By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
Forest Park and Highland Park residents will have an opportunity to decide for themselves the future of street maintenance in their respective subdivisions at a Dec. 12 public meeting with the Dawson County Commissioners.
The commissioners are gathering subdivision residents together to discuss options for management of their street maintenance funds. All Forest Park property owners are assessed $300 per year for street maintenance and Highland Park residents who own property fronting First or Second streets (the only paved streets in that subdivision) are assessed $100 per year. At present, there is $271,156 in the Forest Park street maintenance fund and $80,398 in Highland Park’s.
County Commission chairman Doug Buxbaum said it’s time for residents of the subdivisions to take ownership of their streets, noting that legally, those streets are not county property and so it should not be the county’s sole responsibility to manage their maintenance.
“They’re their roads and their streets,” Buxbaum said. “We need some kind of direction from those people.”
Buxbaum said the way it has worked in the past is not really fair or acceptable. With no neighborhood association or advisory group, street maintenance needs and requests get brought to the commissioners by individuals. He said it shouldn’t be up to the commissioners’ to decide whether the pothole in front of one property owners’ home is more urgent than another, just because one came in to complain about it and the other didn’t.
“We need some kind of direction of what do you people want out there and what are the priorities,” Buxbaum said. “Right now, we just get individuals coming in throughout the subdivisions, and they need to get together and make a decision. The problem’s been people come in and say ‘I’ve got a pothole in front of my house’ or this and that, but we don’t know what the priorities are.”
The commissioners plan to offer each subdivision two options moving forward — either to create a neighborhood homeowners’ association/advisory council, or to designate a county employee to prioritize street maintenance needs.
Given that the subdivision streets do not belong to the county and so are not legally the county’s responsibility to maintain, Buxbaum indicated his preference that residents choose to form a homeowners’ association or advisory council of some kind. He also noted that there are issues beyond just street maintenance — from snow removal to zoning regulation enforcement — that the subdivisions would be better off by having some kind of official neighborhood body to address.
“What better than to have somebody who lives in that subdivision to communicate to us what ought to be done,” Buxbaum asked.
One ancillary issue which Buxbaum quickly pointed to as something else that should be discussed in concert with the street maintenance is the state of the rest of the streets in Highland Park. He noted since they do not belong to the county and they are not included in the subdivision’s street maintenance fund, they receive virtually no care at all. Buxbaum said he hopes the meeting about the rest of the streets might spark Highland Park residents to band together to begin to change that.
“We’d like those people form a Rural Special Improvement District (to pave the streets),” Buxbaum said.
He added he hopes as many subdivision residents who are able turn out for the public meeting so that they can help the commissioners set a better path for maintenance of the subdivisions moving forward.
“This is gonna be good,” Buxbaum said. “The people just got to participate in it. It’s their subdivision, so they need to have a voice in how that maintenance money is spent.”
The public meeting for Forest Park and Highland Park residents is scheduled for Dec. 12 at 6 p.m. in the courtroom of the Dawson County Courthouse.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.