County estimates $92M to take on Eugene, Blue River LARs

Presenter: County officials say it’ll take $88.6 million to bring local access roads up to Eugene road standards, with another $3.3 million for the LARs in Blue River. Sharing a report June 9, Transportation Planning Supervisor Cassidy Mills:

Cassidy Mills (Lane County Transportation Planning, supervisor): The focus of the board assignment, which is why we are all here today, is integration of local access roads into the county road system, specifically two communities: 

There are 10 LARs within Blue River approximating one mile, and 92 within the city of Eugene, approximating a total of 12 miles. Staff anticipate that it could take approximately $88 million to reconstruct all in the city of Eugene to meet current standards, assuming one mile of road is completed each year between 2028 through 2040. (That does include inflation costs.)

To determine the cost to bring urban LARs to city of Eugene standards, Design Services staff used recent construction costs for projects within the city of Eugene that were designed to city specifications.  So the number that I just shared was informed by a recent project within the city of Eugene.

These costs were used to determine a per-mile estimate for full road reconstruction within the Eugene UGB. It’s also based on the assumption that the LAR under review are two-lane miles. So if an LAR happens to be wider, or even more narrow, the cost could fluctuate. 

To determine the cost to bring LARs in Blue River to county road standards, staff referred to the recent evaluative effort of Dexter Street, which is an LAR in Blue River, and staff estimate it would take approximately $3.3 million to reconstruct all LARs in Blue River to county design standards. 

A majority of the local access roads within Eugene are concentrated in what we know as the urban transition area or the River Road and Santa Clara areas. These neighborhoods in particular were established in a piecemeal fashion over the span of many decades. 

Some of these public roads date back over 100 years, and some were generated via subdivision plat approvals by Eugene as recently as 2017.

Maintenance activities on many LARs have likely been deferred or limited. These roads may require additional work beyond routine annual activities. 

The Road Maintenance Division anticipates that many will need some combination of base repairs, drainage improvements, compliance-related upgrades, vegetation removal, culvert repairs or replacement, service rehabilitation, and other associated work before they can be placed on a standard maintenance schedule.

In some instances, a full reconstruction of a given LAR may be necessary. And while this level of work is not anticipated for all LARs, it does remain a possible upper-end cost for certain segments or potentially entire roadways should their condition warrant such intervention.

Activities range in cost between approximately $13,000 a mile for rural roadways and $31,000 a mile for urban roadways on comparable county roads. The costs vary as activities encompassed by routine maintenance differ slightly between urban and rural settings.

Generally, maintenance efforts include the annual activities required to keep road surfaces in serviceable condition, ensure sign and pavement markings remain visible, maintain roadside drainage and stormwater systems, vegetation, and perform seasonal operations such as winter response.

Within the city of Eugene, maintenance also includes routine street sweeping and annual leaf pickup… There may be unanticipated equipment-related costs.

Moving forward, we recognize that LARs present a major funding dilemma both for the county and for residents that are served by these roads. Road repairs are often extremely costly and can be beyond the financial means of adjacent property owners, and they’re also currently beyond our current road fund capacity.

We are tasked with responsibly managing available resources to manage over 1,400 miles of roadway and 425 bridges. These roads and bridges are expensive to maintain and exceed our road fund revenues.

Given the evaluative effort necessary to accept a single LAR into the county road system, staff recommend that the board direct staff to update Lane Manual Chapter 15, to better define criteria for public road acceptance, develop a formal petition application, establish a corresponding fee for processing public requests to bring LARs into the county road system.

To take all LARs in Eugene and Blue River into the county road system without the petition process and a comprehensive evaluation of existing conditions does leave residents and the county vulnerable to unanticipated costs.

There are alternatives to that staff recommendation: bringing back additional information about alternative maintenance options such as local improvement districts or even special road districts.

And there’s also the option to explore other funding mechanisms or policy measures to address the long-term needs of LARs.

Presenter: Commissioner Heather Buch:

Commissioner Heather Buch: It’s hard to reconcile the true need to help residents with the burden of potentially adding over $90 million worth of eventual reconstruction costs.

It’s obviously unconscionable to saddle the county with $88 million of potential reconstruction costs. That’s not a viable option, right?

It is not fair that these LARs exist and people didn’t know that they were owners of these particular roads. Absolutely. And we also at the same time cannot reasonably burden the county with exorbitant costs—or knowing that this will trigger reconstruction requirements by the city in order for them to pull them into the city road system.

So, is there a bridge? Is there a bridge here? Because I think that we have to find a bridge. There’s no way we can fund the extreme. We know that.

Presenter: River Road residents criticized the staff report, and asked the county to make things right. Joshua Kielas:

Joshua Kielas: Joshua Kielas, the River Road neighborhood.

The recently-released Lane County Public Works report on local access roads lacks acknowledgement of the human cost of the issue and of the responsibility of Lane County to make things right.

The truth is that historic actions made by Lane County have created a situation that puts hundreds of county residents in an incredibly awkward and untenable position. They live on a public road, pay the same amount in taxes as everyone else, but for some indeterminate historical reason, are responsible for paying road maintenance costs out of pocket.

Almost all current LAR-adjacent homeowners bought their homes with no knowledge of this responsibility because Lane County failed to make sure that they understood.

And now after directing the Public Works department to do a study, you’ve ended up with only an inflated worst-case scenario of costs, with the recommendation that instead of righting this historical mistake, you should double down on avoidance by making the acceptance process more onerous, difficult, and expensive for afflicted residents.

This is more of that same logic that got us into this position in the first place. We can do better than this.

Please request that Public Works also determine the least expensive way to solve this problem without bankrupting homeowners in the process. Give them a mandate to consider that mass adoption of LARs might actually happen.

