70 years later, Lane County asked to fix ‘local access road’ designation

Presenter: Commissioners are asked to bring residential local access roads into the county’s road system. With public comment Jan. 28, Laura Shoe:

Laura Shoe: I’m Laura Shoe and I live on Sunny Drive in River Road. We’ve discovered that many streets in the neighborhood with over 500 homes, as well as 200 or so in Santa Clara, are local access roads or LARs, and that homeowners are responsible for maintaining these roads.

These are not real LARs—gravel roads out in the country that give a few homes access to county roads—but rather misclassified paved residential roads full of homes.

[00:00:41] Most of these are LARs because back around the 1950s, there were no set standards for admission into the county road system. So whether a road was admitted was happenstance. There’s nothing that physically distinguishes them from county-maintained roads in our neighborhood.

Some are wide, some are narrow, some are dead ends, some are through streets, just like county roads. Some have no curbs or sidewalks, just like county roads, and some even have curbs, gutters, and sidewalks.

[00:01:11] I’ve talked to many residents on my dog walks. Most have no idea they live on LARs. The last chair of the River Road Community Organization, who was also a planning commissioner, didn’t know that he lives on an LAR. The current co-chair recently developed homes on an LAR and had no idea.

[00:01:32] LAR residents have been paying transportation taxes faithfully and assuming that government will perform one of its most basic functions. To tell folks now that those taxes paid have been only to benefit other people and that they have to come up with thousands of dollars to maintain their roads is preposterous.

[00:01:54] Over seven decades, no one has stepped up to right this wrong. I ask you to do so now. The fair solution is for you to pass an ordinance admitting all residential LARs within the urban growth boundary into the county road system. You’re short on money, so pass it with no immediate increase in budget. They won’t get immediate maintenance, but they’ll have an equal opportunity at future maintenance.

[00:02:23] Yes, this may end up delaying work on other roads, but LARs have had their work delayed for decades. It’s simply not fair to continue to put everyone else’s roads and interests above misclassified LARs.

[00:02:38] You may prefer to wait for the city to annex these roads, understandably. But this at best will take years, and our roads can’t wait that long. Plus, there’s no guarantee the city wouldn’t continue them as LARs. These are county roads, the county created the problem, and I urge you, our county leaders, to fix it now. Do the impossible. Do the possible, both.

[00:03:05] Debra Higbee: My name is Debra Higbee, and I live on Dalton Drive and own a home on Fairway Drive. I have owned both homes since 1997 and 1999, respectively. I recently learned last November that both homes are on roads that the Lane County government takes no responsibility for. Maintaining or repairing is up to residents to do that. That was a real big surprise to me.

[00:03:30] With further inquiry, I found that local access roads are county roads that 70 years ago were negligently left out of the county road system. This is a perpetual problem that the county continues kicking the can down the road. (Yes, that was meant as a pun.)

[00:03:48] So the River Road streets do not have homeowner associations to collect dues to find road maintenance and insurance. I’m a president of an HOA and understand the process. Setting up an HOA for each LAR street would require a huge effort given that homeowners are not anticipating road expenses and many are on limited or fixed incomes.

It’s clear that an HOA is an impractical solution, even though homeowners are currently liable if someone gets injured due to the condition of the public road in front of their homes.

[00:04:25] The homeowners on Fairway Street, a street that’s really in very bad shape, have attempted to resolve the problems themselves. Through email exchanges, homeowners expressed concern. One explained that they were personally putting gravel in the pothole in front of their houses, in front of their house. Others explained that they could not afford the expense of paving the street and were concerned about losing their homes.

[00:04:53] This reminded me of what people must do in developing countries: Do the work themselves that governments cannot do, that the government cannot do.

[00:05:05] We live in a representative democracy where elected officials help resolve collective problems. I respectfully request that you incorporate our—all LARs within the urban growth boundary into the county road portfolio. That does not mean that they receive immediate maintenance, but this would offer homeowners an equal opportunity of future maintenance and eliminates the property value lowering stigma of residing on an LAR.

[00:05:34] Polly Habliston: My name is Polly Habliston, and I’ve lived in the River Road area for 46 years. We purchased our home on Dalton Drive in 1979. As has been reported by Laura and Debra, there was no mention of Dalton Drive being a local access road when we bought the house.

[00:05:50] It was a few years later that a neighbor explained to us that they had taken up a collection about a year before we moved into the neighborhood to get the funds to seal the road and fix it up, and that there would be no other maintenance done by the government.

[00:06:05] We were dumbfounded, but as with many things that surface when you’re raising three boys and juggling two jobs, we just filed it away. In 1991, the River Road Sewer project came to pass and all River Road and Santa Clara streets underwent the massive project of sewer installation.

