Holliday seeks Meadow Lake road solution
December 07, 2009
Valencia County Commissioner Don Holliday is looking for a solution to deteriorating roads in Meadow Lake, speaking about solutions with constituents in a town hall on Thursday night.
“We’re never going to make a difference up in this area and other areas of the county if we don’t get aggressive and try to do something outside of the box,” Holliday said.
Just shy of one year on the commission, Holliday expressed frustration at having little to no money for road improvements.
He said the state has provided the county with $80,000 per commissioner for road maintenance this year, but state officials could soon reduce or zero out that funding because the state is struggling with a budget deficit.
Most of the roads in Meadow Lake have never been paved. Some are dirt and others are what’s called “chip seal,” which involves layers of hot seal and fine aggregate rolled smooth. Meadow Lake’s chip sealed roads are 20 years old, now riddled with potholes.
Holliday said the expense of patching the roads keeps growing and it would be better for everyone to find a way to pay for new roads instead of continuing to patch the old roads.
“We keep patching them, and we keep patching them, and we keep patching them. There’s a road up here — Comanche — that has more patch than it does road,” he said.
Residents expressed other concerns about their roads, like High Mesa Road, where Ramona Otero lives.
“They paved, very nicely I might add, High Mesa Road from the far east end almost all the way across, and then I don’t know what happened but they stopped,” she said. “From where they stopped to the end of the road, which is just a small stretch of road, I don’t know where the asphalt starts and the holes begin.”
With money for new roads nonexistent, Holliday offered a solution.
“The only thing that’s left is to tax the people, unless we hit the lottery or find gold or oil out here,” he said.
He suggested forming all or portions of Meadow Lake as one or more public improvement districts, which would allow the county to tax the residents within a district for improvements in it.
“It would be a five- or 10-year tax, and when it’s done, it’s done. It goes away,” he said, adding, “It goes into a fund for Meadow Lake and Meadow Lake only. It will not go to any other part of the county.”
County Manager Eric Zamora explained that a district can be so small it includes the residents of a single road or as large as all of Meadow Lake. The size would be residents’ first decision — whether to make all of Meadow Lake a public improvement district or do it road by road as multiple districts.
Either way, state law requires residents to gather 66 and two-thirds percent support from within the proposed district on a signed petition.
“A large majority want something done, but to find people who will actually pay the taxes — you’re not going to find it,” said Meadow Lake resident Shirley Griffenberg. “You don’t even have people up here who want to pay to have their trash taken away. They would rather go down the road and have it fly out all over.”
The county has another option, which is for the county commission to form one or more districts and impose the tax by a simple commission vote, forcing citizens in opposition to the tax to gather signatures to compel an election on the issue.
Bob Gosticha, a Meadow Lake resident who worked to compel last month’s Correctional Facility Gross Receipts tax election, said he’s in favor of the commission approving this tax outright and forcing citizens who oppose it to gather signatures.
Regardless of the approach, Holliday was clear he wants the citizens to decide whether or not to pursue a public improvement tax for Meadow Lake.
“I’m not forcing nothing,” Holliday told his constituents. “I want you to decide. I’m not going to stick my neck out and do something and then have you come back and say, ‘Well, you rotten S.O.B.’”
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