By Fred Palm, contributing editor  |  The S.C. Joint Bond Review Committee last week sent Charleston County’s funding application to extend Interstate 526  to a four-person subcommittee to provide the due diligence of the facts of the financing.  Why? Because years of skittish details about the project just do not fly.

Core issue: The basic problem that caused the delay by the Joint Bond Review Committee is found in the half-truths, equivocations, shell games, bait and switch, balderdash and peekaboo funding sources draped with inchoate statements about other displaced projects from  the majority of Charleston County Council that backs the I-526 extension (I-526X).  Through  proposed no-see-em fiscal sleights of hand, the council’s Majority of Five offers to push through this incredibly expensive highway with zero contingency built off of a well-founded cost estimate because at its root, the extension is unjustifiable.