Pothole Politics: Understanding Roads Repairs and Government

Ever wondered how to get that pesky pothole fixed? We talk with GP McLeer, Mayor of Fountain Inn and director of Upstate Mobility Alliance to break down the complex world of local government and transportation. Learn who's responsible for roads, how projects get prioritized, and what you can do to advocate for improvements in your community.

Links:

• SCDOT's "Who Owns My Road?" interactive map website

• SCDOT Project Viewer Map website

• GPATS (Greenville Pickens Area Transportation Study) website

• SCDOT STIP (State Transportation Improvement Program) website

• SPATS (Spartanburg Area Transportation Study) website

• ACATS (Anderson Clemson Area Transportation Study) website

Transcript

Katy Smith: Okay, GP, we have this podcast on local government and state government, mostly local issues. And we always emphasize to people that we believe local government is as if not more important than federal government. And the thing that always hits the message home with people is that potholes drive them crazy. And it's usually local government that potentially deals with potholes. So this seems like a really simple question, but I think it's probably not as simple as I might think. If I have a pothole on my street, how do I get it fixed?

GP McLeer: It is one of the most popular questions people ask. How does my pothole get fixed? How does my road get fixed? And there are a lot of complicated answers to that question. And we'll get to at some point, I think, why they're complicated, why complication isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can be intimidating.

The first question, though, that people need to think about when their road needs attention, whether it's your pothole or it's a bumpy ride, is first, who owns the road? So there are a lot of roads in this state, and they have pretty much four different owners. They could have one for a private road, a city road, a county road, or a state road. In all of those scenarios, those entities are responsible for the maintenance of that road and the upkeep, and if it needs to expand.

So to answer your question, if it's your driveway and you've got a pothole, I'm sorry, but you do have to go to Lowe's and get a thing of cold patch and put it on there. So take that out of the equation. Maybe that's an HOA road or it could be privately owned by an individual or a company. You've got to take care of that yourself. But after that, the cities own roads, counties own roads, and the state owns roads. What's unique about South Carolina is South Carolina has the fourth largest road network in the country.

Katy Smith: Wow.

GP McLeer: In terms of state-owned roads. So you think about other states, every road that's out there, somebody owns, city, county, state. South Carolina owns the fourth largest amount of miles. We own 41,000 miles of roads in South Carolina.

Katy Smith: And I would presume in terms of square miles, we are not the fourth highest on the list in the United States.

GP McLeer: Correct. We are not one of the largest states geographically either. And so we have a disproportionate amount of ownership of roads in the state. So the state is responsible for 41,000 miles of roads. Cities and counties are responsible for a lot less. So when you think about a road, you think about communities like the one I live in in Fountain Inn, the vast majority of our roads are owned by the state. Pretty much look at a road, it's probably a state road. Cities, at least our city, owns, for the most part, internal roads. Think of neighborhood roads, maybe small alleys. Those probably are ours, but for the most part, everything in our city is owned by the state, which means that if you've got a problem, you have to go to who owns it. So you're going to have to go to the city, the county, or the state to get it fixed. And there are different levels of sort of red tape that you have to go through at each of those levels.

So that's the first question you have to think about yourself. Now, how do you find that out? It's not that hard at the local level. Cities and counties, you can call, call your public works department, or if they have a streets department, call, and they'll pretty easily be able to tell you who owns what road. There's also a website from SCDOT.

The easiest way to do it is just Google "who owns my road, South Carolina," and there's a website at SCDOT. It's an interactive map. You can type in your county and type in the street name, and it'll tell you whether or not it's a DOT road or not a DOT road. It won't tell you if it's a city or county. It'll just say, this is a state road, this is not a state road. And you can do that and find out at least, does the state own my road? And at that point, I'd recommend calling city or county, city hall or county square.

So that is the first question to ask yourself before you go on the journey of how does my pothole get fixed? So after you find out who owns your road, the next question you want to ask yourself, and these are things that you're able to find out on your own, you want to find out if your road is already on a list to be updated. There are a lot of ways to find this out already. So SCDOT does have all of their projects online. To SCDOT's credit, SCDOT has a massive road system which we already talked about to maintain. They need robust records and a lot of transparency. All of their projects that are programmed for the year and onward and ones that are under construction are all on their project viewer map. You can go online, you can zoom in and see all the projects and you can get the project number and a lot of other details from it. And usually you can even see who's on staff who's overseeing that project.

And you can reach out to them directly with questions. You can also just call or email their office, and they're pretty quick to respond to those requests.

