‘A different ballgame’: Could North Myrtle Beach, others, imperil SC-90 repair money?
A hoped-for injection of cash that Horry County leaders wished to use to jumpstart widening and improving SC-90 could be in peril due to North Myrtle Beach, and potentially other municipalities.
The cash exists in the form of leftover money from the county’s second iteration of it’s Ride Improvement & Development Effort (RIDE), a program that levies a 1% sales tax for a limited period of time and funnels the funds into building and fixing roads. The RIDE II program was in place from 2007 to 2014 and helped widen SC-707, build International Drive to SC-90 and build an interchange along US-17.
About $30 million is leftover and unused in the RIDE II fund. Horry County Council passed a resolution Tuesday night to dedicate those funds to fixing SC-90, a once-rural road running from Conway to North Myrtle Beach that’s seen tremendous development in recent years. County planners have said 8,223 homes currently exist along the 20-mile highway, and 6,722 more are expected to be built, an 80% increase.
County leaders for months have said widening and improving Highway 90 is a dire need for the corridor given its growth. Both leaders and residents have pointed out that parts of the corridor flood badly during large storms and hurricanes, leaving people stranded in their homes without road access out. Highway 90 runs roughly parallel to the Waccamaw River in parts, meaning much of the land near the road is low-lying and subject to flooding.
County leaders have said the highway needs to be widened from two or three lanes to four lanes throughout and that some areas of the road need to be raised to prevent the roadway from flooding. It would take around $500 million to complete such a project from one end of the road to the other.
But ahead of Tuesday’s vote to dedicate the first round of funding to fixing the road, county council member Harold Worley, who represents North Myrtle Beach and Little River, said he had communicated with city leaders in North Myrtle Beach who said that if the county had leftover money from the RIDE II program, the city would want its share.
“...We’re fixing to get in trouble on the $30 million,” Worley said Tuesday. “The chairman asked me if I would approach the city manager of North Myrtle Beach...and I did. And he got back to me the next day with a letter saying they want their $6 million. When that comes up, we’ll be discussing that.”
In an email to Worley on Oct. 8, North Myrtle Beach City Manager Mike Mahaney said the city would want around $6 million of the leftover RIDE II money that was collected in the city during the program.
“Harold, confirming my telephone conversation late yesterday, the Elected Officials Of North Myrtle Beach want their roughly $6 million of the above for road projects in the City,” Mahaney wrote in the email, which The Sun News obtained a copy of.
The city’s argument is that since the sales tax money collected under RIDE II was partially collected in North Myrtle Beach, the city ought to get a proportion of the funds back. In another email on Oct. 7, Mahaney wrote to city council members in North Myrtle Beach advising them to ask for the $6 million, and not let Horry County use it for SC-90.
“I called Harold. The request is for us to pass a resolution authorizing them to use the money below on Highway 90. I would recommend that you NOT do that. That $6 million is ours and can be used to to pave North Myrtle Beach roads,” Mahaney wrote.
North Myrtle Beach spokesperson Pat Dowling said the city wants its share of the RIDE II leftover money to pave and repair its own roads.
“About 18% of RIDE II revenue was collected within the city limits of North Myrtle Beach and, to date, no RIDE II money has been spent on transportation projects in North Myrtle Beach,” Dowling said.
Other council members said Tuesday that if North Myrtle Beach demands a portion of the RIDE II returned, other municipalities in the county might, too.
“Now Mr. Worley is saying that North Myrtle Beach wants their portion of that $30 million, Myrtle Beach will probably want their portion and Surfside and on and on, so now it’s not $30 million anymore,” said county council member Bill Howard, who represents part of Myrtle Beach and whose district includes part of SC-90.
Howard added: “Maybe they won’t ask for their money and we can use it, we’ve been allocating it all along, so it’s a question up in the air. That’s a different ballgame now with Highway 90.”
What other Horry money could fix Highway 90?
Part of the concern surrounding how to collect enough money to fix a road like SC-90 is that certain pots of county money can only be used on certain types of projects. On Tuesday, for example, the resolution to dedicate money to SC-90 came in conjunction with a resolution to dedicate other funds to building Interstate 73, a roughly 43-mile new highway connection from I-95 to the Grand Strand. For that project, county leaders said they wanted to use $4.2 million of the county’s hospitality fee over 30 years to contribute as much as $126 million to building the roadway.
But some council members asked why the county would spend hospitality fee money on a new interstate when roads like SC-90 were in bad need of fixing. But hospitality fee funds can only be used on tourism-related projects, per state law, other council members pointed out, and it would be difficult to make an argument that SC-90 fits that description.
“It would be a stretch to put (hospitality fee money) on Highway 905 for instance, or even Highway 90, except for that short distance to the campground,” County Council member Gary Loftus, referring to the Carolina Pines RV park, said. “You can’t use hospitality fee money in the broader sense that we think of the RIDE money and I’d hate for this thing to go down with everyone thinking you can use that RIDE money or the hospitality fee money on other projects when you can’t.”
Other council members argued that a portion of SC-90 closer to North Myrtle Beach or another major road that leads to beach-bound destinations could allow hospitality fee money to be used.
Other funding for Highway 90
In addition to the county funding for SC-90, it’s possible that state lawmakers could wrangle up to $100 million from the state budget next year to further help fix the highway.
That’s a plan South Carolina Sen. Greg Hembree (R-Little River) and state Rep. Tim McGinnis (R-Carolina Forest) have said they’ll pursue when the legislature begins its regular sessions again in January. In the meantime, engineers with GSATS, the Grand Strand Area Transportation Study, will work to identify specific projects along SC-90 that the money could do toward, Hembree and McGinnis told The Sun News earlier this month.
In addition, County Council member Johnny Vaught, who represents parts of Conway and Carolina Forest, said he would like to see $25 million of the county’s share of American Rescue Plan relief aid to go toward the road.
If the RIDE II surplus remains unscathed, that could mean $156 million out of a $500 million need could be coming to Highway 90 in the near future.
On Wednesday, County Council member Mark Causey, who chairs a committee dedicated to studying improvments for SC-90, said money for projects along the highway will likely come in pieces, and that the county will have to make improvements one-by-one — even if the fixes are as small as adding traffic lights — rather than wait for the whole sum to be collected.
“We may have all of it, we may have half of it, we have none of it,” Causey said about the RIDE II funds. “If some of it has to be given up at least we have some money to address some of the safety issues...be they signals in certain areas or turn lanes.”
Causey also suggested that the county’s upcoming RIDE IV program could also pump some funds into SC-90. The RIDE III program was originally slated to dedicate money toward SC-90 but because the cost of fixing the whole road was so high, county leaders dropped it from the plans, opting instead to pursue smaller-scale projects. Causey said this time around, county leaders could put chunks of SC-90 on the RIDE IV bill and get funding that way.
County planners hope to have a final list of projects for RIDE IV by early 2024, according to a rough timeline of that program, and voters will cast ballots to approve or reject the program during the November 2024 elections.
“We’ve given our commitment to the people out there,” Causey said. “We’ve just got to do everything we can…let the people see us making some moves out there.”
