Sep 24, 2026 · 50 min · 11 segments
In the debut episode of Talking Charleston, Mayor William Cogswell sits down with Councilman Ross Appel, who represents parts of West Ashley and James Island. The conversation was recorded September…
Ross AppelGuest
William CogswellHost
The way I explain it to people, and there's a lot of different entry points to this conversation, is that until very recently, relatively speaking, South Carolina was not a very large, fast growing And I think that unlike some of our neighbors in the southeast, we don't have a lot of the same mechanisms in place to deal with traffic before the growth arrives.
The South Carolina Department of Transportation has the fourth most miles in their inventory, and that's not adjusted.
I don't mean to interrupt you, but I think it's a fascinating fact because I remember this when I was in the state legislature.
Being kind of blown away because we're near the bottom in terms of geographic You know area in terms.
We're a smaller state geographically but we have one of the largest number of highway miles, road miles, of any state in the country.
I think most people don't realize that that really dates back to almost 100 years ago when We did have a very powerful federal delegation, probably when the term pork barrel spending was first invented because our senators and congressmen were very successful in getting a lot of federal dollars to come to South Carolina and pave a lot of roads.
And when you are a local municipality, but you don't own or operate 80% of the roads in your community, that becomes a challenge
And in addition to the ownership and control piece, as we all know, we don't have very much authority when it comes to revenue money right so we don't have the um authority to impose unilaterally um taxes for roads and things of that nature there's no legislative authority for that home rule in south carolina is pretty broad but it sort of stops at the taxation piece.
And so we're left with a situation where we're reliant upon the half cent sales tax at the county level, but it's not something that we control our own destiny on as a municipality.
And so we're doing our best working within this existing framework that we find ourselves in, but it's hard to say it's ideal.
Again, you've got As you mentioned, you've got roads that are owned and operated by the state, but they don't really have the funding mechanism.
Well, they have the funding mechanism, but just not enough funding to take care of them.
The way I explain it to people, and there's a lot of different entry points to this conversation, is that until very recently, relatively speaking, South Carolina was not a very large, fast growing And I think that unlike some of our neighbors in the southeast, we don't have a lot of the same mechanisms in place to deal with traffic before the growth arrives.
The South Carolina Department of Transportation has the fourth most miles in their inventory, and that's not adjusted.
I don't mean to interrupt you, but I think it's a fascinating fact because I remember this when I was in the state legislature.
Being kind of blown away because we're near the bottom in terms of geographic You know area in terms.
We're a smaller state geographically but we have one of the largest number of highway miles, road miles, of any state in the country.
I think most people don't realize that that really dates back to almost 100 years ago when We did have a very powerful federal delegation, probably when the term pork barrel spending was first invented because our senators and congressmen were very successful in getting a lot of federal dollars to come to South Carolina and pave a lot of roads.
And when you are a local municipality, but you don't own or operate 80% of the roads in your community, that becomes a challenge
And in addition to the ownership and control piece, as we all know, we don't have very much authority when it comes to revenue money right so we don't have the um authority to impose unilaterally um taxes for roads and things of that nature there's no legislative authority for that home rule in south carolina is pretty broad but it sort of stops at the taxation piece.
And so we're left with a situation where we're reliant upon the half cent sales tax at the county level, but it's not something that we control our own destiny on as a municipality.
And so we're doing our best working within this existing framework that we find ourselves in, but it's hard to say it's ideal.
Again, you've got As you mentioned, you've got roads that are owned and operated by the state, but they don't really have the funding mechanism.
Well, they have the funding mechanism, but just not enough funding to take care of them.
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