Ninety-two public roads in Eugene, lined with hundreds of homes, are not owned or maintained by any government. The people who live along those roads are trying to change that.

Local Access Roads are defined in a 1981 Oregon law. They are public in the sense that anyone can travel on them, and the right-of-way must be kept open, but they aren’t owned by a city, county or state government.

LARs exist statewide, but Lane County is unique for having so many in an urban area. Of the 514 LARs in Lane County, 167 are inside urban growth boundaries, 92 of which are in Eugene’s UGB and total 12 miles of roadway.

The people living along these roads have long urged the county government to take them into its road system, saying their LAR status is fundamentally unfair to the residents.

Liz Porter, one LAR resident, said when she tried to explain the status of the road to her neighbors, most didn’t believe her. The ones who did agreed: The concept is “completely unfair.”

LARs “have been here 45 and 50 years and are no different than the county roads a block away,” yet unlike those roads, they place the burden of responsibility (including potential liability) upon homeowners, said Joel Korin, another LAR resident.

Most LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary are in River Road and Santa Clara and form a patchwork in those neighborhoods. There are also a few in the Industrial Corridor and in Northeast Eugene off Coburg Road.

There are even roads that have multiple jurisdictions. Sunny Drive, where River Road neighborhood leader Laura Shoe lives, is a city street on its northern third and an LAR on its southern two-thirds.

It’s usually not clear why a road is an LAR. They were developed when the River Road area transitioned from agricultural to suburban. Sometimes the county took on roads from the developers and added them to the county road system; other times it did not.

The people living on LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary feel the county government has a responsibility to take on maintenance of the roads, and have made the case to commissioners before. Last year, commissioners directed staff to evaluate what adding the LARs in Eugene and Blue River to the county system would look like, including the timing and cost.

The LARs are in a variety of conditions. Joshua Kielas, a River Road neighborhood leader who lives on Fairway Drive, said Fairway is “falling apart,” but others are indistinguishable from county roads.

River Road residents said they remember the county historically maintaining the LARs, last repaving them in the 1990s when the sewer system was installed.

County staff said current Oregon law prevents the county from using its funds for LARs unless there’s an emergency. However, county commissioners have the authority to redesignate the LARs as county roads.

There is a process to apply for the county to incorporate an LAR into the county road system: 60 percent of the homeowners along the road must sign a petition and the road must meet certain standards. LAR residents believe documenting those standards would require hiring a surveyor, an engineer and a right-of-way attorney.

County staff disagree with River Road residents’ position that the county should take on the roads outside that process.

In a presentation to county commissioners on June 9, staff said LARs aren’t up to the standards they need to be for the county to take them into its system, and bringing them up to urban standards — with curbs, gutters, storm drains and a minimum width — would be prohibitively expensive.

County staff said taking on the LARs in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary would cost millions of dollars, including between $60,496 and $120,993 in staff time to evaluate the roads and $88.6 million to reconstruct the LARs to city urban standards between 2028 and 2040.

Reconstructing the 10 LARs in Blue River to rural standards, which commissioners also told staff to look at, would cost $3.3 million.

Instead, staff presented two recommendations for commissioners and LAR residents: 1, commissioners could direct staff to streamline the application process for taking on an LAR, but without lowering the standards, and establish a new fee for these applications; and 2, LAR residents could form a road improvement district to maintain the roads.

LAR residents were frustrated by the report. They disagree with the report’s underlying assumption that the county must improve LARs to urban standards. Residents say the county could take in the roads and put them on the same maintenance schedule as other county roads in the River Road neighborhood.

“There are roads in the city system that don’t meet those standards,” said Polly Habliston, another LAR resident. “Why should these roads be brought up to some unreasonable standard in order to be brought into the system?”

Lane County spokesperson Devon Ashbridge said the report assumed those costs because the long-term plan is to transfer these roads to the city of Eugene, which sets those standards for roads in its system.

LAR residents also said staff didn’t address the fundamental unfairness to the people living on LARs.

LAR residents said they didn’t know the government didn’t maintain the road when they bought their homes, many of these roads are driven on by people going between county roads, and homeowners bear the legal liability if someone is injured because of a faulty LAR.

LAR residents found the special district suggestion “insulting.”

“Why would homeowners vote in a super majority vote to tax themselves more to pay for the roads when they’re already paying transportation taxes?” Shoe said.

The county primarily uses its share of state gas tax for road maintenance, a tax LAR residents pointed out they already pay at the same rate as their neighbors on county roads.

What about annexation? Merely annexing LAR residents’ homes into city limits wouldn’t solve the problem, they said. Some of the homes on LARs are annexed. Additionally, both annexed and unannexed residents don’t want the city to take on the LARs because of the city’s street maintenance policies.

According to a city fact sheet, the city will only work on unimproved roads (the ones that don’t meet the urban standards county staff described) to patch potholes at least 3 inches deep.

That fact sheet said the city’s urban standards include “curbs, gutters, storm drains, sidewalks, and an asphalt or concrete surface built to handle the traffic load.”

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Register-Guard and then was distributed on the USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

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