STATE MUST FUND CRITICAL NEEDS FIRST …
To be clear: South Carolina does not need Interstate 73.
This proposed highway – which would run from just north of Cheraw, S.C. to Myrtle Beach, S.C. – is a poster project for unnecessary highway spending in The Palmetto State.
Nonetheless Palmetto politicians are clamoring to support the boondoggle – ignoring viable alternatives and even going so far as to include its $2.4 billion price tag in an alleged shortfall of funding for our “crumbling roads and bridges.”
Hell, they’re even re-routing funding from core infrastructure needs to build “interchanges to nowhere” for the project – hoping to force the hand of state leaders.
Anyway, the only way this road ever gets built is if federal and state governments raise their gas taxes (as one liberal S.C. congressman is proposing). And even then it would still be a toll road.
One influential state leader has had enough of the madness … well, sort of.
S.C. Senator Harvey Peeler – who has ripped into wasteful transportation projects in previous years – told The Greenville News this week that Interstate 73 should take a back seat to more pressing needs.
“I’m not opposed to I-73,” Peeler told the paper. “What I am opposed to is spending one penny toward I-73 before they fix our problems with our existing roads and more specifically our existing interstates.”
Peeler is referring, of course, to the deplorable condition of Interstate 85 – a major economic thoroughfare in the South Carolina Upstate. Of course he might as well be referring to the sad shape of Interstate 26 around the Columbia, S.C. area, or the debacle that is Interstate 95 – a major national artery that runs through the South Carolina Lowcountry and Pee Dee regions.
Despite these critical needs going unaddressed, the S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT)’s commission – which has been involved in all sorts of corrupt schemes to advance this project – is up to its old tricks.
Specifically, the SCDOT is spending taxpayer money on wetlands mitigation associated with the Interstate 73 project – even though there is no guarantee federal funding for the project will materialize.
“We’re pretty darned excited about it,” SCDOT commissioner Mike Wooten told The News.
Wait … who is Mike Wooten?
For those of you with short memories … he’s the guy who was busted earlier this year deliberately concealing the results of incriminating SCDOT internal audits (and threatening to fire the auditor who blew the whistle on his treachery).
For our exclusive report on all that, click here.
Wooten is also the guy who was busted trying to hide the results of a recent taxpayer-subsidized study on Interstate 73.
Why all this secrecy with your money?
Easy: These leaders don’t want you to know that while your roads and bridges (including critical interstate thoroughfares) are indeed crumbling, they are blowing billions on totally unnecessary projects.
We’re glad Peeler has spoken out in support of funding critical needs prior to Interstate 73. But he needs to go further. Much further. He needs to support the efforts of S.C. Senator Tom Davis of Beaufort, S.C., who has made holding the SCDOT accountable for its reckless spending his top priority in the State Senate.
In fact Davis single-handedly blocked the passage of a gas tax hike earlier this year that would have further burdened Palmetto State motorists already paying more of their income on fuel than residents of any state save Mississippi or West Virginia.
34 comments
Movement brewing to force federal criminal charges on Wooten.
Long overdue.
Wooten and his corrupt crowd are getting behind another criminal Stephen Goldfinch’s senate run….Interstate 73 is a major windfall for this crowd of Goldfinch supporters, a gathering of the like-minded.
You are right about Wooten backing Goldfinch — to the tune of a $1,000 campaign contribution on 6 November.
Goldfinch also likes to burn up ammo with his buddy Alan Clemmons from time to time on the Goldfinch farm. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152420921774593
Rep. Clemmons is probably the biggest I-73 pusher in the House, what with being the head of the National I-73/I-74/I-75 Association. He is also the biggest booster of Israel and took Goldfinch along on his last junket there.
RIGHT….courtesy of a Israeli friend who forwarded this to me some time back, listen to the crooked Goldfinch talk about Christ here::
http://www.voiceofisrael.com/23-legislators-south-carolina-knesset/
By the way, Goldfinch’s partner Yair Adereth is an Israeli who left sneaked out of the country as the whole stem cell criminal case was coming to light. I wonder if Goldfinch met with Adereth on this trip to Israel. THAT would be some news, given that a criminal case against Goldfinch was already filed.
Mike Wooten essentially runs the Horry County engineering dept
Will, you’re wrong on this and so is Peeler. MYB is the largest Metro Area in the USA not served by an Interstate Highway. This needs to be fixed ASAP. I-73 is an very important infrastructure project that needs to be completed. Especially for public safety issue in case of a necessary evacuation of the Strand.
Yeah, if only Houston had an interstate during Hurricane Ike.
Or Rita, it was worse then
Pft….if only New Orleans had an interstate, Katrina would have never happened.
Doh! I-10, I-12, I-49, I-55, and I-59
Katrina would have happened. The loss of life would have happened too because the city’s emergency evacuation plan crumbled like a Bangladeshi factory.
I’m going to beat my usual drum on this issue.
If you really cared about evacuating the Grand Stand, you would favor more than one 4-lane road outta town and would push for widening the current road an I-73 would replace and widening US 521 from Andrews to I-95 at Manning. That’s actually a two-fer since it would facilitate the transport of goods from the Port of Georgetown. There has been no work on this project for over a decade.
Is the US 378 widening completed between I-95 and Conway? That would be the 3rd 4 lane highway inland.
