Chip Seal Road Repair, Dust Control and thoughts on creating an HOA.

[JasperFrank]

I would avoid the whole thing if you're OK with the way things are now. Why sign up for extra hassles in your life.

Our property association has a private shared driveway that was required for three owners to access their properties. It's basically a shared easement across all of their lands. Paved with asphalt, but only to residential driveway standards. Each property pays $200/year to go into a road fund. We did the math and it will never amount to much in our lifetimes, certainly not the $50-60K it would take to replace the asphalt (and that's in today's dollars). There is concern that construction on the last remaining property could really damage the road and then all those folks would be in trouble.

There are huge concerns with that, in that there is a property owner that owns a huge amount of land above all the current easement users. And they are not involved with this road improvement thingy. Who knows, that could become a subdivision and all that preliminary construction would just wipe out what we paid in to.

 

[Oldoak]

Petition your county government to take it into their road system for maintenance.

That can be very costly to the people who own property along the road. Some counties require the road to be brought up to the county's road specifications before they would consider taking over a privet road. And like most government run programs, there are no guarantees the road won't fall into disrepair in later years even if taken over by local municipality.

 

[Jim Nelson]

In our area,San Diego,county Ca., we are in an unincorporated community and can have assessment districts which means the county will appraise the project area, bring it up to their standards, then maintain it in future, with the payments coming from assessments added to property taxes.

The bad is the initial agreement must include a majority of property owners and the initial cost of bringing it up to standard can be high. The good is, once established, the annual addition to property taxes is minimal and maintenance is taken care of.

We have a couple of these in our area and everyone is happy with them. We tried to get one going for our approx. 1 mile private road, but the initial cost turned too many people against it.With the high cost of paved road up keep I was all for it but less than half of the others could afford to do the initial work to bring it up to County standards so we gave it up.

The last time our road was done was about 15 years ago and it was only $10,000,it's past due now and would cost over $50,000. Probably won't happen in my lifetime.

 

[JasperFrank]

This is unrelated... sort of. But I had a private agreement with my fire district that cost me $80 a year for fire protection. The neighbors got together and petitioned that we should all be part of a new fire district that would be on our property taxes. I signed that petition, which was then put in to force, cause I was thinking it was a good idea and maybe I'd be paying less. The next year I was assessed at 160 dollars for the fire district. And has been increased ever since. Just say'en.. best intentions don't always work.

 

[Streetcar]

Chip seal will only work with a good base. It is more of a maintenance item rather than paving item.
Asphalt grinding are similar to gravel, not a permanent surface

 

[JasperFrank]

We are expecting some heavy truck usage directly after the Chip and Seal. I think I should not enjoin in this. We have two cars. One is 1800 lbs and the other is 2100 lbs. We have the two lightest cars. And we only use the road, at most, four times a day going up and down. I have a Critter Cam and have been keeping track of who uses the road. My upper neighbors are running 4X what we do per property.

 

[Industrial Toys]

I use "Farmers Hankie" but never figured it might control my summer dust problem.

 

[Diggin It]

We are expecting some heavy truck usage directly after the Chip and Seal. I think I should not enjoin in this. We have two cars. One is 1800 lbs and the other is 2100 lbs. We have the two lightest cars. And we only use the road, at most, four times a day going up and down. I have a Critter Cam and have been keeping track of who uses the road. My upper neighbors are running 4X what we do per property.

There ya' go. Put a Toll Gate up and collect per vehicle passage.

On average, I'd say I drive my road 6 or 8 times per month.. Most days not at all. Sometimes it's 2 weeks or more that I don't even start either car. I think my longest stretch is a little over 30 days. I keep maintainers on both batteries because they sit so long between starts.

 

[oosik]

The dust from my mile long gravel driveway is an insignificant, drop in the bucket, compared to the dust that comes naturally with the SW winds. It would be a fool's errand to consider dust control on my driveway.

I seldom read here of any type of HOA that is touted as a shining success. I would avoid any type of HOA like the plague. HOA or NO - some folks simply will not contribute. With a HOA you are looking for a great big mess. These same folks will respond to a road maintenance district in similar fashion.

I find great pleasure in having my very own driveway. I can do EXACTLY as I wish and nobody else will be bothered.

 

[Diggin It]

Have a question .....

Suppose, just suppose you're on a shared road like this BUT you have a possibility of cutting another, private drive out of the property in another direction, maybe to a different public road. If you're able to do so and no longer use the shared road at all, would you still be expected to contribute to it?