County Considering Program To Pave Unpaved Roads

Thousands of homeowners in Highlands County live along the 210 miles of county maintained, unpaved, shell roads.

Despite county crews grading most of these roads at least once a week, they still get bumpy and dusty during the dry season and sloppy during the rainy season.

Mike Wright, county administrator, is putting together a new program so that homeowners on a shell road can have it paved.

The cost for the upgrade would be shared by the county and the property owners, under a formula that has not yet been set.

Wright said the program, which he plans to present to the county commissioners in May, would benefit both the county, through lower road maintenance costs, and residents.

"What we're looking at is a program that other counties have used where the county and the property owners - on a majority basis - agree to upgrade a road and share in the cost," he said.

Wright ran such a program in Indian River County, where he was county administrator in the mid-1980s, and reports that it was extremely popular.

"We had a waiting list," he said. "Most of the streets we did were three or four blocks long. It was primarily for neighborhoods where you had a lot of dirt roads."

On Tuesday, county Road and Bridge crews paved the 1,300-foot length of Cherry Road, an unpaved residential street in the Orange Blossom Estates. This project, paid for entirely by the Orange Blossom Special Taxing District, is being used as a demonstration project for the proposed road paving program.

"Before we take this to the board (of county commissioners), we need to have the exact cost per foot," Wright said. "And we'll be able to say to folks, if you want to know what your (unpaved) road will look like, look at Cherry Road."

Green said sodding and culvert work remains to be finished on Cherry Road. Once the project is completed, he said, "we'll be able to figure out the total cost per lineal foot for everything we have to do to bring a road up to county standards and pave it."

Green said the annual maintenance costs for an unpaved road drop substantially if it is paved with an asphalt surface, because it won't require resurfacing for 10 to 15 years, depending on the amount of traffic.

A shell road requires grading at least once a week, Green said. Over the 10- to 15-year lifespan of an asphalt surface, he said, the county spends substantially more maintaining a shell road than an asphalt road.

"If you calculate the costs of grading the shell road compared to that (resurfacing), you will drop the cost to maintain it if it is paved," he said.

If the county commissioners adopt the paving program, they would determine what kind of a majority of property owners along a street would have to agree to upgrading their road.

"It could be a majority or a super majority - that would be up to the commissioners," Wright said.

Wright said similar programs save counties money on road maintenance, but he is proposing it "basically as a quality of life issue. The basic question is, would you want to live on a paved road, or an unpaved road?"