Is Horry County’s road fee unlawful? Residents sue after SC Supreme Court case
Two Horry County residents are suing the county over controversial road fees that are paid by vehicle owners and go towards repairing roads in the county.
The lawsuit states that charging and collecting unlawful “road maintenance fees,” which are assessed annually on each motor vehicle registered in Horry County, is illegal. The lawsuit comes after similar road maintenance fees were declared unlawful this year by the South Carolina Supreme Court in a Greenville County lawsuit.
Road Fees are assessed on each motorized vehicle licensed in the county. The fee is $50 and has been since 2019. The county generates roughly $17 million per year in road fees, which is used to maintain and improve the county’s roads. Part of the road fee also pays for Coast RTA operations, the local public transit agency which runs buses through the Grand Strand and Horry County.
Robert Lamaire and Crystal Goings filed the class-action lawsuit in federal court last week, but it is not the first time the fees have been challenged in Horry County.
“It is county policy not to offer commentary on substantive matters related to pending litigation,” Mikayla Moskov, a spokeswoman for the county, said.
At Horry County Council’s Infrastructure & Regulation committee meeting Tuesday, Council member Al Allen, who represents a large portion of Western Horry County, warned that the county could be facing difficult budget decisions in the future if it kept adding newly-built roads to its maintenance list.
Adding new roads is a routine part of the council’s Infrastructure meetings because new neighborhoods are built frequently here. The county adds privately-built roads to it maintenance system if the builders pledge that the road can last for at least eight years before it needs repair.
Allen warned that the county potentially losing the road fee used to pave those roads could complicate problems.
”We’re building a monster empire of roads and it’s going to catch up with us one day. And with us facing the possibility of not having access to our road fund, that’s kind of concerning me,” Allen said.
History
Road maintenance fees charged by the County were the subject of the South Carolina Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Brown v. Horry County.
In 1989, John Brown and other residents challenged the road fees as well. They filed a class-action suit to put an end to the fee and get a refund of the fees paid with interest. A trial judge said that the fee was a valid uniform service charge authorized by S.C. Code and denied their request.
County council member Johnny Vaught argued Wednesday that the state Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling ought to stand, and that the county has been operating off of that ruling since.
“We were told by the Supreme Court in 1992 that ours is a legal ordinance,” he said.
Still, he said, the county has begun placing the road fees it collects into an escrow account in case the county loses the lawsuit.
In 1997 after Brown’s case, lawmakers defined a “service or user fee” as a charge required to be paid for a government service or program that benefits the payer in some way that is different from the general public that are not paying the fee.
The lawsuit argues that road fees should not fall under this category.
“Every driver on any road in the County, regardless of whether the vehicle is registered in the County or in another county or state, benefits from the fact that the Road Fee revenues are allocated for road maintenance and improvement,” the 2021 lawsuit states.
In Burns v. Greenville County Council, a 2021 lawsuit that made it to the South Carolina Supreme Court, the court said that an identical “road maintenance fee” charged by Greenville County was unlawful.
Could the legislature get involved?
Vaught, as well as several other council members who attended Tuesday’s meeting, said they’d work with Horry County’s delegation to the state legislature to amend the part of state law that outlines such user fees to clarify that road fees are explicitly allowed. Fixing that language, Vaught said, would be a “simple fix.”
He argued that people who don’t pay the road fee are still allowed to use the roads, just as other residents have access to county services if they aren’t paying property taxes on a home.
Plus, Vaught said, the county would have a difficult time maintaining roads without the road fee. The county gets little money from the state for road projects, he said, meaning that the burden of keeping up those roads lies with the county.
“We’re getting no money from the state,” he said. “The state is obviously not going to maintain a county road. They don’t even maintain their own roads.”
