PICKENS COUNTY — Residents will see a change the next time they pay their car taxes as the $20 road user fee has been eliminated.

During Monday’s County Council meeting, an ordinance passed 5-1 removing the road user fee after a similar fee in a different county had been deemed illegal by the SC State Supreme Court earlier this year. To make up the lost funds (around $2.3 million were generated from the fee) the County increased the millage rate, raising taxes for some residents.

Previously, the Road User Fee was a $20 fee for each vehicle titled in the County.

County Administrator Ken Roper said at last count there was a little over 117,000 vehicles with almost a third of that money given over to local municipalities, based on how many miles of road they had.

But Roper said the fee was not only not meeting the need of Pickens County, it was also leaving people out.

“How many people do you have that live in your neighborhood whose tags are North Carolina tags,” he asked during an Administrator’s Update video where he explained the Road User Fee — his point being that there are people who live here, own property here, but if their cars are titled somewhere else, they’re not contributing to the road fee.

Monday’s Council meeting changed all that.

“What we’re doing is doing away with the ordinances we think the Supreme Court would not uphold,” Roper explained. “Instead, we amend our existing budget — the one that we’re in now — to take that money we need to raise, that 2.3 million hole that the Supreme Court blew through the middle of our budget, to take that off a fee and put it on a millage.”

The funds to the municipalities for roads was also not included in the new ordinance, with Council Chair Chris Bowers saying it would ne negotiated seperately.

Roper said a perk of the offset was instead of road maintenance funds being funded by people who register their vehicles, it will now be more broadly shouldered by everyone that owns property.

Councilman Alex Saitta was the lone “nay” vote on Monday.

Reach Kasie Strickland at 864-855-0355.