After packed RRCO meeting, residents ask county to take over local access roads

Presenter: As more River Road and Santa Clara residents discover that in addition to paying taxes, they must also pay for all maintenance and repair of their own streets, Lane County is asked to take action. During public comment March 18, Linda Lovick:

Linda Lovick: My name is Linda Lovick. I live in River Road neighborhood right here in Eugene. We are very happy in our home and imagine this to be our aging-in-place home.

Within the last couple of months it has come to our attention that the street we live on is known as a county local access road, ‘inclusive of all the public use that goes along with that,’ which sounds benign and neutral enough, but it turns out that designation is a huge problem for those who reside there.

[00:00:44] It turns out that, shocking as it may sound, as a local access road, the homeowners are responsible for the street’s maintenance and repairs. Logically, the only way for that to happen is for homeowners to form some kind of road association and divide the costs for maintenance and repairs. Well, that just isn’t going to happen.

[00:01:06] Several residents are elderly, and I’m just speaking about our quarter-mile-long street. A couple of them are even homebound. Others are retired and on fixed incomes. Others in their working lives. Others have children. Our street is mixed and looks just like most other streets around.

[00:01:23] But that isn’t the point. The point is fairness, or lack of fairness. My understanding is that Lane County should have folded our street and its other so-called local access roads into its jurisdiction long ago, even decades ago like the majority of the other streets, since we pay gas taxes and vehicle registration fees to the county just like all the others.

[00:01:48] My message is simple. We don’t get it. We don’t understand. We don’t accept this unfairness and the problems it will cause, such as reduced access to our homes as our road degrades, reduced property values as our road degrades, reduced access to health and well-being for our lives.

[00:02:09] We implore the (Lane) County Board of Commissioners to do the right thing—to pass an ordinance incorporating the LARs local access roads into the county road system, and thus belatedly convert the current LARs to streets in their jurisdiction, which would be then fairly considered for future maintenance or repairs just like the others.

[00:02:31] And as a follow up, I would like to be involved as I can, or receive communications from whenever or however the commissioners go forward on this.

[00:02:41] Laura Shoe: I’m Laura Shoe. I’m here to talk to you about local access roads. These public roads, most of which are paved residential roads that look and function just like county-maintained ones, are left to homeowners to maintain simply because the county neglected to take them on decades ago.

[00:02:59] We had record attendance at a River Road Community Organization meeting on LARs, almost 100 people. They were angry to hear they’re responsible for maintaining their roads, but outraged to learn that they might be liable for road conditions, and alarmed that State Farm says that homeowners’ insurance probably wouldn’t protect them because homeowners don’t own the roads.

[00:03:24] Private citizens should never bear liability for public assets. Public Works told me in a call before the meeting that they absolutely will not take on these roads. In the RRCO meeting, they frightened people stating that expensive improvements would be needed before acceptance that might encroach on private property.

[00:03:46] But you have the authority to accept these roads as they are. They should have been accepted decades ago, and requiring that they meet current standards, which almost no county roads in the area do, is an unjust burden.

[00:04:02] Public Works pointed to the Metro Plan to say that the city should take on these roads. And we did have Councilor Leech there to discuss this, but the plan is 45 years old, few roads have been annexed, and we know that it’s going to take many years for the rest to be annexed, while roads degrade and repair costs skyrocket.

[00:04:23] In the meantime, Public Works isn’t abdicating responsibility for their roads in the area and shouldn’t abdicate responsibility for these either. They argue that they can’t afford this, citing the real budget shortfall. But this is not a budget issue, it’s a fairness issue. Imagine for a moment if these roads had been taken in decades ago as they should have been. The exact same budget shortfall would exist today, yet they would be maintaining all of our roads without a second thought.

[00:04:59] For 70+ years, they’ve been in the privileged position of being able to use LAR homeowners’ taxes on other people’s roads and telling these homeowners, ‘We don’t like it either, but there’s nothing we can do.’

[00:05:13] No doubt (Lane County Public Works Director) Dan Hurley and his folks are good people. But they are protecting only what you have charged them with, and staff has absorbed institutional groupthink passed down through the decades.

