Family, neighbors argue about private road

On a remote, mountainous road, some family members and neighbors in Catoosa County are fighting about a locked gate, and whether they can close it to the outside world.

Some residents argued during a commission meeting Tuesday night that they get locked in by the gate, located a couple of hundred feet from the end of Taylors Ridge Road. Sandra Gordy, who lives at the very end of the road, said she doesn’t want to get out of her car in front of the gate when she takes her grandson to school every morning.

“We’re in the woods,” she said. “We’ve got critters. In the dark. There’s no streetlights. There’s no porch lights. There’s nothin’.”

Gordy and a neighbor brought the issue before the commissioners because they want the elected officials to declare the end of the road a public concern. Because if the road is public, the gate can’t stand, making their entrances and exits easier.

The commissioners didn’t make a decision Tuesday night, choosing to table the vote after a heated argument. They did the same thing after a similar argument Tuesday between residents on Misty Meadows Lane.

On Taylors Ridge Road, Kyle Moreno told the commissioners the end of the street is private. It’s unpaved, unlike other parts of the road. Plus, he said, the issue has been overblown: Gordy and her neighbors aren’t literally getting locked inside.

“Nobody’s trying to take access [to the public parts of Taylors Ridge Road] away,” said Moreno, the grandson of the property owners who installed the gate. He said it’s there to keep the public out.

“I don’t care what Kyle says,” Gordy told the commissioners. “[The property owner] will land lock us. We make our living here. We have a farm up there. We grow crops. We sell it. That’s how we make our living. She land locks it, I’m in the street.”

On Tuesday night, a commissioner told her that, even if the road is private, she should be able to get an easement, allowing her to use the road. But she wasn’t interested in fighting this battle in court.

“I’m just a poor white girl,” Gordy said. “I don’t have money to throw out here for lawyers and stuff.”

In another part of the county, on Misty Meadows Lane, a similar fight is ensuing. The county has proposed declaring just one-fifth of a mile of the street as a public concern. The rest would be considered a private road.

But Shirley Smith wants more of the road to be public, County Attorney Clifton “Skip” Patty said, because her land sits in the middle of where the status of the street would change. She wants to divide that property into three tracts and give them to her children. But, Patty said, she can’t do that if the road is private, for complicated legal reasons.

“If you close this, you’re taking away a very valuable property right of hers, almost all of the 675 feet of public access,” said her attorney, Wayne Peters.

The Peeples family, who own about 360 acres around the road, want the street to be private. Their area is secluded, and nobody really drives there anyway. But county employees worked on that road two or three times in the 1990s, indicating the streets may be considered public.

Meanwhile, the County Commission did vote on one other street Tuesday night, declaring Frontage Road to be private. The road is located off Alabama Highway and runs by Mashburn Equipment. The commission’s vote allows the business owner to put a gate on that street.

COUNTY CLINIC

The commission also voted to put out a request for proposal for a clinic staff. County administrators are considering opening a clinic for county employees, hoping it will save taxpayers money.

County Manager Jim Walker said the local government would partner with Ringgold Telephone Co., which already runs a clinic two days a week. Under the proposal, the county would pay to expand the clinic to become a Monday-Friday operation, and it would be open to employees of the county and the company.

Walker said the county pays about $5 million a year for health insurance. He believes the rates would drop if the employees could visit an in-house clinic, cutting down on visits to the doctor. The county should receive proposals to staff the clinic by the beginning of April.

Contact Staff Writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.