Editorial from the Sun News

Growth Woe Shifts Inland

Some folks get satisfaction in refusing to help people who refused to help them in an hour or need. But when it comes to balancing new development against roads, sewers and other public infrastructure, "what goes around comes around" makes for poor public policy.

Proposed neighborhoods in western Horry County threaten the integrity of public roads and other infrastructure geared to a small rural population. The folks who live in the affected areas don't like what's happening and want their County Council members to stifle or water down the proposed developments.

The members in question, Kevin Hardee of District 10 and Paul Prince of District 9, supported development that threatened to overwhelm - and since has overwhelmed - roads, sewers, school buildings and other public infrastructure in coastal council districts. Prince and Hardee for years have been steadfast friends to the county development community - real estate agents, builders and landowners. Now it's their turn to beg council colleagues for help.

Some on the council, as payback, will be tempted to ignore their pleas. Instead, council members should collectively use past mistakes in overseeing near-the-coast development as a guidebook for what not to do on inland development.

This shouldn't mean making development so difficult that landowners and builders give up - or sue to protect their property rights in Circuit Court. But it should mean imposing greater expectations on developers - no more blanket approvals of high-impact residential rezoning proposals without concessions to improve roads and other infrastructure, for instance. The goal should be to balance property rights with community rights, in order that Horry County absorb new development with less disruption to residents and cost to existing taxpayers.

Revisit impact fees

In November 2004, Horry County voters, at the urging of the development community, resoundingly defeated a County Council advisory ballot initiative on impact fees. But the failure of the initiative, which would have encouraged the council to lobby in Columbia for changes in state law on impact fees, didn't settle the question.

Current law allows county and municipal councils to collect fees from developers for a narrow range of impacts - roads, for instance, and expansion of police and fire services (though not salaries). The council has resisted passing such a fee because the revenue it brings in would not come close to paying for the impacts that new residents exert.

On the theory that some new revenue for infrastructure is better than none, the council at last should enact the impact fees the law allows. Members also should take a leaf from Councilman Marion Foxworth's book and seek voluntary impact fees from developers to ease the problems their proposed new neighborhoods would cause. Foxworth used this technique to good effect in leveraging money to widen River Oaks Road.

Finally, council members should team up with councils from other fast-growing S.C. counties to lobby legislators to liberalize the impact fee law. Ours isn't the only S.C. county feeling the pain of rapid growth. And legislators, in a sense, "owe" local governments such a concession, considering the new restrictions they put on the property tax this year. Counties need more tools for dealing with growth, and legislators have a duty to provide them.