Legislative Priorities

Vital signs, vital services, vital routes. Every one of them depends on getting from here to there.

The Chamber’s role is to share the business perspective and to support the needs of businesses and the workers who power them. There will be a voting opportunity for Beaufort County citizens on whether to fund transportation infrastructure improvements this election season. The need for the improvements are obvious to most, but there’s more to unpack as voters decide if now and how to fund and fix them.

I hope you read last week’s VIBE on how roads affect businesses – now we are focusing on the safety and community aspects… which, honestly, is still very business related.

Roads are part of critical response
When someone calls 911, help travels on the same roads as everyone else, and congestion, crash scenes, and poorly designed intersections can add time to every trip. Sometimes the road itself is the reason for the call: Beaufort County recorded 138 fatal and 465 serious-injury crashes from 2017 to 2023, according to the County’s Safety Action Plan.

Every minute a crash blocks the road, the risk of another one grows, by 2.8% a minute, according to federal highway research. On our islands, where one road or bridge is often the only way in, a single crash can leave an ambulance waiting in line with everyone else. What if that ambulance was for you, or a loved one?

Local emergency management officials reported to the county’s Transportation Advisory Committee that dense traffic, high-risk intersections, and rising injury crashes are public safety concerns. The largest share of the referendum to fund infrastructure improvements, $326 million, goes to safety and intersection improvements aimed at exactly those problems.

A view from the hospital
Beaufort Memorial recently wrote in support of the referendum to fix the roadways. The full letter is attached, and it explains what roads mean for patient care from the hospital’s perspective. A few highlights:

• Scale. As the county’s largest private employer, Beaufort Memorial cares for nearly 750,000 patients a year across its main campus in Beaufort and its locations in Bluffton, Hilton Head Island, and Okatie. Patients, physicians, nurses, and staff travel between those sites every day.
• Minutes matter. National guidelines call for treating heart attack patients within 90 minutes of arrival and stroke patients within 60 minutes. As the letter says, meeting these standards also depends on how quickly EMS can reach a patient and get them to the hospital.
• Healthcare is expanding. New healthcare offices and services being planned and built county-wide to help address our healthcare needs, and also add more patient mobility needs and more locations for clinical teams to travel between.
• Access to care. Community Health Needs Assessments have consistently found transportation barriers to be a high-priority issue. Beaufort Memorial runs transportation assistance for cancer, sickle cell, and post-discharge patients because unreliable transportation leads to missed appointments and delayed treatment.

The letter identifies the corridors that patients, healthcare staff, and emergency vehicles rely on most. All of them are on the locked project list that a passed sales tax referendum will fund.

When everyone has to leave at once
In another aspect of emergency, hurricane season runs through November 30, and so far this year we’ve been lucky to not have a hurricane threat – “knock on wood!” When an evacuation does come, it tests our road network harder than anything else. South of Broad evacuees head out on US 278 with a lane reversed, and North of Broad evacuees take US 21 north to US 17.

This month marks ten years since Hurricane Matthew. If you weren’t here for it, you won’t have to look far to find someone who was. Just ask them about it, and pull up a chair.

Thousands and thousands of people left our region in South Carolina’s largest evacuation in at least 17 years, and getting home was also challenging. Our most recent mandatory evacuation was for Dorian in 2019, but it can come again, anytime, and the transportation infrastructure referendum includes work on several of those routes.

Evacuation is also a business continuity issue. The sooner employees, customers, and supply chains can get out safely and back in, the sooner businesses can reopen and support our community.

What’s on the ballot (in layman’s terms)

• Question 1: Adds a penny to the dollar in sales tax for up to nine years, or until about $780 million is collected, whichever comes first. It doesn’t apply to groceries, gas, prescriptions, or rent and mortgage payments. The biggest share, $326 million, goes to safety and intersection improvements.
• Question 2: Lets the county borrow up to $450 million against that sales tax so projects can start sooner, instead of waiting years for the money to build up.

Where the Chamber stands
The Chamber supports the proposed infrastructure improvements. A safe, reliable transportation network is a business issue, a workforce issue, and a community issue. And the roads that carry our employees, deliveries, and customers also carry ambulances, fire engines, police cars, and evacuees. We want you to have the full picture, so we encourage you to review the project list and ballot language yourself. Voting matters!

Learn more

• Beaufort Memorial’s letter of support (attached)
• Full project list and interactive map: beaufortcountypenny.com
• Early voting runs October 19–31. Election Day is November 3.