Rep. Sanders Says Boat-Motor Tax Relief Bill Good for S.C.
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
“South Carolina shouldn’t be driving boat owners across the Savannah River to Georgia just because of our tax code,” said state Rep. Blake Sanders, a Republican from Anderson County whose district lies a short drive from the water that doubles as both playground and border. “This bill makes our state more competitive, supports our marine industry, and encourages boat owners to keep their vessels registered right here at home. I’m proud to have co-sponsored from the beginning and worked with the counties to ensure the local impact is phased over time.”
At the Statehouse in Columbia, where budgets and tax codes are often arranged with the abstraction of an accountant’s spreadsheet, the subject of boats—how they are titled, taxed, and, increasingly, where they are kept—has become unexpectedly concrete. For years, South Carolina has required owners to title and pay annual property taxes separately on their boats and on each outboard motor, at a rate that advocates say is the highest in the country, a double bite that has made crossing to Georgia’s side of the Savannah not just a matter of current and wind but of arithmetic.
The proposal moving through the legislature promises, at least on paper, to simplify that calculation. Approved in the Senate on Wednesday by a 39–1 vote, the bill would create a single tax bill covering both the boat and its motor and would effectively lower the rate from 10.5 percent to six percent by exempting the first 43 percent of their combined value.
“We have to deal with the reality that it’s unseemly and debilitating to have a double-digit tax basis on these boats,” Sen. Danny Verdin, a Republican from Laurens, said during debate, a rare moment in which tax policy was described less as a matter of ideology than of decorum.
The mechanics of the change are unmistakably local, even as the rhetoric tends toward the grand. Property taxes on boats, like those on homes, are collected by counties to fund schools and services, so the state’s own coffers will not shrink; instead, county governments will absorb the slower leak in revenue as the new system is phased in, a concession Sanders points toward correction when he talks about working “with the counties” on the bill. The state Department of Natural Resources, which oversees registration, will have to retool its forms and retrain staff to match the new regime, costs that remain, for the moment, notional—another line of uncertainty in a state that has decided it would rather risk a modest administrative headache than keep nudging its boat owners toward the far bank.
Another vote in the Senate will send the amended bill back to the House, which passed an earlier version 89–7 last year, a lopsided tally that suggests bipartisan agreement on at least one thing: that there are limits to how much pain a tax code can inflict before people begin to take their hulls, and their dollars, elsewhere. If the House accepts the Senate’s changes, the measure will go to the governor’s desk, where it will face a final, quieter test—whether the state’s appetite for reform extends from the chamber floor to the stroke of a pen.
