South Carolina must improve its anemic effort at secondary road repair.

State Sen. Scott Richardson, R-Hilton Head Island, will introduce a good proposal in the General Assembly this year, another in his long effort to get his colleagues to quit ignoring the growing problem.

South Carolinians pay the lowest gas tax in the country, and the legislature refuses to address it. The state has been stuck on the same flat fee since 1987, with no provision for income to rise with inflation. It is bad policy, especially in a state with 41,000 miles of state-owned roads to maintain, one of the largest systems in the country.

The state Department of Transportation Commission calls the current situation a "crisis." It says the shortfall for maintenance is $560 million a year, and the shortfall for new construction is $1.3 billion a year.

The state has robbed the maintenance funds in order to match federal dollars. That is smart because otherwise the state would throw away 80 percent of the cost of a project because it couldn't come up with a 20 percent match.

But the state system -- which includes many "city" streets throughout Beaufort County and statewide -- suffers.

Richardson's plan would levy a 5 percent franchise fee on oil companies doing business in the state. His bill has lots of advantages:

It raises a significant sum of money at a time when piddling responses are too late.

It would raise $268 million a year, half going to maintenance and half to larger road improvement projects.

It gives the DOT new bonding power it needs to address major needs quicker.

It avoids the direct tax to the consumer that seems to scare so many legislators.

Richardson's approach is preferable to the hike in vehicle registration fees recently endorsed by the DOT Commission. And it is preferable to a plan to redirect $60 million from gas tax and vehicle license fee revenues back to the DOT maintenance fund. That should be done, but that does not resolve the significantly more costly problem the state finds itself in.

For too long, the issue has been ignored. Richardson's plan accepts reality and does something about it. That is an approach needed by the full General Assembly.