U.S. 21 of local traffic. Its first phase was funded by the 2006 transportation penny, and it was built. But without the second phase, Phase 1 is largely inconsequential.
And, yes, Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling raised no objection as he watched $6 million of the county’s 2006 transportation penny money that his constituents had voted for to plan and engineer the northern bypass get spent in Bluffton. The northern bypass is the long-discussed crossing of the Beaufort River at Brickyard that was first proposed in the South Carolina Highway Department’s 1973 BEAUTS study, and that numerous subsequent studies have shown will relieve traffic on Beaufort’s Woods Memorial Bridge.
And, of course, there’s the matter of the much-discussed $30 million for Lady’s Island that was in the 2018 penny. Had Councilman Bartholomew faced opposition last time out, he would have undoubtedly been flogged in that campaign for the county’s shortcomings there.
The voters remember when their elected officials don’t honor past commitments, and – as has been seen already – it makes it less likely they’ll vote for future lists.
But those are not the only problems with this 2026 initiative.
The big money problem the northern part of the county faces today isn’t roads. It is how to get the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park safely back online, a project whose estimated cost was most recently pegged at $78 million. Beaufort Mayor Phil Cromer expresses optimism that the $78 million will be found, and it no doubt one day will be.
But when?
Here’s the tragedy. This was entirely avoidable. A sharp county administrator, transportation planner or county attorney, had they been paying attention, would have caught this in a millisecond.
Had the County Council directed the 2026 penny towards the broader category of transportation and infrastructure instead of the more restrictive transportation at the fork-in-the-road September 22 meeting, Hilton Head could have gotten the repairs and intersection improvements their representatives say they need, Bluffton could have gotten the money for the S.C. 170 and U.S. 278 improvements their representatives say they need, and the northern part of the county could have gotten some money for intersection improvements and the money it needs to keep its signature park from collapsing into the Beaufort River. Then a majority of the voters might have gotten behind the package.
But you can’t pay for a park with road money.
Check out the tape (https://bit.ly/3UMUypb). That’s what council signaled they wanted. And then they sleepwalked into voting against themselves.
Bill Rauch was the Mayor of Beaufort from 1999 to 2008 and has won multiple awards from the S.C. Press Association for his Island News columns. He can be reached at TheRauchReport@gmail.com.