Beaufort County to decide fate of Highway 278 expansion

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. (WSAV) – Last week, the Hilton Head Island Town Council voted in favor of the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) plan for the Highway 278 corridor and a Memorandum of Agreement with Beaufort County, all designed to get the project driving forward.

So with the voting over for now, what’s next?

Local leaders say the work is far from over.

“The project council defined on Friday has moved the needle to meet the expectations of the community. Now it’s time to get to work with the county and the state,” said Shawn Colin, Hilton Head Island’s town manager. “We’re already starting to move through and identify the improvements and begin starting the conversations to advance those improvements.”

Now that the Town Council has weighed in, it is time to get down to work building the new and improved Highway 278 bridges and corridor to Hilton Head Island.

“It’s going to be one single bridge,” explained Colin. “It is going to be three lanes in each direction. It has the widths of the shoulders, ten feet on the outside and six feet on the inside. It had the multi-use pathway component at 12 feet.”

In addition, the plan includes neighborhood improvements for the native island Stoney community, which is near the new path of the roadway. The town says it has gotten impacts to neighbors there down to .89 of an acre, with the hope to shrink that even further.

It took close to seven years of talk, public meetings and backroom discussions to get to this point, but this is far from a finished product.

Beaufort County still has to sign off on the Memorandum of Agreement for this project. But Colin believes the framework has been laid to set off a good deal for all parties.

“We were very clear in our expectations to make sure that the town had a seat at the table, to make sure that the design elements that were defined by our Town Council and the community were included as this project advances,” he said. “And as long as our partners work together to deliver what council has laid out I would expect that the project will move along.”

Once that is signed, sealed and delivered, the design is next on the list. Only 30% of the elements have been fully fleshed out.

The hope is to get to 60% completed in the next year and 100% in two to three years. That way, the construction phase of the project will be ready to put out for bid.

Then, it’s time to talk money — and a lot of it.

“There’s roughly $300 million of funding that’s been secured, and we’ve heard project estimate somewhere in the $460 to $480 million range,” said Colin.

“Our senator, Tom Davis, who spoke at the meeting on Friday committing that he’ll work with the legislative delegation to help identify funding, whether it’s through SCDOT, the State Infrastructure Bank, federal highways or other sources. Look at every opportunity for funding where it might exist.”

The county is expected to vote on the Memorandum of Agreement later this month.

Colin tells News 3 that once the money is secured and bids go out for construction, the goal is to get the entire project finished by late 2030.