Some county landowners may be in for a rude awakening when they ask county commissioners to maintain a road on their property.
Assistant District Attorney Greg Stidham told commissioners at their weekly meeting Monday that unless the road has been surveyed, meets certain minimum standards and has been dedicated to county it is illegal for the commissioners to maintain the roads.
He noted that a number of property owners simply throw some gravel down, call it a road and then ask the county to maintain it.
The first step is for the owner to bring the road up to minimum standards before asking the commissioners to maintain it.
“The county doesn’t have the funds to bring these roads up to standard,” Stidham said. “The landowner has to have some obligation.”
He noted that some commissioners in the past may have by accident or on purpose not followed the regulations and, for whatever reason, maintained roads that were not qualified.
“We have some that a previous commissioner accepted the roads, but I don’t know why. There’s one road we can’t even get a grader blade across,” said District 3 Commissioner Bobby Ziegler.
Stidham told the commissioners they should advise property owners who have been having the roads on their property improperly maintained that it could no longer be done.
“Advise them that it isn’t a county road, and they can no longer maintain it,” he said.
If the property owner wants to survey the roadway and bring it up to certain specifications, then the county can accept the road. But it has to meet minimum standards.
“What has happened through the years, some people are not dedicating plats and through the years the county started maintaining and now it comes to light they are not county roads and the county can’t maintain a road on private property.
Stidham said with some property owners, this has been going on since the lake was put in over 60 years ago.
He noted that some people come out here and buy 40 acres and call it a subdivision and put in roads without proper authority and kind of rope the county into maintaining them.
“Some people wanted to do it on the cheap,” he said.
Other Business
The commissioners requested sharing a portion of the money in their CBRI (County Bridge and Road Improvement) Fund to purchase much needed equipment.
There is $801,000 in the account, money that comes from the Oklahoma Tax Commission.
It’s a shared account and the commissioners each requested $200,000.
A final decision will be made at next week’s commissioners’ meeting.