So you can start there, especially if it's a state-owned road. If it's city and county, a lot of them put those maybe in their budget documents. Sometimes it's online. But again, for cities, particularly around the Greenville area and the county, just call. They're all super nice people. They enjoy working with the public. Just give them a call and ask, where is my road on the list? Now, the answer might be no, and we'll get to that in a second, but they'll at least be able to give you direction on that.

There's also a couple other areas that people can look at because transportation is like an onion. Every layer you peel back may make you cry a little bit more. So you can talk to SCDOT. You can talk to your city or county. There's also other documents and other plans out there. The state itself has a statewide State Transportation Improvement Program, the STIP. A lot feeds into that, including more local projects. So there's some governing bodies that I'm going to get into in a second at the more local level in the Greenville area that put together their own Transportation Improvement Program, TIP. And in that document, it lists out all of the roads that a portion of the state funds that come to our area are going to be allocated towards. So there's another list of roads in the TIP that you can look at. That TIP is put together by a group called the Greenville Pickens Area Transportation Study, GPATS.

It is what is called a metropolitan planning organization, a federally designated MPO. There's also ACATS, Anderson Clemson Area Transportation Study. There's also SPATS, Spartanburg Area Transportation Study. These federally designated MPOs are responsible for prioritizing more local projects using state funds and also some federal funds. So typically in those areas, you've got a couple of county council members, you've got some legislative delegation members, you've got for GPATS, for instance, all of the mayors in the GPATS area are on that. And a couple other stakeholders like for GPATS, Greenlink GTA has a seat on there as well as SCDOT commissioners. So those are local leaders who are helping prioritize some of those state dollars because you don't want all of those state dollars being dictated in a room in Columbia. You want people on the ground who understand the projects and the communities. And this is one way that occurs.

You have who owns the road and who's responsible for the road. There's also processes to get them on the list to be done. And sometimes those lists are impacted by not only local priorities and the people around the table that know their communities, but sometimes it is about funding sources. So there are federal sources, there are state sources, there are sometimes local sources that go towards road projects, and sometimes those will also dictate how things get on a list and where they're prioritized. So for instance, federal funding almost always requires some sort of match.

And so a community is going to have to come up with that match. Sometimes they've got the cash. Sometimes they need to go find it through a grant, through maybe the state dollars. They can start piecing that together.

Katy Smith: If I may interrupt you, just in case someone's not familiar with this term of match, because it's very much in the world that GP and I are in of government and in nonprofits too, that like it might say, okay, we're going to provide 50% of the cost of the project, but you local government need to pay for the other 50%, right?

GP McLeer: So if it's 10 million.

Katy Smith: You got to come up with the other 10, or it could be an 80-20 match or anything like that.

GP McLeer: A lot of federal stuff is 80-20. The federal government will provide 80%. You have to come up with 20%. A state has different ones depending on the project and the pot of money you're going after. So sometimes those sources impact the priority. Additionally, what can also impact the priority, whether it's whatever group you're talking to, is how much money is available. How much cash do you have for the match? And also how much obviously is in the big pot. But if you come to the table with more, whether it's you've already spent the money on planning or you've got the money at the table to do it, if your city comes to the table with additional funds, you're more likely to get higher on the list because that means your project is closer to shovel ready.

So that's another thing at play here and how things get on the list is how prepared are you to actually do this work? Because it is one thing to say this road needs a lot of repair. It's like, well, the whole road or a section of the road? Is it just a surface job or is it we're going down to the dirt and we're rebuilding the road? Does the road run along a rail line? All of those things are factors in this. And I think it's important to kind of keep that in check too. When you think about roads, it's not just a simple necessarily buying something from Lowe's, some cold patch and putting it in. There's a lot at play for roads. There's utilities under roads. There's utilities over roads. There's private businesses. There's private residences that are along that road. The ability to widen a road is complicated at times. So there's a lot at play when it comes to trying to fix your pothole in front of your house. And so I think it's important to always remember that the complexity is there because I think it has helped me sort of take a measured approach on, okay, if we want this road fixed, let's think about everything that goes along with fixing this road and not just get me a bucket of cold patch right now.

Katy Smith: Okay, well, that was really helpful to understand how complicated it is and how layered it is, like both literally and figuratively. What about the headaches that I have when I'm driving around that might not be a bumpy road or a pothole, like terrible congestion where I watch a light change repeatedly without barely moving. Or I can see the green arrow to let me go left, but I'm stuck in a row of cars going straight. How do those kinds of things get addressed?

