Why you should vote “yes” for the Greenspace Penny

In the over 14 years I have served in the South Carolina Senate, I have never voted for a tax increase; my rating for fiscal responsibility is consistently scored at 100 percent. However, I ask Beaufort County voters to vote for a one-penny sales tax, for a period of two years, to raise $100 million to preserve greenspace in our county – a tax that would not apply to the sale of groceries, gasoline, or medicine, and 40 percent of which would be paid by visitors.

Earlier this year the South Carolina General Assembly passed the County Green Space Act, a piece of legislation passed with broad bipartisan support that offers local governments a powerful tool to conserve lands and protect water quality. Beaufort County became the first county in the state to put this act to work when its council agreed last August to put the so-called Greenspace Penny on this November’s ballot for county voters’ consideration.

The wetlands that permeate Beaufort County make up one of the largest intact coastal ecosystems on the East Coast, and local initiatives like the Rural and Critical Lands program help protect them; but they are not enough. Despite these efforts, if the development densities already approved by local governments come to fruition – as they rapidly are – the number of rooftops in the county will more than double.

This will destroy our county’s unique qualify of life, and simply sitting back and doing nothing in the face of that ruination is not an option. Look at what happened to the Chesapeake Bay: Maryland and Virginia essentially sat idly by as unchecked development stripped the bay of its natural defenses to runoff pollutants, essentially destroying an entire ecosystem. Letting the same thing happen in Beaufort County would be both immoral and economically stupid.

I wish there was another way of tackling this existential threat, but there isn’t. The densities already on the books cannot be taken away, either through a building moratorium or by downzoning; that would trigger inverse condemnation actions for damages by landowners. I wish local governments hadn’t approved such unsustainable densities over the past several decades, but they did.

And there’s also this: a one-penny sales tax for a period of two years to fund greenspace purchases now would prevent even higher property tax increases later. That’s because the near-term cash advantages of new growth, that is, an expanded property tax base, is inevitably outpaced by the long-term financial obligations associated with the cost of such growth, e.g., roads, water and sewer, schools, libraries, parks, law enforcement, emergency services, etc.

Strong Towns, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), has dug in on this issue, collecting hard numbers from actual projects and comparing those costs to the revenue generated by the underlying development pattern; their unequivocal conclusion: “In every instance we have studied so far, there is a tremendous gap in the long-term finances once the full life-cycle cost of the public obligations are factored in.”

This is empirically true here in Beaufort County. Residential and commercial development densities have increased exponentially over the past ten years, but has the average property-tax bill gone down? No, they’ve increased dramatically.

Would you rather have a penny sales tax for a period of two years, 40 percent of which is paid by visitors to the county, to pay for greenspace acquisitions, or let development continue on its current course, with the number of rooftops more than doubling, and pay higher property taxes – in the aggregate much higher than the taxes associated with the Greenspace Penny – that inevitably result from that growth?

Finally, and surpassing all other reasons to support the Greenspace Penny, there’s this: It’s simply the right thing to do. Aldo Leopold once wrote of “a need for new ethic, an ethic dealing with human’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” On the November ballot there’s an opportunity to declare our love for and allegiance to what makes Beaufort County special. Let’s take it.