COASTAL OBSERVER

There were no flags in the Highway 17 median in Pawleys Island over the Fourth of July. The weeds were too high.

Georgetown County is funding another round of maintenance, which will be done sometime in July, while it waits for a private group to take responsibility for the landscaping in the raised medians. It will be the third cleanup in the last year, not enough to keep up with the growth of weeds, but an improvement over the previous year when there was no maintenance at all.

“It should have been done two months ago,” said Chad O’Brien, co-owner of Waccamaw Landscaping.

The company planted the medians in 2015 when they were installed by the state Department of Transportation. The state funded the first year of maintenance, then turned that over to Georgetown County, which had approved the raised medians as part of a package of proposed improvements to the Highway 17 corridor.

Since then, the county has hired various firms to do the work, with mixed results.

When it returned to Waccamaw Landscaping last year, the work had gone from maintenance to remediation. The firm hauled off 20 dump truck loads of weeds and trimmings from the 1.9 miles of median. The $30,000 cleanup included $5,000 for a separate firm to put out traffic cones to reduce the highway to one lane in each direction as the crews worked overnight in the median.

The county tried to get the nonprofit groups interested that conduct median landscaping in Litchfield and south of Pawleys Island in the raised median, but didn’t commit to providing funds.

This year, a group called Mainstreet Pawleys formed to adopt the raised medians.

“We are moving along on that,” said Vida Miller, a former state representative who organized the effort. “It’s just taken awhile to get the legal paperwork done.”

Mainstreet Pawleys got its nonprofit status last month.

“Hopefully, Mainstreet Pawleys will be able to take it over,” O’Brien said.

While the county approved another cleanup, he said the company was only notified two weeks before the holiday weekend. That wasn’t enough time to get permits from the state Department of Transportation, schedule the traffic control firm and adapt his company’s schedule so crews could work overnight on the median.

“Everybody wanted it done by the Fourth,” O’Brien said. “That wasn’t enough notice.”

The renovation of the median last July also followed the holiday. American flags bought by the Pawleys Island-Litchfield Business Association to match those in the other medians couldn’t be displayed, just like this year.

“It’s so overgrown, we can’t put the flags out,” O’Brien said.

While Miller is among those who are disappointed, she said the cleanup will coincide with a fundraising campaign now that Mainstreet Pawleys has its nonprofit status.

“We have not given up, and we hope people will support it,” Miller said.