State roads chief Christy Hall retires

COLUMBIA – South Carolina’s well-respected transportation leader Christy Hall is retiring after spending the past decade overseeing billions of dollars in highway spending after the state raised its gas tax to fix its roads.

Hall’s retirement announcement as secretary of the South Carolina Department of Transportation was met with praise across the spectrum.

She took one of the most political jobs in state government – who gets new highways, more lanes and better roads – and made it equitable and based on needs, while also convincing those in power that was the best way to operate.

Hall is a “unicorn among state agency heads,” unique in her ability to tell people how it is instead of what they want to hear, but also in earning trust that she’ll do everything she can to solve problems, Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Larry Grooms said Thursday.

“We now have objective criteria by which we measure projects. We know what we are going to do and how much it is going to cost before we do it,” said the Republican from Bonneau. “She took out the guesswork.”

In 2015, Hall took over an agency that had had three directors in two years. The department’s finances were so bad that contractors weren’t sure they would get paid.

South Carolina roads were in such bad shape that factories were threatening to stop expanding unless the gas tax was raised. But the poor management of DOT was an argument against giving them any more money.

Hall came to work for the road agency fresh out of civil engineering school at Clemson University in the mid-1990s and rose through the ranks.

As director, she earned the trust of lawmakers, who said they were impressed with her ability to get as much money as she could from other places to supplement cash from the 12-centper-gallon gas tax increase.

A dozen projects expanding interstates or upgrading old interchanges at major crossroads are under construction or planned through the end of the decade across South Carolina. They include the long-sought expansion of Interstate 26 to three lanes in each direction, to accommodate the thousands of trucks that head from the port at Charleston to Columbia, and the untangling of where Interstates 20, 26 and 126 meet west of downtown Columbia.