Hole opened by snow is tip of the iceberg for western York County highway

Last week’s ice and snow has opened up a hole in a western York County highway, and locals are upset the road has yet to be resurfaced since the project was first approved by the voters a dozen years ago.

S.C. 97, connecting Hickory Grove to Smyrna, saw a foot-deep hole open up in the middle of the roadway late Monday, likely due to moisture seeping into cracks after last weekend’s ice and snow. That upset Smyrna’s Frances Faulkner, who has been waiting for the highway to get resurfaced since it passed the “Pennies for Progress” referendum in 2003.

“We can’t get our road fixed, and now the road’s caved in,” Faulkner said. “It needed to be fixed 20 years ago.”

Even as state Department of Transportation crews work to fill the latest hole, road officials are hoping to get the 4.5-mile stretch of highway paved as soon as this summer in line with the original Pennies vision.

“We’re going to have to re-do the base of the road first,” said Patrick Hamilton, the recently-appointed manager of York County’s Pennies for Progress program. “The road is in such poor condition, if you resurface it with cracks in the concrete, it will open up cracks in the asphalt.”

Hamilton toured the road on Thursday morning along with Assistant County Manager David Harmon and Frances Faulkner’s husband, Chris Faulkner, who is also Smyrna’s mayor. He agreed the highway, which is bare concrete and about two to four feet narrower than the standard state highway, is in need of repair.

“(Faulkner) told me they had a school bus and a truck that couldn’t fit on the road at the same time, and one had to get off on the shoulder,” Hamilton said. “It’s an old, old road.”

The highway is part of a multi-phase project to widen a “loop” through western York County that includes Nimitz Road, S.C. 211 and S.C. 49, stretching from north of Smyrna through Hickory Grove and Sharon to the south side of York.

Other portions of the $15 million widening project have been finished since 2003, but Hamilton said work on the S.C. 97 portion of the loop has been held up by right-of-way issues. A disused railroad track runs along the highway, and the county had to negotiate right-of-way access both with the railroad and with private property owners to whom portions of the track reverted after it was shut down.

With those issues settled, Hamilton says the project should go to bid this spring, with construction starting as early as this summer, using some $7 million remaining in the project budget collected by the penny-on-the-dollar tax before the latest round of Pennies projects was approved in 2011.

In the meantime, the highway remains open after DOT crews laid gravel this week to keep the route passable. “Routine maintenance” should fill the hole with asphalt soon, said resident DOT maintenance engineer Clint Beaver, but a quick solution may be stymied as low temperatures prevent the blacktop setting properly. Beaver said many plants slow production in the winter months as cooler temperatures keep demand low.

S.C. 97 isn’t alone in waiting for completion. Twelve projects approved by voters in the 2003 referendum are still in the design and permitting phase. Another 31 of 69 projects from the second Pennies referendum had to be carried over to Pennies 3 after cost overruns ate into the $174.8 million raised by the penny tax.

Only five of the 62 items on the 2011 list have been completed, and two projects approved on the 2003 list – plans to widen Ebenezer Road and Eden Terrace in Rock Hill – were dropped after they weren’t carried over to the 2011 list.

York County voters will be asked to approve a fourth round of Pennies funding in a referendum next year.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 4:42 PM with the headline "Hole opened by snow is tip of the iceberg for western York County highway."