The result of a recent audit of the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) discovered that the agency had more than 150 separate priority lists for road and bridge repair projects; the reason for this, according to SCDOT head Christy Hall, is that a single statewide list of all road and bridge projects is simply not practical.
To drive this point home, state roads officials unveiled—literally—a list of all road and bridge projects statewide on a 55-ft-long roll of paper, a list containing 1,530 road- and bridge-repair projects.
This hyperbolic demonstration was made to justify the agency’s present manner of project prioritization and organization.
“The way our funding is set up, it’s impractical to have a singular, ranked statewide list,” said Hall.
Under the hypothetical list, fixing Columbia’s Malfunction Junction, an area that includes the intersection of I-20 and I-26, tied with four other projects as the state’s No. 1 priority.
An state legislative audit council report released earlier this week found the Transportation Department has at least 157 separate priority lists for projects in 15 categories. “The benefit of a single priority list is that the highest-ranked projects from a statewide perspective are more likely to be funded than lower-ranked priority projects,” the audit council report said, contradicting the philosophy of the SCDOT.
In addition, the report said the SCDOT’s priority system is not transparent. For example, not all priority lists were on the agency’s website. But a single list is not practical, maintained Hall, since the agency still would have to group projects based on their funding.
The estimated cost of producing an ream of paper long enough to print War and Peace 10 times over in order to prove this point has yet to be disclosed.
Photo: The State
