COLUMBIA, S.C. – Officials at South Carolina State University are adamant that they will find a way to complete the school’s 197,000-square-foot planned transportation center named for U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, even though an audit has raised serious doubts in the minds of state legislators.
Clyburn, an S.C. State graduate responsible for securing the federal designation and money that launched the project in 1998, says the expected $83 million needed to complete the complex’s six buildings and parking garage can be raised in private donations.
“The earmarking process is not the only way,” he told The Associated Press. As for the current anti-earmark climate in Washington, he added, “What’s true today may not be true tomorrow.”
The school had been counting on a continuing flow of congressional earmarks for the James E. Clyburn University Transportation Center, said the Legislative Audit Council’s executive director Thomas Bardin. It released its report last week.
The report found that mismanagement, inexperience and a lack of oversight are largely to blame for years of delays on the project at the historically Black college. The center was announced 13 years ago as a showpiece for research and training in fields including mass transit, traffic engineering and bridge design.
Blunders included beginning work in 2006 on land the school didn’t own and failing to do a traffic study until 2009 – seven years after the school began receiving federal money for construction.
Between 2002 and 2005, Congress allocated $24 million to the Orangeburg school for the project’s first phase, though it’s spent only a third of that so far.
