Should Hilton Head give municipal consent on U.S. 278 project? One private group thinks so.
Collisions on U.S. 278 are common, but at Tuesday’s Hilton Head Town Council meeting, two groups espousing different ideas about the road’s future may get into more than a fender-bender.
The Hilton Head Town Council will soon decide whether or not to advance its independent review of the U.S. 278. The council will review a proposed “request for qualifications” (RFQ) to firms competing to conduct the study, another step in a lengthy project that has lingered as an issue for several island mayors, town councils, and county elections.
The project’s design has yet to be finalized and is far from breaking ground, five years after a 2018 tax referendum to source its funding was passed. Through the interim, disagreements and negotiation between town and county officials on various aspects of the project’s design, including specifications of the bridge connection Hilton Head and the mainland and traffic flow systems, have stalled progress. Sen. Tom Davis has often stepped in as a mediator.
Lack of visible progress, and the town’s soon-to-begin independent study, has frustrated some prominent island residents and area elected officials. This has led to a resolution from the Greater Island Council, a nonprofit, self-described “citizen advocates” group whose membership includes influential private citizens, as well as current and former public officeholders.
Their proposal asks Hilton Head council to formally give its municipal consent for the 278 project to move forward. This would allow the full project to move forward when the time comes, removing one of the town’s safeguards against project designs they feel don’t meet Hilton Head’s needs.
In the past, Davis highlighted that in the absence of Hilton Head’s municipal consent, the project is “done.”
The new proposal’s supporters and detractors will likely turn out in numbers Tuesday, swarming council chambers prepared to make their case.
Some of the town’s elected officials said progress is still being made on the project, and they don’t believe enough questions on the project’s design and effectiveness have been addressed to give immediate municipal consent.
Steve Baer, a former county councilman and GIC member, has raised the alarm on the ethical issues, including lobbying or influencing efforts by a private group like the GIC while having sitting public officials among its members.
What’s in the ‘act faster’ resolution?
The GIC’s ‘municipal consent’ request resolution was approved by its executive committee on May 4, urging Hilton Head leaders to go ahead immediately on the 278 corridor project. It also asks that the county, should the town do so, build town recommendations for the island’s Stoney community and other “feasible” town suggestions outside of that area into the project as a compromise.
The resolution argues continued delays to the project could threaten funding, increase the project’s cost, and poses a threat for Hilton Head to “compete for business retention and economic development now and in the future.”
In the May edition of the Plantation Living newsletter in Hilton Head Plantation, the island’s largest private community, a piece outlining the importance of swift transportation solutions to preserve the workforce and frustration with the current progress was published. Peter Kristian, chair of the GIC’s sustainability committee, serves as the neighborhood’s general manager.
While congestion on 278 continues to plague island residents and visitors, town officials said they aren’t likely to surrender municipal consent at this stage, given how far they’ve already moved down the path to their own independent study and as-of-yet unanswered questions about how the current design would affect Hilton Head.
The study will expand beyond the scope of the current town-county joint review of the project, by examining its impacts all the way from where 278 reaches the island to Whooping Crane Way and down the Cross Island Parkway to Sea Pines Circle.
“There are questions that have not been answered yet in the design of the bridge,” Hilton Head Mayor Alan Perry said. “At the last hearing from a town forum that the chamber held, and (county council chair) Joe Passiment spoke to that, they were only at a design percentage of roughly 30%. The information is not there to even go to a municipal consent at this point in time, so nothing is being held up.”
Ward 5 Councilman Steve Alfred agreed that, for now, he saw no need to give municipal consent before the studies are finalized.
“I am not in favor of responding positively to the resolution,” Alfred said. “There are some traffic flow problems with the current plan that could certainly stand some additional consideration and review. ... It would surprise me if there was anything close to a majority that agreed with Peter (Kristian)‘s brochure.”
Notably, most of the town council that approved the town-county agreement on 278 last fall have been replaced. Of the four ‘yes’ votes cast last October, only Ward 6 Councilman Glenn Stanford remains in office. All three ‘no’ votes — Ward 1’s Alex Brown, Ward 4’s Tamara Becker and Ward 3’s David Ames — are still on the dais.
A key part of the town’s desire moving forward from the October agreement was withholding municipal consent until council was satisfied with the data collected and conducting its independent corridor study.
Diederik Advocaat, one of the members of the recently created Citizens’ Advisory Committee helping create the scope of work and RFQ for the town’s study, said he understood municipal consent wouldn’t be given until their task was finished.