[00:06:22] The pavement was understandably torn up with a huge trough cut down the length of the street and massive holes at every juncture. There was discussion between the residents and the contractor of what are they going to do about this? And the contractor explained that the decision had been made to asphalt the trough and put a cap on the entire road.

[00:06:41] There was no mention of being an LAR at the time. It was all part of the sewer project. Some recollect that elderly residents on the street asked how big the cap would be when they put it on, and when told, growled, ‘Well, that’ll never hold up.’ But surprisingly, 35 years later, Dalton Drive’s surface is in fairly good shape.

[00:07:00] This, despite no sealing or routine maintenance that roads would normally require. However, cracks in this infrastructure are beginning to show as is inevitable. Dalton Drive is a dead-end street, so it doesn’t have the wear and tear that we’re seeing on other LARs, but it didn’t help that in 2011, the city of Eugene constructed the Escalante Swale Project at the end of the street. The swale was designed and constructed to eliminate five dry wells and filter neighborhood storm water. The project was lauded because it improved drainage and protected local water quality.

[00:07:35] Residents of Dalton Drive received no benefit from the project because we lacked dry wells or water piping systems. But we watched truck after truck cart down the street with heavy loads of dirt and then coming back with heavy loads of gravel to construct the soil. Dalton Drive was there. It was used or abused when needed to facilitate an engineering project.

[00:07:59] It’s a road. I mentioned the swale only to reiterate that the onus of wear and tear on our street should not be just on their residents. LARs are an archaic designation evolved by your predecessors to avoid setting and maintaining standards of roads in our neighborhoods.

[00:08:16] I echo Laura and Deborah urging you to admit all residential county LARs within the urban growth boundary into the county road system. We understand you’re dealing with a limited budget. We’re not suggesting imminent repairs or staggering costs. We just want all county roads to be in the queue for future maintenance as needed. The past neglect of these roads should not fall on homeowners who are not aware of past commission or doping.

[00:08:41] Presenter: Commissioner Heather Buch:

[00:08:42] Commissioner Heather Buch: I did get the email that was sent couple days ago regarding the issue. We did have a meeting a couple of years ago that kind of reevaluated local access roads.

[00:08:54] I have to say I’m not a fan of local access roads specifically because of the issue where people didn’t know that they own and are responsible for a portion of their road, which is something they learn later on when they want to get the road fixed and they call the city or they call the county and want it fixed. And then they realize that’s on their dime because it is considered a local access road.

[00:09:21] And it wasn’t always put in the deed. So people wouldn’t know and when you do paperwork, mortgage papers are this big and you don’t read every word in it and people are caught off guard.

[00:09:34] And then usually comes to our attention when there’s a major event or a big issue in the road that needs repair and a lot of people are blocked from access, ingress and egress from their homes.

[00:09:48] And that happened because there was an issue in Florence in this very similar situation and then hundreds of people couldn’t get in and out of their home. And we had to figure out what to do.

[00:09:59] Ultimately, at the time, we decided to continue local access roads but to make sure that the language is very explicit in agreements so people in the future would know.

[00:10:09] My personal preference would be to discontinue local access roads in the future. The reason that wasn’t necessarily the result was because making roads up to current standards is expensive and it increases the cost of the residential property and you’re trying to keep costs down for housing.

[00:10:33] It is a really weird balance to try to make but this issue continues to arise, people are continually caught off guard, and often will never have the money necessary to make the upgrades on the road. And it’s shared, so you’re not the only one.

[00:10:55] Sometimes people go and try to vacate, what we call ‘vacate the road,’ a technical term for them to acquire the road. And it’s a private road so if you do updates then it’s yours and yours alone and you can limit access.

[00:11:09] Regardless I am open to future discussions on this particular topic, because it does come over and over.

[00:11:18] Presenter: Commissioner Ryan Ceniga:

[00:11:19] Commissioner Ryan Ceniga: (I) thank the LAR crew for coming out. You guys took the next step by coming in here and explaining to us how frustrating it is. This doesn’t make sense and yet that’s what we’re forced to do.

[00:11:30] Presenter: He said he would be requesting a presentation on LARs. Commissioner Ceniga:

[00:11:34] Commissioner Ryan Ceniga: —A presentation on LAR’s and what we can do to change some code on that. Because I’ve been working with our Roads Department and they don’t like it either. They don’t like having to tell somebody that that pothole is theirs, that they can’t come out and fix it. It’s a tough part of their job.

[00:11:51] … We have six miles of LARs inside the Eugene urban growth boundary and maybe we start with inside urban growth boundaries and then extend.

[00:12:02] But you know, part of that LAR problem—and I’m dealing with this at multiple locations—is easement issues. At that point, the county doesn’t have control of those easements and it turns into a civil matter and we all know nobody wins those.

[00:12:17] Presenter: Lane County commissioners are asked to drop what residents call ‘an anachronistic designation,’ and bring all residential ‘local access roads’ into the county road system.