GP McLeer: Some of them are easier than others. And sometimes traffic flows do change over time. And so light signals do need readjusting. Or sometimes maybe there's a glitch. You know, there's somebody hit a pole one day and kind of put dust in the computer like we used to have to do with, you know, open the CD-ROM and blow it. You know, sometimes there are simple solutions, but those agencies may not know about it until you tell them. So I think first and foremost, making sure that any issues you're experiencing are communicated is valuable because it's hard to keep up with all of the different needs at all the different times across, A, the whole state if you're SCDOT, but even in your own community. So getting that communicated is important first.

So congestion-related projects are kind of similar in road improvement projects. They may not involve resurfacing, but they involve widening. They involve additional traffic signals. They involve impact studies, car counts. Because when you do this, you don't want to redo an intersection every two years. You want to do it for the long haul.

So I think making those concerns heard and then same questions of, is it already on a list? And how do I get it on that list if it's not already there? Those are the two questions you want to ask yourself. And for congestion, I think it's also interesting to think about, is it happening all the time or only a couple times a day? Is it happening only around major events that happen a couple times a year? Or is it happening throughout the week? Is it only happening on Sundays? You know, before or after school, because those are factors, because you do want to take a step back and take an objective approach to this. For instance, in our community, we had a traffic signal on exit 23 on 385 that was put in 2018-19 on coming north on 385.

Everyone wanted it on the southbound side. Long story short, it's coming. It's currently waiting on the control box. But why did it take so long to only put both lights when the public really wanted it over here on the southbound side, but it was installed first on the northbound side? It's the same question of when does the traffic occur? Traffic coming south on 385 to get off at exit 23, peaks twice a day, give or take. And when it peaks, it peaks, but it peaks twice a day. And so the traffic count, when you count the number of cars that go through that intersection back when they first did the first light, was not as large as the truck traffic that was coming northbound and turning onto 418 and going through Pelzer and Williamston and onward, sort of the pre-toll road Southern Connector. And so they had a lot more traffic on that side of the interstate than they did coming back into town from Greenville.

Now those numbers are different. And it took us, I mean, it took us from 2019 or early 2020 till, well, not even yet, because it's not on yet, but for that light on the other side to come to fruition. And a lot of it was, yes, us advocating for it. And I think that's a big part of this too, is keeping up the messaging and communicating the continued need, but it took us a while. And I guess let me use Let me break that open a little bit more because it's a really great example of what we talk about when how many layers of complexity there are to this work and a little bit of why.

So we got one light. We really wanted the other light. We needed the traffic count, and then we needed to get it on SCDOT's list. We finally got it on SCDOT's list, but because it's a U.S. Interstate, it also requires federal DOT approval. And so SCDOT put it on their signal list. It went to the federal government, took a while there to get approved, finally got approved. Then it had to be funded and then it had to be put out to bid. And it actually had to be put out to bid twice because the first bids came in too high. So it took us four years, almost five years to get one traffic signal put up because of the complexity of the process and understanding the dynamics and us constantly pitching like, hey, we've got another business opening on this road. We've got yet another business. There's increased traffic. I'm getting a lot of complaints about this. Please hurry up. And SCDOT never disagreed that the need was coming, but they had to go through their process. And I think that's important to remember in this whole conversation is improving your roads isn't just about calling up your local government representative or the state agency saying, come fix it, and then boom, it's done.

Again, take a step back and think about how can this be done objectively in terms of a system of roads across this state and across your community. You don't want just subjectivity that my road's worse than my neighbor's or they think their road is worse than mine. So that's not a good way to make priorities. So SCDOT, for instance, has really straight, stringent guidelines on what triggers a traffic signal. So you have to kind of meet those and understand those things in order to really kind of get your project higher up the list.

Katy Smith: Okay, this is something that's hitting me, like this larger concept around government, is that there are folks that get really frustrated about government not being efficient enough. So someone might say, if it's obvious that a light was needed for four years, that is super inefficient. Other people, or some of the same people, are very concerned about government spending. And that sometimes to help make sure dollars are going in the right place, or if there are limited dollars that need to be spent really well, it makes a process that's slower. Is that a fair statement?

