COASTAL OBSERVER

Comments received this week from 400 people who met with traffic planners about a proposal to eliminate left turns from a section of Highway 17 in Litchfield are expected to have an impact on the final version of the project.

“Based on the amount of feedback, I would be surprised if there aren’t changes to the design,” said Ginny Jones, director of public engagement at the state Department of Transportation. “There certainly seem to be some details that are causing concern.”

Whether people favored the proposal largely depended on whether they live on the east side of the highway or the west side. The Litchfield Beaches Property Owners Association opposes eliminating left turns from Litchfield Drive, the only road to the beachfront neighborhoods. The Litchfield Country Club Property Owners Association has tried for years to find a way to improve access to Country Club Drive.

“Corridors are tricky,” Jones said. 

Georgetown County Council Member Stella Mercado said the project will physically divide the area.

“You cannot disconnect our neighborhoods,” she said. “We’re a community.”

The current plan emerged from a 2020 update to a 2003 study of the Highway 17 corridor on Waccamaw Neck that put the stretch in Litchfield at the top of the priority list. The study proposed replacing left turns at Litchfield and Country Club drives with U-turns at the YMCA and Crooked Oak Drive, where new traffic signals would be installed.

After meeting with a small group of residents and officials earlier this year, DOT and its consulting engineers, Mead & Hunt, restored a left turn from  Highway 17 onto Litchfield Drive. Traffic that wants to go south from Litchfield Beach will still need to go north to Crooked Oak and make a U-turn, under the plan.

Nancy Sippel, a Litchfield Beach resident, said she wants to keep the Litchfield Drive intersection as it is. 

“It’s our community, that light,” she said. “We’re basically nothing without that light.”

Sippel was among those who said that the project is designed to keep transient traffic moving at the expense of local residents. She said DOT needs to be focused on a crossing over the Waccamaw River to allow traffic to bypass the Waccamaw Neck.

Marty Farrell, who lives in Litchfield Country Club, said that’s been a familiar theme with area road projects.

“Their whole idea is to get traffic off 17,” he said. “Once again, other people are making decisions for Georgetown County.”

Farrell is among those who take golf carts from the country club to the beach along Litchfield Drive.

After the small-group meetings, the project planners  widened the pedestrian crosswalk from Litchfield Drive to the Litchfield Village complex so it could accommodate golf carts.

“I’ve actually heard more today about golf carts than anything else,” said Jessica Johns, the project manager for Mead & Hunt. She was among those positioned in front of maps of the project. 

She added that the interest in golf carts wasn’t a formal tally.

“My main concern is going to the beach on that golf cart,” one country club resident said. “I know that’s selfish.”

But Farrell, who opposes the project, said the golf cart option raises questions. There is no access to the Litchfield Drive intersection without driving through a gate at Litchfield Village or, if the gate is locked, driving on the shoulder of Highway 17 from the country club entrance, he noted.

Driving on the shoulder of the highway is illegal, he added.

Others were concerned that the proposed Litchfield Drive signal will only stop traffic heading north on Highway 17 to allow for right turns. For southbound traffic, there will be a flashing yellow light at the crosswalk.

Some also questioned if the crosswalk through the raised median will be wide enough for more than one golf cart.

“I think we’re going to need all the talent that the S.C. DOT engineers have to get us out of this,” said Jerry Oakley, president of the country club POA.

He served on County Council when the section of Litchfield was first identified as a problem in the 2003 corridor study.

Bill Ringer, a member of the country club POA board who is challenging Stella Mercado for re-election in the GOP primary, said he and other officers will draft the POA’s formal response.

He said he didn’t attend as a candidate. “It is my understanding that County Council has no say in this project now that it is underway. It is a state and federal project,” he said.

 Mercado said she is “100 percent against this operation.”

Along with ensuring there is connectivity within the community, she said that any work on the highway needs to account for drainage and landscaping.

She also wants to see it include an expansion of the Bike the Neck multipurpose path.

Linda Ketron, a founder and the long-time leader of Bike the Neck, told the project planners that their proposed sidewalk needs to be a multi-purpose path.

They told her they would consider that if enough people mentioned it. But Ketron was frustrated that the drop-in forum in the Waccamaw Intermediate School cafeteria didn’t encourage the spread of ideas.

Tom Stickler, a Hagley resident, served on the advisory committee for the updated corridor study. He didn’t like the Litchfield plan then and doesn’t like it now. He proposed a single traffic signal at Country Club Drive synced with the Litchfield Drive signal to improve access.

“They could have done it seven years ago or over a weekend,” he said.

In addition to digesting the comments from the meeting along with those submitted online (which will be accepted until May 29), the project planners will also update the area’s traffic study in June. The current study is from 2019 with a annual growth factor of 1.5 percent.

The timetable for the $10 million project calls for right-of-way acquisition to start in the fall and construction to begin a year later.

That could change, Jones said, if there are changes to the design. “You like to have your design pretty locked in,” she said. “If we change it, we will come back and share that with the public.”

Comments on the project can be sent at projectportal.scdot.org.