[00:05:27] Please break through this and do the fair thing. Bring these roads in, as-is, now, and then pass them to the city as quickly as you guys can work that out.

[00:05:40] Joshua Kielas: Hi, Joshua Kielas from River Road neighborhood. Recently one of my neighbors informed me that our home is on a local access road and that we’re responsible for repairs. That’s how I came to understand why roads around us receive maintenance, while ours is collecting potholes. This began a small research project and kicked off a discussion among homeowners on our road in an attempt to work out a solution.

[00:06:06] I spoke with people in Lane County and in our neighborhood who knew more. By the end of a few weeks, I was thoroughly frustrated by the growing realization that without city or county intervention, we have no good options. We have no HOA or any other device to prompt folks to save for repairs, we know little to nothing about street maintenance, and some of us still don’t even know that we’re supposed to be responsible.

[00:06:34] There are over 20 homes located on our little block. After talking with more than half of our homeowners, it’s apparent that there’s almost no chance that we’ll agree on a course of action. Even if we could, a number of folks can’t afford to do the work.

[00:06:50] The only realistic option we have is for some of us to step forward and fill potholes each year, as we watch the roads slowly crumble around us and pray for governmental intervention.

[00:07:02] At this point, our little block may be beyond the point of no return, but most of our LARs are not. This problem could be greatly diminished by proper and regular maintenance. The longer the city and county argue over who should take them on, the worse the problem gets. And more roads are going to start falling past the point of no return, where they could be prolonged by proper, less expensive maintenance.

[00:07:31] Please act now and vote to adopt all local access roads within the urban growth boundary into the county road portfolio, so at least they have a chance of being properly cared for.

[00:07:43] Mary Leoni: Hello, my name is Mary Leoni. I’m a resident of the city of Eugene on an LAR. I purchased that home six years ago, not knowing that it was an LAR. I have lived in Oregon for 50 some years, and in Eugene for most of those years, and so I bought this property not knowing that it was an LAR. It’s surrounded by streets that are maintained by either the county or the city.

[00:08:14] So it’s bizarre. It has curbs. It has drainage. So it’s connected to the city drainage system. It doesn’t make any sense that this little block-long street is up to me and my renting neighbors to maintain.

[00:08:32] And, considering that there are like five or seven miles of LARs in the urban growth boundary, compared to the 1,400 miles of roads that the county maintains, this is a tiny little thing that you guys could decide. Let’s just take these into the system. This is a small percentage of stuff, get it over with, then move all these things into the city, urban growth boundary, whatever is decided later, take care of it all at once.

[00:09:04] But at least take these roads in. Make it equitable at this point, so that they’re all taken care of at once. And I worked for the government for 28 years, for the library, for the post office. I believe in supporting government. I don’t have any problem paying taxes. I believe in sharing costs. That’s the whole point of government services.

[00:09:33] We provide for these things that we all use. Because we each can’t pay for them ourselves. We use all these roads. I don’t always drive on your street. You don’t always drive on mine. But we share them. So that’s all I wanted to say.

[00:09:52] Ellie Lepinski: Hi, I’m Ellie Lepinski. I’m a county resident. My husband’s also here today. We live on a long block, one long block. It’s represented to be an LAR, which we didn’t know when we bought our house. We didn’t know anything about LARs. So when we went, and it was mentioned, it was a really huge community meeting—big, big turnout. People are concerned about this.

[00:10:17] Many people didn’t know about this and want to know why it is that we pay taxes, just like anybody else does, we’re residents of the county, our neighbors are residents of the county, and why our road is not taken care of in the same way as everybody else’s.

[00:10:33] Now, we certainly understand that money is really limited these days, and there will have to always be decisions made to prioritize or say, ‘Look, we don’t have time, you know, we’ll do this, and then we’ll have to wait on that.’ We understand all that, but we feel that we should be treated just like everybody else.

[00:10:48] We should be included just like everybody else, and stand in line, whatever our place in line is.

