Small Business Funding

Members of the Greenville County Council are discussing ways to move forward with paying for road improvements after a proposed 1% sales tax referendum failed to pass on Election Day. A day after the ballot question was tabulated, council members began sharing their own ideas on how to pay for the infrastructure.Council member Ennis Fant said that at the next council meeting, he will introduce a measure to repeal the $25 road maintenance fee on all cars registered in the county.”This forces everybody that’s for the penny and against the penny to sit down at the table and come up with a viable, meaningful, substantive solution to fixing the roads in Greenville County,” Fant said. “It is not fair, nor is it practical to think that only people who live in Greenville County with a car registered in Greenville County should bear the entire burden.”Fant said the fee generated around $12 million for the county last year, which helped pave around 17 miles of roadway. If the referendum had passed, county officials said it would have added 1% to the county’s sales tax for all purchases except gas, unprepared groceries, rent, mortgages and pharmaceuticals. In total, they said it could have created around $1 billion in revenue.”For me, the penny was a really impactful way that we could have made a difference quickly, but clearly, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board,” County Council member Liz Seman said. However, other members of the council said there are alternative means to raise money for road improvements.Member Benton Blount and member-elect Curt McGahhey are among several members on the council who are advocating for an audit of the county’s budget to see where more money could be allocated toward roads. They also raised the possibility of potentially cutting funding to county programs, such as affordable housing and conservation.”There’s a potential that we may have to, at least for a temporary amount of time, look at making cuts there,” Blount said. “If that’s the only places that we can find the additional funds, we put close to $15 million extra into several different initiatives like that in the last budget.”Both Blount and McGahhey said they are in favor of adding an impact fee to new development within the county to help pay for road projects.”The developers come in, build a bunch of neighborhoods and move out, and they make a ton of money, so if we can take some of that and say, ‘Hey, now the people moving here have to help us build our infrastructure out,'” McGahhey said. “I know the council wants to take a hard look at impact fees, and I’m sure we’re going to do that in the upcoming future.”However, some council members said impact fees are a nonstarter for them and pushed back against cutting any funding for programs.”I think if we really want to control growth and improve mobility for our residents, all those things have to work in concert together,” Seman said. “I don’t really see where we’re cutting one of those items actually really helps our cause in the long run.””Nobody likes to make cuts in general, but when it comes down to it, if the citizens are very concerned about roads, they expect us to deal with that with our budget and working within our means,” Blount said.Council members said they could be in favor of another future referendum for road infrastructure if their constituents would like to see one on their ballots.