Road Maintenance

Road upkeep is a major budget killer for our association (~250 homes) and what's worse is board member turnover has caused some loss of historical knowledge among the board leading to added expenses in road repairs (work redone, work not done correctly but not followed up on, etc).

I was wondering if anyone has gone down the path of trying to have their municipality take control of the road?

Obviously experiences and details will vary from place to place but in general I'd appreciate hearing from someone who has navigated this path and might be able to offer insight to the challenges, pitfalls, and unintended consequences of trying to have government take on their road.

We had to make our roads public when we put in separate water meters. We used to be able to turn the water off on those who didn't pay their bills. However, that changed and people decided to have their own water. In order for the water department to come in and do the work, we had to pay them about 20K and give our roads to the city.

There are good and bad aspects of this. The bad is that you have to have approval of the legal majority of your HOA members/owners. Which means getting 75% to 90% vote to approve the change. In addition, you will have to change your CC&R's to reflect the roads are now public. Which could mean limitations on parking or car related issue enforcement. That could or would change to the city. The city may require some road modifications to bring them up to code. Our roads were up to the COUNTY code. Which lead to additional issues. The HOA will need to go to the city council and present this idea to them once they get their ducks in a row. It's the city that ultimately would have to make the agreement.

Once the city does take over the roads you will find some more changes. We are NOT allow to have signs in our HOA other than "For Sale/Rent". This did not allow the city to put in "No Parking" signs for those sides of the road that had the fire hydrants. We had to go to the Code department of the city and have them adopt a code for our situation. Instead of signs, we could paint the curbs RED and Handicap area Blue. Which avoided the whole sign placement issue.

We had hand made special signs that had to be removed. The city is now the ones who will place the street name signs. So if you had any special signs, those go. We also had to make sure trees were trimmed and fences did NOT block the view of the stop signs or yield signs. They would issue a fine if we did.

All in all it was worth it. We were also able to lower our dues since we didn't have to save up for the water bills or road repairs. Which was a benefit and helped passed the special assessment to get the project done. Each situation is different. You will find some small details here and there but think it's a good option to explore. I involved our city representative and fire chief to get the ball rolling on the city side of things. Which is good to get to know your rep for your area. They can help you out. Good luck!