Charleston County Council’s most important job in 2026 undoubtedly will be specifying what voters would get — in terms of road improvements, public transit, parks and land conservation — if they agree to extend the county’s existing half-percent transportation sales tax when they go to the polls next fall.
To that end, several conservation groups recently made a compelling case that greenbelts — a catch-all legal term that includes everything from urban parks to rural conservation easements — should get a significantly larger slice of the sales tax pie.
As Maddy Quon recently reported, the Lowcountry Land Trust, Open Space Institute and Ducks Unlimited submitted a detailed request that would protect the county’s rural areas, improve public access to waterways, conserve ecologically sensitive areas, reduce flooding and support rural livelihoods. And while every dollar committed to the county’s greenbelt program is arguably a dollar not spent on improving roads, the groups note that protecting rural areas slows the increases in traffic congestion and therefore reduces the need to spend on new and expanded roads.
The difficult decision will be how much to allocate. The groups have asked for more than $750 million of the projected $4.3 billion for land conservation work on the rural side of the county’s urban growth boundary.
We find their request very defensible and grounded in logic, while we also recognize that County Council will see more requests for road improvements, road maintenance and public transit than it can fund through an extended sales tax. If the county agrees to the $750 million request and keeps its policy of spending 50 percent of greenbelt proceeds in urban areas, that would come to $1.5 billion, or about 35 percent of the total raised.
That’s a lot, perhaps too much, but we urge County Council to first consider steering a larger percentage of greenbelt proceeds toward rural areas, perhaps even $750 million, while giving urban areas a lesser but still significant amount.
The biggest problem with the 2024 sales tax referendum — which voters overwhelmingly rejected — was that it featured a highly controversial road project: extending Interstate 526 to James and Johns islands. But the proposed greenbelt allotment was another strike against it, as we argued at the time. While it would have set aside $432 million for urban and rural greenbelts, more than the 2004 and 2016 referendums combined, that sum was only 8 percent of the $5.4 billion that was projected to be raised. That was a far smaller portion than the 17 percent share in the original 2004 tax and down from 10 percent in the 2016 transportation sales tax.
Charleston County’s greenbelt program enjoys widespread popularity and has leveraged more than $200 million in other governmental and private investment. In comparison, road projects often get bogged down due to environmental and local impacts.
Nate Berry, chief land protection officer at Open Space Institute, noted that anyone driving outside the metro area routinely notices new development where there once were only forests and fields, and without an extension and expansion of the greenbelt program, that trend will continue.