Some hurricane evacuees are tourists who will just want to get home and that’s not necessarily in the direction of your I-73. Some of the Grand Strand residents want to go to friends and relatives away from the coast…and, not necessarily in your I-73 direction. What is the point for them or the traffic flow to try to send as many people as you can out on Myrtle Beach’s one very own Interstate, when other directions with a lesser, split up traffic flow would be better? Do you want the traffic to move or do you want people sitting still?
I can’t remember if it was Hurricane David or Floyd, but I might still be trying to get out of Greeleyville on 521 if I had not known the back way to Manning by Lake Marion.
You cannot have bottlenecks of people stuck at places like that for hours and backed up for miles. As the crow flies, as the hurricane barrels, people bottlenecked at Greeleyville might as well be on the coast. If 521 is how the tourists got to the Grand Strand, that is how they will try to return and will encounter the same mess that I did 20 years ago.
People who want I-73 are thinking more about their civic pride than the safety of the people who will have to evacuate at the next hurricane.
Bullshit. See other comments here detailing all the ways millions of tourists and residents of areas of the Lowcountry will not benefit one bit from I-73, especially in the eventuality of an evacuation. You’re just parroting the propaganda put out by the MBACC and their corrupt minions like Wooten.
I tell ya Boz.I just spent 2 nights at the Bar Harbor in MB and the entire place has really gone to shit.MB I mean.Nobody there either.I see somebody is building next to the Dead Dog in MI.
Charlie C. is building a new restaurant there, called The Claw House. It will feature live lobster and other fresh seafood from New England, the Chesapeake Bay, and points on the coast in-beween — brought in several times a week by refrigerated trucks owned by the company. Smart. He’s always been a smart businessman.
Interesting point. I have been following a few cases around the world (Melbourne, Australia as an example) where the Chinese are choosing places to buy up high value property at top dollar, thus pricing out the locals, and then re-developing and/or building new homes, high rises etc. to on sell or rent out.
The key question is…where do they get all the $$…as often times the amount they’ve paid for a property + development costs far exceeds its market worth. The answer…it’s a giant money laundering operation from crooked Chinese actors using real estate as a legitimate way to park their ill gotten cash.
I just want the roads fixed and I am willing to pay more to get it done.
MYR gets huge amounts of funding from whomever federal state coffers and building interchanges to nowhere are pure wastes of tax dollars that are needed to rebuild roads and bridges that were damaged by the floods and those that needed repair before hand.
I repeat, Hugh Leatherman is a very, very, very GREEDY man
Wetlands mitigation funded by tax dollars is code for inside dealing amongst the power.
Post the names of those firms involved and you will find a list of the rich and powerful and their friends.
You stupid fucks couldn’t arrange a one car funeral.MYB is the economic engine of SC.Build the highway.
Economic engine of meth beach. Yeah right. We just keep MB in the state to keep the blue collar mid-westerners out of Charleston. They’re to stupid to drive the extra hour.
I have always been a proponent of utilizing Interstate 74 when completed
to Wilmington with a spur down to MB would be a reasonable alternative.
This would bring the traffic from Charlotte and northward down to the
beach. Then improve East/West routes within SC to handle the regional
traffic to the beach. Some of these East/West routes could be limited
access, like an interstate highway, to handle the traffic.
Poor Pee Dee – no I-73 – It’s not very Merry – for Flip or for Kerry.
Hey pussy I was going to buy you lunch yesterday.
Flip, if that was directed toward me, that is an admission that you are, in reality, perpetual loser candidate, Keith VanWinkle — obscenely obese “political consultant” and henchman for dirty trickster Jay Specter and that convicted felon’s lord and liege, Andre Bauer. He’s the only person who has offered to buy me lunch lately. An offer I declined, of course.
If true, I’m somewhat surprised. Flip/pogo never seems up-to-date, but is always about three years behind the times on the Grand Strand political happenings. But that could be a ruse, in and of itself.
If you’re KVW, after the shit y’all have pulled in the HCC 3 election, you will either be in jail, run out of town, or destined to stay behind the wheel of your taxi.
No fatass dipshit it was in reply to my buddy Rocky.
Boz I saw the mayor and Wayne at the convention center/Sheraton a couple of days ago.Your reputation as a crazed lunatic is in tact.
Don’t get me started about I-73. https://www.fitsnews.com/2011/10/19/stickler-i-73-study-riddled-with-errors/
Meanwhile–unknown to FITS–Tea voters were building a one-way road for Joe Wilson and the gutless flag-ripping payday-grubbing Legislators, too
And exit-polling revealed that voters memo to legislators was…now what you’ve all done to Southern heritage and patriots is what we’ll be doing to you !!!
Bet he has a new Greenville hwy project ready to go…
I find it amusing that our GOP dominated state government has willfully ignored bad roads for decades…and only when the vaunted private sector investor in BMW came forward to scold S.C. about its woeful roads did the gov’t leap from the slumber of their collective feather bed to the comfort of the old fold out couch.
For once, he’s thinking with his brain and not his dick.
Before we start tearing each other apart, let me remind everybody that there was SUPPOSED to be an interstate from Spartanburg to Myrtle Beach. But that all died when Jimmy Mann retired. And you KNOW, I don’t have to remind you where the money went, after that.