EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this story was written, Charleston County Council elected Kylon Middleton as its new chairman.
The new year is officially here with new and past Lowcountry issues that have county officials buckling down and gearing up to tackle.
Like every year before, Charleston County faces two major challenges, traffic and flooding. And there are a handful of other problems that local leaders have made some headway on — housing, public safety, rampant development and taxes — but most agree there’s plenty more to be done.
Back to the drawing board
During the 2024 general election in November, Charleston County residents sent a solid “no” message to county leaders when they rejected a half-cent sales tax extension that would have raised billions for roads and other projects, including the controversial decades-long Interstate 526 extension plan. The effort effectively died after the election, when state officials pulled a share of promised funding.
“The Mark Clark [Extension] is off the table now,” said then-Charleston County Council Chairman Herb Sass in a December interview with the Charleston City Paper. “We had a lot of public engagement on that project. I think that’s probably the same process we’ll go through again. We know from [the Charleston Area Regional Transportation Study] and from the state where the chokepoints are and where there’s congestion, and that’s what we tried to address last time.”
Sass, who last month said he would seek to continue as council chair, said the county learned a lot from the referendum’s defeat. In the future, he said, he would prefer a referendum that did not lock residents into paying for county priorities for 25 years.
“But if you’re going to have any road projects at all, you’re going to have to have at least 10 years to get any of them done,” he said.
The constantly inflating price tag of the extension didn’t help either, Sass admitted. “Even though we estimated high in the beginning, we had no idea Covid-19 was going to hit or that the companies that do the work would cost so much more to hire,” he said.
Looking ahead, Sass said he has high hopes for the Lowcountry Rapid Transit project, a 21.3-mile bus rapid transit plan set to connect downtown Charleston’s medical district to Ladson via dedicated bus lanes and several modern stations along the route. The project recently secured a $365 million public grant to fund the endeavor. 2025 marks the start of the final engineering and design phase of the plan before construction is slated to begin.
Continuing work on living with water
Charleston County’s Climate Action Plan, which passed in September 2024, set the stage for decades of strategies to help Lowcountry residents stay safe from rising water levels.
“We have worked hard on our comprehensive plan,” Sass said, “on zoning, on increasing minimum building heights.”
He said those factors combine to create a more robust and resilient community that is built to withstand the changing climate. But, he said, there is always room for improvement.
“Everybody needs to do a better job of looking at sites they are trying to develop,” Sass said. “You don’t have to be an engineer to tell that there are some sites that just don’t need to be built on. That’s a big thing this year.”
For example, developers shouldn’t build homes where water runs from one lot to another. “That creates a bad situation for that property owner they didn’t expect,” he said.
Meanwhile, the county will continue to support area municipalities in their efforts to combat rising tides, Sass said.
“We have a good working relationship with North Charleston and Charleston,” he said.” We’re going to work hard with them to make sure we agree on efforts and things. The smaller municipalities like Mount Pleasant sort of look to us and follow along with what we do in these larger areas.”
Some success, but room for more
Despite setbacks on managing traffic and the ever-growing threat of rising sea levels, county leaders have noted several areas of improvement in the Lowcountry and hope to continue the trend in 2025.
“We are very pleased with all the progress we’ve made with housing in the last two years,” Sass said. “We have a long way to go. … We all know affordability is a huge problem.”
He pointed to a new apartment project by Greystar for which it built units off-site, trucked them to their designated area and stacked them up.
“It saved them a lot of money, and those units will be a lot less expensive for residents,” Sass said. “Humans are smart. They figure out ways to fix things. This might be something that works, and I think we need to encourage people to try things.”
Sass commended the amount of cooperation on council he saw in 2024 and said he looked forward to seeing even stronger communication in 2025.
“This is a good council — it really is,” he said. “We got a lot done in the last two years. This is our area. This is where we live. We’re all in this together, and we need to continue to do the best we can for everyone here.”
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