With two weeks to go before the half-cent sales tax takes effect, CARTA decided Friday to seek a $550,000 loan to keep the buses running for two more months.

The new tax goes into effect May 1, and Charleston County budgeted $588,970 from it for the Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority's May and June operating expenses. But the county hasn't worked out exactly when the money would be delivered.

Funds likely will be available in early May, Charleston County Council Chairman Leon Stavrinakis told the CARTA board Friday, but he added that he couldn't make any guarantees. CARTA will have only $30,000 as a cushion against any shortfall. With just two weeks to prepare, the board opted to find a bank or local government that might cover the remaining amount.

"We aren't anticipating a problem. We're not saying we're going to have a problem with receiving county funds," CARTA board Chairman Patterson Smith said. "But since they have not yet (finalized) when it's going to be paid to CARTA, in an abundance of caution we took the action we took today."

County Council is trying to determine whether the county can legally advance money from the sales tax before the money reaches county coffers, Stavrinakis said.

"That's where the problem has been," he said. "The legal conclusion that I think our staff has come up with is that once the revenues are collected, even though they are not here yet, that they are comfortable that we could advance the monies ... and then replenish them out of sales tax revenue."

A portion of the half-cent sales tax, which Charleston County voters approved in a referendum in November, is earmarked for CARTA. The transportation authority ran out of money more than 16 months ago. To survive, it sold property, cut routes and ended night, weekend and holiday service. The tax also will pay for new roads, bridges, mass transit and greenbelts that would range from parks to rural land preservation.

"The county has obviously not just CARTA to be concerned about, but they've got an entire new program that they need to figure out how it's going to be administered, and there is not a road map for that," Smith said. "But we, of course, as everyone knows, don't have a reserve of funds that can give us the luxury of continuing to operate until the funds become available."

The process and planning for how the sales tax money will be collected and distributed is still under discussion. Charleston County Administrator Roland Windham has said he needs to hire five new people to help plan for the tax, but County Council decided Thursday to wait before giving him permission to do it. The vote came after a lengthy debate about pay scales and racial diversity among the more than 1,000 county employees.

Stavrinakis hopes County Council works out decisions on the sales tax Tuesday.

West Ashley resident Anne DeMoth said the county and CARTA should not have waited until the last minute to work out the details.

"The election was in November. They had all this time to find monies to cover the deficit," DeMoth said. "Their finances are confusing."

North Charleston resident Albert Lee, 62, sat in the sun at a Rivers Avenue bus stop Friday and shook his head at the thought of a financing delay. Lee said his travels have been disrupted because some routes were shortened to save money.

"I want them to get the routes back the way they had it," Lee said. "We've had to wait and wait and wait."