That scope of work, Advocaat said, will examine potential pedestrian and driver safety issues with the current project, as well as how traffic may flow onto the island with a new bridge and traffic signal system.
“That’s part and parcel of the citizens’ committee,” Advocaat said. “It was never part of our thinking to give municipal consent until this has been completed.”
Are reviews delaying the project?
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Assistant Beaufort County Administrator Jared Fralix said when the county and town agreed to the October memo of understanding, the document’s language allowed many of the project’s early stages to move forward simultaneously, even without municipal consent.
Fralix confirmed the current project is about 30% designed. The project’s next vital stage is submitting a finding of no significant impact, or FONSI, to the federal government.
“As we detailed in our (agreement) together between us and the town, that would be something that could move forward simultaneously,” Fralix said. “With the independent reviews that are ongoing, and no municipal consent, the agreement stood as a way to facilitate that portion moving forward. We’re coordinating with SCDOT on how to best navigate that with (the Federal Highway Administration). Depending on DOT’s guidance that may get submitted soon, or it may be after the county-town joint study is completed.”
The county-town study is expected to end around August or September, Fralix said.
There remains a roughly $30 million funding gap with the current project, Fralix said, which has an overall cost of $326 million. That cost estimate includes built-in contingencies to account for the increase of material costs or other price hikes over time.
“There will be a need for additional funds, and when and where those come from, and what that looks like is still being determined, but that’s not holding up any of the processes at the current timeline,” Fralix said.
Is it a ‘secret society?’
Steve Baer, a former county councilman and former GIC member, has been vocal in his criticism of the group past and present. Most recently, he’s decried how the GIC went about drafting its resolution and attempting to sway town policy.
Baer is a leading member of the Technical Working Group, an organization formed in opposition to the county’s vision for the 278 project that has strongly supported further examination of the 278 corridor. The group has raised issues they feel aren’t being properly vetted with the project including its impact on safety and traffic flow on the island.
“I resigned years ago because I didn’t like the way that they make decisions,” Baer said. “It’s an organization that basically operates in secret.”
While Baer said he felt some of the group’s committees do good for the community, he maintained others “don’t know the difference between right and wrong.”
The Technical Working Group has garnered a petition of over 10,000 signatures through its messaging of traffic congestion and safety issues they say the current project won’t solve.
“If they have a strong story to tell, call a public meeting, and let both sides have equal time and put up their experts, and let the public know what’s going on,” Baer said. “(The county-town review) scope ends at Spanish Wells Road, which is insane. ... There’s insufficient, almost no mention of safety. They have six lanes of traffic and one lane of bicycles that pedestrians have to cross to get to a park on the other side of Spanish Wells Road. The left turn at Crazy Crab has never been dealt with, and now there’s more lanes to cross”
The GIC and some of its members have been involved in transparency controversies in the past, Baer says, from a secret meeting with prominent island locals and public officials to discuss the U.S. 278 project in 2020 to a much older 2002 court ruling that the group had violated a South Carolina ethics law by not properly reporting money used in a ballot measure campaign and failing to indicate who’d paid for advertising in support of the measure.
The organization’s website hosts a meeting calendar for its various committees and lists the chairs and vice chairs of each committee, but pages for individual committees don’t include current membership of the committee. The individual pages are inconsistent with how much information is offered, with some listing specific locations for meetings and others leaving the information out. Other pages appear to be years out of date.
The site also offers a membership directory, “accessible to approved users only.”
Rodman: No secrets here
Stu Rodman, a current GIC member and former county councilman, said he didn’t feel there was any conflict or secrecy in how the group conducts its business.
Rodman chairs the GIC’s regional committee with Joe Passiment, the current County Council chairman, as his vice chair.
“A lot of people call it a secret society, but it’s not a secret society,” Rodman said. “It’s a private organization, there’s thousands of private organizations, and they do whatever they want to do. And over time, there’s been a fair number of elected and former elected officials that have been part of GIC. I’m just one of many, so I don’t see any conflict from citizens being involved.”
The GIC’s resolution, Rodman said, is aimed at starting community discussion on how the “languishing” project could move forward effectively. He added it may be worth considering as a way to further negotiations for potential project changes with the county.
“It strikes me that the town would be well served to consider giving consent, but in exchange for that, it seems to me the county could say, ‘Okay, we’re going to take whatever comes out of these studies, and as long as it improves safety and reduces congestion and falls within the FONSI footprint, we’ll agree to do it.’”
This story was originally published June 2, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