And that they should be willing to think outside of the code book if necessary to find a pragmatic solution. 

Commissioner Ryan Ceniga: Next up we have Mary.

Mary: Public Works was asked to compile a report to the council on how and how soon the LARs in the UGB could be taken into the maintenance system. Public Works staff had already expressed that they will never accept these roads. So the report you are receiving, rather than being a step-by-step answer to and consideration of the basic requirements, is designed to present an impassable barrier to acceptance.

The report should state, ‘This is what would be minimally required: (1) right-of-way surveys, (2) road condition surveys so they can be fitted into the maintenance schedule; road description, (3) road description additions or amendments for the state records.’

Since I’m not a professional planner, this process is rather like asking foxes to design a hen house. We can’t rely on these figures as bare minimums for absorbing the 13 miles of public roads into a 1,200-plus-mile system, barely 1% of the total.

However, if I want to snow you with numbers, I’ll give you tables and cost breakdowns to the single dollar, even though all of this is a complete fabrication. If Public Works was told to accept these roads using their existing budget, you and I know there would be exceptions and exemptions and shortcuts made immediately.

Using Howard Avenue as an example, the city recently took ownership of a road much degraded by the removal of incorrectly-placed striping. There are no curbs, gutters, drains, or sidewalks. The roadbed is now in much worse condition than before the Safe Routes To Schools project was implemented.

The city is obviously less concerned with road amendments than this report states.

Finally, the additional 102 roads could be added to the system in lots of 34 per year. Many are extensions of roads already included with legal descriptions in place. Some are one block long. Some connect two sections of existing maintained roads.

All are used by the public. All need ongoing maintenance for safety, and most residents are completely unaware of their current responsibilities.

According to Public Works leadership at the latest TrAC meeting, it could be 100 years before the city of Eugene actually takes ownership of these UGB roads.

The city’s 2026 urban standards are being applied unreasonably in this report. Please do the right thing now. Correct this long injustice. Direct Public Works to accept these roads into the county maintenance system within three years using the least amount of money and staff time possible. 

Let’s have no more lengthy and obfuscating reports to justify class-based and historical exclusion of some roads. It is only fair. 

Commissioner Ryan Ceniga: Next up we have Laura Shoe.

Laura Shoe: I was in the corporate world for 20 years and I drank the Kool-Aid. I truly believed that the programs we developed were in the public interest, but after I left, I realized that there were assumptions that we never questioned, and that those unfairly harmed a ton of people. 

I think Public Works staff is in a similar situation with LARs. They aren’t bad people. They don’t have bad intentions, but they’ve grown up in a system that treats these roads as fundamentally different and undeserving without asking whether that assumption or the outcome is fair. 

They believe they’ve given you a neutral report, but it’s one that maximizes costs and burdens on homeowners and minimizes county responsibility, and they’ve ignored the main goal of achieving fairness.

Public Works made a fair point considering whether LARs should be reconstructed to current standards at a cost of $90 million. But why didn’t they also tell you that county roads a block away are unimproved and they have no plans of reconstructing those? Why didn’t they also tell you that the city has annexed many unimproved roads in the area with no—including Howard Avenue last year. 

Why didn’t they tell you that the Lane Manual acceptance process for new roads is not set in stone, is intended for developers building new roads and would create insurmountable barriers for homeowners? 

Or why didn’t they tell you that county roads have some of the same issues, like right-of-way encroachments, and the county maintains them anyway? 

Why didn’t they tell you that Lane Manual, as best as I could tell, offers no policies on how to fix longstanding inequity, and that this situation might require an out-of-the-box approach, send this back to the drawing board, but not with the same question. 

Ask Public Works to center equity and find the most expedient cost-effective way for the county to provide equal services to residents who have been paying for them all along. 

It takes strong leadership to challenge groupthink inside organizations. That’s what we need from each of you. 

Linda Lovick: My name is Linda Lovick and I live in the River Road neighborhood on a local access road.

Obviously your issues are enormous and your responsibilities are considerable, and I appreciate all of you and I also appreciate the report being made available publicly from the Public Works Department. 

And I want to speak with you this morning a little bit about that and add to the comments and the public remarks of my colleagues, who I believe spoke eloquently.

I feel the report gives just a dizzying complexity of the situation, the statutes, the policies, the plans, the costs for your consideration in accepting the 13 subject miles of LARs in Lane County according to that—or adding to that, I’m sorry—adding to that, the stranglehold between the county and the city regarding the 12 miles within your urban growth boundaries, which all paints a daunting picture. 

What the report does not provide you is the history of why certain public roads were left out of the county road system—now decades ago—to become these orphaned local access roads.  Wouldn’t that information help to inform the way forward? 

Several of us homeowners in River Road neighborhood have testified before you frequently since learning of the orphan status of the public roads we live on over the past year and a half. 

By now, you know well the absolute unfairness of some homeowners in Lane County being saddled with repairing the street they live on and further being liable for uninsurable public harms. 

You may recall that we have canvassed extensively in the affected areas and 95% of people we talked to feel very strongly that Lane County should accept the LARs in the urban growth boundary into the county road system. 

The report mentions that in 2020, the county established recording requirements so that homebuyers would be informed, but without enforcement. Many were just as unknowing as neighbors who had lived on their LAR for 60 or 70 years without knowing the status of their public street.

Please remember that our request to accept the LARs as-is requires no monies now, nothing from the road funds now. 

The bottom line is it just isn’t right that that inaction from the county decades ago or inconsistent application of procedures should result in the financial crisis that would come to homeowners now. It just isn’t fair. It just isn’t right. Thank you.

Presenter: Commissioners look for a path forward after staff estimate a cost of $88 million to bring Eugene’s local access roads into the road system.