While most roads in River Road are County-maintained (and a small number are City-maintained), another subset of roads in River Road are “local access roads”, or “LARs”. These are public county roads that Lane County failed to accept into its road system many decades ago, and which are the responsibility of homeowners to maintain.
After researching this issue and after hearing concerns of homeowners expressed in our March 3 meeting on local access roads, the River Road Community Organization Board voted unanimously (with one abstention) to send the following letter to the Lane County Board of Commissioners, urging them to accept these roads into the County road system so that they will regularly receive maintenance.
To learn whether your road is a local access road, and for more information on this issue, visit Laura Shoe’s website www.larsineugene.com.
Letter from the RRCO Board to the Lane County Board of Commissioners:
Date: April 22, 2025
From: The Board of the River Road Community Organization
To: The Lane County Board of Commissioners
Re: Local Access Roads within the Urban Growth Boundary
Esteemed Commissioners:
We are writing to express our concern about publicly owned local access roads (LARs) within the River Road community.
Our River Road community meeting on LARs on March 3 drew record attendance of almost 100 residents. We had Dan Hurley and his Public Works staff speak, as well as Councilor Leech. (Commissioner Ceniga was out of town.)
Our homeowners are concerned that:
- They are responsible for maintaining these roads.
- They pay transportation taxes (which fund road maintenance), just like residents on County and City roads, and yet none of this benefits their own roads.
- They might bear liability for damage or injury arising out of road conditions.
- Most were not aware of their responsibilities.
- Property values may be negatively impacted.
In addition we are concerned that continuing to leave this responsibility in the hands of homeowners will mean that these roads will continue to degrade, leading to a decline in the quality of life for all of our residents.
Most of these local access roads look just like County roads in River Road – many are unimproved, just like County roads; some have curbs and gutters, as do some County roads, and some LARs even have sidewalks (unlike County roads). Dan Hurley has explained to one of our board members that back in the mid-twentieth century there were no set standards for acceptance of roads into the County system, so some were arbitrarily left out.
(We acknowledge that there are a small subset of LARs that are different from County roads – for example, a few short segments in Santa Clara appear to be single-lane dirt roads. These are not the focus of our immediate concern.)
We agree that the long term solution is for the City to annex and assume maintenance jurisdiction for all roads within the UGB. However, this will take years, and most LARs – unimproved or not fully improved roads on which maintenance is not up-to-date and not many City taxpayers live – will be low priority for the City and will have difficulty receiving approval by City voters for road bonds to improve them. Nevertheless, we will be writing to and working with the City to attempt to expedite this process.
Because our roads can’t wait, we ask in the meantime that as a stopgap measure, under authority granted to you by ORS 368.016, you pass an ordinance accepting these LARs into the County road system.
We further ask that you waive the Lane County code requirement that they be brought up to current standards for new roads, since these roads should have been accepted decades ago and look just like roads that were accepted at that time, and most existing County roads in River Road do not meet these new-road standards.
We understand that this will most likely come with no increase in budget, given the current large transportation budget shortfall. We ask that after being made County roads that they be added to the maintenance calendar, prioritized with all other County roads based on function, condition, and other usual criteria, so that they have the opportunity to receive future maintenance as funding is available. This won’t ensure immediate maintenance for these roads, but it will relieve homeowners of that burden, eliminate potential homeowner liability, reduce the potential hit to property values, and reduce degradation of the roads until the City can take over.
We acknowledge that it is difficult to imagine, with serious budget challenges, taking on more roads, even 6-7 miles into a 1400+ mile system. We find this framing helpful: If this problem had never occurred – the roads had been accepted decades ago – the County would today be facing the same budget shortfall it currently is, it would be receiving the exact same level of funding it currently is, and yet the County would be taking care of all of our roads to the best of its ability without a thought to leaving a few roads out to save money. By remedying the current situation, those already in the County road system would indeed receive slightly less, but all of our public roads and the residents on them would be served by our County.
Thank you for your consideration of this matter.
Sincerely,
Beth Gerot, Co-Chair
PS: Three of our board members, along with Commissioner Ceniga and Councilor Leech have gone on short driving tours of the neighborhood in which they saw first hand that these LARs are mostly normal paved residential roads that look just like County roads in the neighborhood, and they also were able to observe their condition. If it would be helpful to any of you or your staff to see these firsthand, we extend the same offer to you.