South Carolina gets additional $200M to fix aging bridges

COLUMBIA, S.C. - South Carolina is facing “a real challenge” when it comes to aging bridges, according to the state’s secretary of transportation.

More than a quarter of all bridges in the state are 60 years or older, and many more are rapidly aging.

The South Carolina Department of Transportation said funding levels, until recently, were not sufficient to tackle this reality, and if they did not significantly increase, around half of all bridges in the state would hit that 60-year mark in the next decade.

Last year, the General Assembly gave SCDOT $200 million for bridge improvements.

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That money is already allocated, and the legislature just gave the agency another $200 million in this year’s budget for the same purpose.

“I can guarantee you when we meet about the budget in August, I’m going to be coming to y’all, asking to turn in another request for $200 million in bridge money because I was abundantly clear to the General Assembly that this doesn’t solve the problem. This just helps us address the problem,” Secretary of Transportation Justin Powell told members of the SCDOT Commission.

The commission recently approved a list of the next 159 bridges that will be funded for repairs with this new pool of money, though not all will be under construction within the next year.

They include interstate, primary and secondary bridges located in all regions of the state.

The $200 million in the new state budget is in addition to the $239 million SCDOT has received from the federal government as well, and agency leaders say they are exploring more grant and funding opportunities.

Powell said he also tasked the department with figuring out how to get these bridge projects started more quickly.

SCDOT has since worked with the federal government to cut red tape in that process, which Powell said will allow them to start projects three to five months sooner than before.

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“So that we could basically be able to say once the inspector comes in and says the bridge is closed, we could turn around the next day and have our design team start working on getting a plan to get it either replaced or repaired,” he said.

Funding from the state budget typically goes out in September, but this year, budget writers added a stipulation that most one-time funding won’t go out until next February.

That includes the $200 million set aside for bridges.

Powell said this delay will not slow down SCDOT’s work.

“We have $239 million in federal funds that we use for bridge projects. We’re going to go nonstop and then when that point comes that the funds are released, we will immediately start putting it to work,” he said.