GP McLeer: I think so. You know, take the two light example. I'm able to articulate why that first light went, even though I still believe I was with I'm with the public. Like that one should have come as well. We needed both. But I understood what's we kind of dug into it of, oh, this is why we're doing it. So the traffic count isn't high enough on this side yet. Oh, it's peaking only. I'm getting calls because everyone's stuck in traffic at the same in the same one hour block. But if you go on down that intersection at 10 a.m., there's no traffic. Now, that has changed, hence SCDOT putting in the new light. But at the time, that's how those decisions are made. And so I think it's important to have government that's also accountable and transparent. And I think using the taxpayer dollars wisely necessitates objectivity. And if that takes a second longer in terms of especially infrastructure investments to make sure that all of those metrics are being met, that yes, this road is in poor condition by every measure that we can come up with. If there's increased traffic, we can show that with data. That builds a stronger case that this was a good use of taxpayer funding. And I think as advocates for better mobility across the upstate, we want to help add to that. I think community members...

Giving the agencies and governing bodies those calls, giving them the data that this is a problem for me is really important because it does help move the needle. And so I think that that accountability is something that we don't want to lose sight of.

Katy Smith: That's great. Right. Well, if you're listening and you're like, I still don't exactly understand how to fix my pothole. I think a big takeaway from what GP is saying is that you have people in your government who want to help you with these kinds of problems. Your elected officials and your staff of local government, call them up and they will be delighted to help you understand the process and help you know how to best advocate and follow along. It can take a long time, but sticking with it and following the process, you can see an impact over time.

GP McLeer: Yes. And I also remember that we've all gone through the same thing. All of us who have been in elected office, you don't just immediately get infused with knowledge about how it works. You know, you have it's there is a learning curve.

Katy Smith: Yeah.

GP McLeer: And a lot of times we've I've learned how this system works by fielding questions and me turning around and asking them and saying, well, how do I get this on the list? And what do I need to do? Do I need to help push forward a traffic study so that we have, like I said, sort of like a little bit more to bring to the table instead of just a cold ask that we've thought about this. We already have a plan in place. We want your help. Do I need to, who do I need to call? Do I need to, how often do I need to check in? You know, that's been from constituents calling me and me turning around and asking those same questions. And so I think the more questions you ask also, the more that our elected officials, go and explore those answers. And if there's changes to the system that we can advocate for, I think we should definitely be at the table for that. And if you want to lower congestion, if you want to take 40 cars off the road, maybe you want to add a bus to the mix. And that's an advocacy angle. If you want another signal, it's, hey, tell your elected officials, hey, let's do a traffic count on this road. Let's get the data so that we can tell them there is a traffic problem here. So I think that advocacy piece for individuals is really important because it's helping those elected officials navigate the system as well.

Katy Smith: That's great. Well, it feels like there's one thing that's worth noting, which is that sometimes these solutions for roads and for you as users of them can be addressed by things that are not about widening or repaving. So it is really worth noting for y'all something GP mentioned that he noted buses. If you could take 40 people off the road and put them on one bus, imagine how much less their congestion is. That doesn't mean you have to get out of your car and get on a bus. But if other people did it, it would make your journey easier. Sidewalks to get kids walking to school, like to Monarch Elementary, reduces the congestion on Five Forks Road. So sometimes those things that don't have to do with roads themselves can make life a lot easier. So please know that if you're like, we don't need more buses, like buses might make your life easier in your car, as an example.

GP McLeer: Yeah, I think you have to think about transportation, on the whole spectrum, which is one reason why it's the Department of Transportation. It's one reason why folks like GPATS that I mentioned earlier also deal with trail funding and bus funding or public transit funding. It's because we have to think about how people move across the region. And there are a lot of ways to get around. And whether it's walking safely to school or to work, or it's taking the bus, or it's hopping on a bike on a trail. Those are very important alternatives that A, have a healthy lifestyle choice of walking or biking to work if you have the ability to get to work that way is really great. But then also the congestion part. I mean, that is part of the answer because the truth is there's not a lot of right-of-way to widen more roads with. I mean, if you've got a road in front of your house, imagine that your road is now the most trafficked road in your community, are you willing to sell part of your property or to have it widened? And is your neighbor? And is the next neighbor? Is the next neighbor? And that's what it takes to widen a road. And studies show widening doesn't really fix congestion the way that most people think that it does.

So sometimes it's needed, but not all the time is it as impactful. So I think we have to think about transportation also in the grand scheme of things. How are we getting to and from? And it's probably the answer doesn't have to be one car with one person in it.

Katy Smith: Well, GP, this was very helpful to me and hopefully to you all listening to know there are ways to get your potholes filled, but there's a series of questions you need to ask and steps your government's going to have to take. So we have a lot of links to put in the show notes from GP. And we'll be sure to get those in there for you so you can take a look to learn more. But thank you for all that you do for mobility and for effective government, GP. Really appreciate you.

GP McLeer: Thank you so much. I hope I helped a little bit.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.