COASTAL OBSERVER

Georgetown County would limit golf carts to roads with speed limits of 25 mph or less under a proposal from Council Member Bob Anderson.

“These golf carts on the Waccamaw Neck are traveling on roads that have 35-mile-an-hour speed limits. They just can’t keep up, and they’re causing a lot of trouble with people passing on double-yellow lines,” he told the council last week.

He asked the county attorney, Jay Watson, help him draft an ordinance to limit golf  carts to slower roads.

State law allows golf carts to operate on secondary roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or less and restricts their range to 4 miles of their registered address or, if that’s in a gated community, the community’s access point. The law prohibited local governments from restricting golf carts until it was amended last year.

The county could adopt an ordinance to “stipulate the hours, methods, and locations of golf cart operations, provided that golf carts may be operated only on a highway where the speed limit is thirty-five miles per hour or less.” A county ordinance could also allow golf carts with proper lighting to operate at night. Under state law they can only operate during daylight hours.

Anderson said after the meeting that he has seen the problem first-hand on Kings River Road between Waverly Road and Willbrook Boulevard. “They can’t even do 25 miles an hour,” he said.

Watson told Anderson last week that state law already governs golf carts.

That allows them on roads with a 35 mph speed limit or less, Council Member Stella Mercado said.

“I’m saying it should be 25 or less,” Anderson said.

Council Chairman Clint Elliott acknowledged that the law gives the county some authority.

“They have left it up to counties if we want to allow golf carts to be on roads 35 miles or less,” he said.

“We haven’t done that, have we,” Anderson said.

“And we’re not going to,” Elliott said. “We’ve already got too many problems over in that area to start with. We don’t need to be regulating that kind of thing.”

He did offer to have Watson look into it.

Anderson said he’d do that himself.

This week, he said he wanted to speak with state Sen. Stephen Goldfinch to see what the county could do to restrict golf carts to 25 mph roads. If that’s possible, he wants to know whether the lower limit could be applied only to the Waccamaw Neck.

Anderson said he would rather apply a lower speed limit than try to restrict golf carts on specific streets.

“I would rather do a broad-brush approach,” he said. “That way we don’t get up with what we did on trucks.”

The council last week deferred action that would have amended the ordinance that restricts trucks with 10 or more wheels on certain county-maintained roads. Elliott initiated that in order to limit through-trucks on Turntable Road in Murrells Inlet.

But Council Members Louis Morant and Raymond Newton said they thought the amendment was too broad and gave county staff too much leeway to limit truck traffic.

The current ordinance only bans through-trucks on Hesterville and Center roads in the northwest part of the county. They were being used as a shortcut by big trucks, Newton said.

The amendment wouldn’t close any roads, Watson said, just provide a mechanism to do so. “Right now, there’s nothing if the county’s got a problem,” he said.

Morant said the decision should be made by council, not by staff.

Watson said he would come up with some criteria for limiting commercial traffic for staff to apply. They would then make a recommendation to the council, which would have the final say.

In the meantime, Elliott said he plans to introduce a separate ordinance for Turntable Road next week, when the council has a special meeting scheduled to give second reading to an ordinance to place a referendum on a local option sales tax on the November ballot.

He said he will check with his colleagues first to see if they have any concerns.