CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – Horry County Council leaders announced Tuesday their plans to spend about $12.9 million dollars on a piece of property along International Drive.
Horry County Council Chairman Mark Lazarus says the land is wetlands, and the county wants to protect it from development.
This comes after several environmentalists have filed lawsuits against Horry County to stop the paving of International Drive.
Lazarus says they’ll use the land for a mitigation bank to earn credits they can use on other infrastructure projects.
“When you build roads, you will damage wetlands or sensitive areas. By law, what you have to do is mitigate those damages. The law says then you have to buy into a mitigation bank which is basically a conservation area,” said Lazarus.
Lazarus says this piece of property would give the county more than enough mitigation credits to complete Ride III projects.
The property the county plans to buy is about 3,700 acres, and Lazarus says they’ll use leftover funding from Ride II money to pay for it.
The purchase has not been talked about in any open meeting before Tuesday night’s council meeting when the agenda was changed to add a resolution to transfer funds to purchase the property.
“What we didn’t want to happen is for others who were seeking that property to know that we as a county were after it to get other people looking and then get into a bidding war,” said Lazarus.
Council leaders were also told Tuesday night there are still four road projects left to complete in Ride II.
International Drive is only about half of the way finished. The county has spent $25,500,000 so far on International Drive alone. The project was budgeted to cost $19,000,000 less than that.
Lazarus says the project is over budget because of litigation costs with environmentalists against the project and inflation because the projected costs were given about twelve years ago.
With some projects coming in over budget, News13 asked Lazarus how there’s still money left in the Ride II account to use for additional projects like the one announced Tuesday.
“Our collections were higher than projected. So, between the higher projected revenues that we received, between the projects that came under budget, and between the lower cost of the P25 system that we allocated funds out of there for, that gave us extra revenues.”
Lazarus says there will still be additional revenue left in Ride II and the council will have to debate how it wants to use the money on other road projects.
