Official seeks more road maintenance
County Supervisor Porchas points to subdivision issues
The Yuma County Board of Supervisors talked road policy at its Monday meeting, with District 1 Supervisor Martin Porchas getting pushback on his stance the county should be maintaining far more roads than it currently does.
Public Works Director Joshua Scott said the county maintains about 846 miles of roadway in unincorporated areas, including declared county highways, standard and non-standard public roads, and there’s another 774 miles that it doesn’t. Paved and unpaved roads each carry their own annual and other periodic maintenance costs.
Many of the streets which haven’t been brought into the county are older stretches of road, which may or may not have been built to the standards the county had at the time. Many residential subdivisions are affected, some with roads built to earlier standards which are now deteriorating.
“Basically, we’re talking about areas where somebody built a subdivision in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and didn’t provide improvements as required by the law now,” explained Board Chairman Tony Reyes, supervisor for District 4.
Porchas, whose district includes Somerton and the west end of the county, said he’s having to deal with these issues all the time.
“There are subdivisions were someone has to call and say, ‘Hey there are potholes here which have been there for three or four months.’ And you might not get them, because your district might not have them, but mine has them, and I get them constantly,” he said. “And there’s a process the county has, by the time it gets there.”
“I think we should be paying a little more attention to those subdivisions that have those (potholes). I’m not saying pave, but fill up the holes, and crack sealing, and not once a year or once every two years,” Porchas said.
Under state law, the county has limited authority to maintain roads which
have not been declared a county highway and therefore a road it will maintain on a regular basis. Streets built after June 1990 must meet county standards for width, surface and other measures, but those already existing by then don’t have to meet those standards.
Even in those cases, there’s only so much the county can do under the law: it can add rock products, gravel and processed materials to the base of the road, but cannot purchase or lay cement, reconstruct or “improve or alter the status quo.”
Porchas argued that residents who move into subdivisions built with county approval are entitled to regular road maintenance, regardless of what standards those roads were built to.
“They’re living there every day because they’re driving on those roads, they pay their taxes, they pay fuel tax, so I’m just saying, those roads in those subdivisions where they’re paying to be in, should be getting the same amount of maintenance as any other road,” he said.
Reyes, who’s spent 20 years on the board versus Porchas’ one, appeared to be alarmed by the implications of what he was saying.
“I’d just like to point something out, and that’s that Supervisor Porchas isn’t totally understanding what he’s talking about,” he said. “I mean I think he knows what he’s talking about, but don’t think he understands the budgetary situation that would open up, if we went into a subdivision.”
District 2 Supervisor Darren Simmons, whose area includes isolated areas of the eastern and northern county, said there are even more serious issues in Dateland.
“They pay taxes, but the roads out there, there are times when storms hit out there and we can’t get any response out there and they’re at the far end of the county. I’ve been out there during storms when a 4-wheel drive had tough access getting in there, to homes that were destroyed,” he said.
Reyes said, “It’s not a new issue. The only thing new is a fresh set of eyes looking at it and just finding out what it takes to do what they want done. It’s what I want done, and I’m sure most people here do. It’s just a matter of figuring out the cost and what happens once we get into it.”
He said going into one subdivision on a regular basis would open the county up for requests from any number of others with similar road conditions. “And then we didn’t have any money to do it anyway,” he added.
Reyes did leave the door slightly open, however.
“I’m not saying this isn’t what we’ll get into. I’m just saying that if we’re going to talk about this, I’d like you guys to come back and tell us what it’s going to cost to do something like this, to go into it. And be specific about it, and then we’ll realize what we’re talking about,” he said.