Opinion: Tuesday Vote on Road Referendum Key to County’s Future
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Ignore the hand-scrawled “Vote No on Referendum” signs, they are as errant as they are inarticulate. Voters on Tuesday will make an historic decision about the future of the county’s roads and bridges, and a no vote will put the county on a precarious path.
For decades now, long-time denizens of Anderson County—and, it must be said, faithful readers of The Anderson Observer—have been party to a familiar civic lament: the Herculean, if not wholly Sisyphean, matter of keeping the county’s 1,554 miles of roads and 162 bridges intact. The story predates the era of “Home Rule” and council governance, reaching back to the days when road commissioners, by all accounts, applied asphalt with a mix of intuition, personal favor, and political calculation.
The abiding problem has always been money—or, more precisely, the absence of a steady stream of it. Supervisor Ed Poore, a man rarely accused of sentimentality, captured the frustration perfectly in 1981: “I run this roads program from day to day,” he confessed. “Ain’t no plan, no schedule.” The subsequent shift to a council-administrator system seemed to hold promise, but the roads, unmoved by bureaucratic reform, continued their steady decay.
For nearly 40 years, the refrain has changed little: the roads are failing, and the coffers are thin. A modest vehicle fee came and went. A more ambitious funding scheme—a one-penny sales tax—emerged only after much consultation and inter-county comparison, a process described by one council member as “our own Odyssey without Ithaca.” That journey ended in disappointment last November, when voters narrowly rejected the measure, confused perhaps by the dual ballot questions. The companion request to authorize bonds, oddly enough, passed. Thus began a fresh chapter of patchwork solutions, temporary repairs, and deepening potholes. Each new storm season exposes the fragility of the system anew.
Anderson County now functions in a perpetual state of asphalt triage. With repair costs inching toward one million dollars per mile, the arithmetic is grim. The statewide gasoline tax yields the county about eight million dollars annually, one quarter earmarked for state-maintained roads. The so-called “C Fund,” 3.99 cents per gallon, delivered roughly $8.9 million last year—sufficient to fully repave about nine miles. One begins to understand why one-third of all county bridges are now closed to heavier trucks, school buses, and fire engines.
Yet some glimmer of method has entered the madness. In June 2023, council members approved a $337,000 road assessment study, dispatching a specially outfitted vehicle to evaluate every mile of pavement. The survey’s diagnosis, though unsurprising, was sobering: more than a third of the county’s roads rated “poor or failing.” The data point is less a revelation than a confirmation of what most drivers already feel through the steering wheel.
Safety, hardly a decorative concern, figures prominently in this saga. Poor roads and weakened bridges translate directly into accidents, injuries, and wasted hours in repair shops. By the council’s own reckoning, road conditions remain the top concern among residents. Hence, the a new referendum, this time accompanied by a more deliberate campaign and a clear list of priority projects—an effort engineered by a Capital Sales Tax Commision representing the county and municipalities. By state law, the funds can be used for no other purposes than road/bridge maintenance and repair.
If voters approve the new initiative on Tuesday, the county might finally acquire the means to plan rather than react. And if not—well, Anderson County may once more find itself living out Ed Poore’s unintentional proverb, managing its roads day by day, with no plan and no schedule, caught between habit and hope, listening to the steady hum of tires over the cracks.
