Start here: Charleston County absolutely, positively must get a half-cent sales tax passed next year. I hate taxes, too, but we need the dough to deal with the increasing gridlock on our roads. The county cannot screw this up a second time.
So the question is whether County Council is willing to risk it all — next year’s expected $4.25 billion half-cent transportation tax referendum — by allowing Charleston Mayor William Cogswell to put a seawall on the ballot.
The fear, of course, is that Charleston’s $1.3 billion (and counting) Battery extension will be a poison pill that kills the half-cent tax, just as surely as the $2.3 billion (and counting) Interstate 526 extension killed the referendum’s chances a year ago. Put simply, is the CogsWall the next 526?
To be clear, Charleston needs this seawall, too, if it’s to survive as we know it. The option, as a certain Harvard professor suggested in a book not long ago, is to move to Ladson. No thank you, with all due respect to the good people of Ladson.
The issue has never been whether we build a seawall (no matter what you brand it), but how should we pay for it?
Cogswell, quite reasonably, sees a giant piggy bank, the half-cent tax, and says, “Why be shy?” And who wouldn’t?
Never mind that the tax is now projected to raise $4.25 billion over 25 years, not the $6 billion Cogswell estimated on this very page in December. What’s a billion or two when you have a city to save?
It wasn’t long ago that Cogswell penciled in $300 million from the half-cent tax to pay for his ambitious (ambition being a good thing) plan to create more than 3,500 units of affordable housing by 2032. That quietly went away when the effort by the mayor, a former legislator, to tweak the transportation sales tax law to include housing died just as quietly in Columbia. Setting ambitious goals is easy; paying for them is not so easy.
Now the mayor wants to use the half-cent tax to help finance the city’s $455 million (and counting) share of the Battery extension.
It’s not at all certain that it’s any more legal to use transportation taxes to build a seawall (or the roads under it) than to build housing. County Council’s lawyers will have to hash that out.
But even if the lawyers approve, will the voters?
A year ago those same voters overwhelmingly rejected extending the half-cent tax, 61 percent to 39 percent. That’s an absolute beatdown.
The vote became a referendum on 526. The last thing County Council wants is for the next vote to become a referendum on a seawall for downtown Charleston. If next year’s referendum vote fails, it could be dead for years. This is an uphill battle anyway, given the paucity of trust among voters. Trust broken — and it was — isn’t easily repaired.
Still, the seawall is imperative. But then I live downtown; most voters don’t. The median price of a single-family house is $704,000 countywide versus $1.7 million on the peninsula. Why should my tax dollars, a West Ashley voter might wonder, go to bail out those rich people downtown? Heck, I don’t like paying taxes, anyway, and a 9-percent sales tax is steep.
Last year’s referendum was crushed by a creative grassroots coalition that out-hustled the deep-pocketed political and business establishment. If I’m running the