[00:10:54] There are huge potholes. We have a car that we take really good care of. We try to, you know, be careful of it. There are potholes that we have to go over in order to go in and out of our garage. And that’s going to throw your car off. We go as slowly as we can. We try to take as much care of it as we can. But there’s a limit to what we can do.

[00:11:14] So, I guess that’s basically what I want to say. We would like to be treated equally like anybody else in the county. I know the guy that’s in charge of this said that their idea is that they’ll wait until the city takes over the whole system. Well, come on (laughing). I mean, that’s just a way of throwing the ball down the street.

[00:11:31] We’re county residents and as I said before, we should be treated like everybody else. Thank you.

[00:11:37] Kevin Studer: My name is Kevin Studer. I’m here as one of those LARs people. Bought my house a little more than a year ago, not knowing that the dirt road was going to stay a dirt road. Okay? Starts right at my house, paved right up to my street.

[00:11:53] It’s a mud pit. So I ponied up, I put in a French drain, I put a couple of thousand bucks in, in gravel and all that stuff. You know what my real problem is? The guy at the corner has let his shrubbery grow to the point where it overgrows the lane, and it’s less than 12 feet to get through there, it’s supposed to be a 32-foot road, okay? Between Lane County and the city of Eugene, you guys are tossing a hot potato, okay?

[00:12:27] This guy’s overgrowth is detrimental to the point where emergency vehicles couldn’t get through if they really needed to. Trash trucks really don’t care if they rub through that shrubbery. This is really egregious. You know, you guys have let this go for decades. This is a terrible situation.

[00:12:48] Presenter: Commissioner Pat Farr:

[00:12:49] Pat Farr (Lane County, commissioner): We heard from lots of folks this morning, Mr. (County Administrator) Mokrohisky, regarding local access roads. It’s not the first time we’ve heard about it. We’ve been dealing with it since probably about the first week you came to Lane County and before.

[00:13:02] It’s something that really is an issue and I think at some point we can dig a little bit deeper into two elements of that.

One is: Is there something that we as a county can generally do in order to ease some of the burden on the folks who live on the local access roads?

[00:13:17] Everybody this morning was from the River Road area, a little bit in the Santa Clara area. I expected it because they had a pretty well attended meeting last Monday of the River Road (Community Organization), and that was the main topic, was local access roads. There are more of them in the urban transition than you might imagine, certainly than I imagined.

[00:13:35] A lot of roads that you think are county roads, because they’ve not been incorporated yet, and Commissioner (Ryan) Ceniga, you’re becoming more and more familiar with this all the time. It’s particularly this side of Beltline Road, the district that used to be North Eugene and now is no longer North Eugene.

[00:13:49] A lot of local access roads there, it’s up to the homeowners to do the maintenance on it. Well, they don’t have the capability, and as was mentioned this morning, typically, they don’t have either the wherewithal or the desire to organize into homeowner associations.

[00:14:04] So, for future reference as something that we can discuss as far as the county is concerned beyond individual local access roads that we have dealt with on a one-on-one basis.

[00:14:13] The second is that when people buy their property, they should be informed that it’s a local access road. And you know, we had a couple of people this morning said, ‘Well, I bought my property six years ago, I bought my property eight years ago, and I just found out it’s a local access road.’

[00:14:27] I don’t know whose responsibility it is. I, as a buyer, would like to know who owns the road I’m on. Is it a county road? Is it a city road? Wait, it’s neither, what? And it seems that it should be a part of the responsibility of the seller. I don’t know where the legal responsibility lies there, but I’d like to be able to answer that question, Mr. Mokrohisky.

[00:14:42] Presenter: County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky:

[00:14:46] Steve Mokrohisky (Lane County, administrator): I’d just offer that you have a work session scheduled for April 8 on local access roads. [It’s a policy discussion that the board needs to have about how do we handle those roads.] So you’ll have greater ability to discuss with our Public Works staff and County Counsel staff on those issues.

[00:15:03] Presenter: River Road and Santa Clara residents ask for fair treatment by the county. Commissioners are scheduled to discuss local access roads April 8.