County explores adding more rural road signs

HOT SPRINGS — Garland County officials are exploring whether to provide signs for some rural roads.

They are waiting for the completion of a study differentiating public and private roads in the unincorporated areas of the county, County Judge Rick Davis said. The county doesn’t maintain private roads.

A more conspicuous identifier than the “pvt” on the end of private road signs is needed to label roads the county won’t maintain, Davis said, but federal road sign standards limit the county’s options.

“We’re looking at a different-colored road sign,” Davis said. “I’d like it to be red, but we have to stay within federal standards. We’d probably use green and white for county roads and blue and white for private roads.”

An ongoing review of property records from 1979 to the present has identified 1,800 miles of roads the county has accepted for maintenance, and many more miles Davis said can’t be readily designated as either private or dedicated public rights of way, confusion he attributed to years of poor record keeping.

“I’m going to have to make a decision on whether we’re going to take them or not,” Davis said of roads lacking a clear designation, noting that traffic counts will help determine which ones the county chooses to maintain.

At Davis’ urging, the Garland County Quorum Court adopted an ordinance in July that makes property owners responsible for roads with name applications submitted to the county’s emergency 911 system after Jan. 1, 2014. The county’s acceptance is based on compliance with minimum design standards in the master road plan the county adopted in 2013.

Davis has said the process for confirming that the affected roads meet county stan- dards will be more onerous than if the property owner or developer had consulted the county before construction, explaining that the need for differentiation came to a head after last spring’s flooding washed out numerous roads.

He said many of the people who called for assistance were unaware their roads fell outside the county’s scope of maintenance — the result, he said, of developers who exploited the lack of documentation separating private from publicly maintained roads.

Owners and developers applying for road names through the 911 system are now required to sign a notice acknowledging they’re aware of the road standards and understand that naming the road doesn’t make the county responsible for it.

The notice is attached to the property deed, alerting future owners that the road leading to their property isn’t a dedicated public right of way that the county will maintain.

The road ordinance was intended to clarify the county’s maintenance responsibilities by imposing restrictions similar to the standard Hot Springs enforces in its planning area, and required the county judge to approve property surveys, restrictive covenants and deeds subdividing tracts of land before they could be recorded into the county’s property records.

The ordinance was ultimately tabled in committee.