For decades, Local Access Roads (LARs) in the Eugene Urban Growth Boundary have occupied an unusual and inequitable position: they are public roads under Lane County jurisdiction, serving more than 1,000 households who pay the same transportation taxes as their neighbors, yet Lane County does not provide road maintenance.
Many of these roads are in established neighborhoods in River Road and Santa Clara. Many look and function just like county-maintained roads a block or two away. Yet because of decisions made decades ago, some public roads became part of the county maintenance system while others did not.
Last September, Lane County Commissioners directed Public Works to evaluate the timeline and costs for incorporating 12 miles of Eugene UGB LARs and 1 mile of Blue River LARs into the county road system. Unfortunately, the resulting report does not provide the practical roadmap residents hoped for. Instead, it evaluates inclusion through a framework that makes acceptance appear extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and burdensome.
What the Report Found
The Public Works report estimates that accepting LARs into the county system could involve:
- approximately $91.9 million to reconstruct LARs to current urban standards;
- approximately $1.2–$1.7 million simply to evaluate and process acceptance;
- additional ongoing maintenance costs;
- extensive engineering and administrative review.
The report identifies real issues that must be considered, including road conditions, right-of-way questions, future maintenance responsibilities, and long-term coordination between Lane County and the City of Eugene.
But the concern is not that Public Works identified challenges. The concern is the framework used to evaluate them.
Instead of starting with the equity problem — that residents on public roads have been excluded from the maintenance system for decades — the report largely analyzes LARs as liabilities to be avoided. It focuses on what it would cost to bring roads up to modern standards, what barriers might prevent acceptance, and what burdens should be placed on residents before the county assumes responsibility.
A different starting question would produce a very different report: How can Lane County provide equitable maintenance for existing public roads as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while addressing deficiencies over time the same way it does for other county roads?
The Report Assumes Full Reconstruction Instead of Maintenance
A central assumption throughout the report is that LAR inclusion should be evaluated through the lens of bringing roads up to current urban standards for eventual transfer to the City of Eugene. That assumption dramatically changes the cost discussion.
Residents are not asking for every road to be rebuilt into a brand-new city street with sidewalks, curbs, gutters, and full urban improvements. Residents are asking why existing public roads cannot receive basic maintenance like other county roads.
Public Works justifies including reconstruction costs by stating:
“Urban roads accepted into the County Road system without the required urban facilities are likely not eligible for City consideration [for annexation].”
In other words, the report assumes that if Lane County accepts LARs today, the County may eventually have to pay to fully upgrade them before Eugene will take responsibility.
But actual practice in River Road and Santa Clara raises questions about that assumption. The City of Eugene has already annexed several roads in these neighborhoods without full urban improvements – including Howard Avenue just last year.
Likewise, many county-maintained roads in River Road and Santa Clara also lack features required of new urban streets, including sidewalks, modern drainage systems, and current design standards. The county maintains those roads anyway – and to our knowledge they have no plans to reconstruct these streets to modern standards.
The unresolved transition of roads from County to City responsibility is a broader governmental issue affecting most roads inside the Urban Growth Boundary — not a problem unique to LARs and not one LAR homeowners created.
The fact that a road does not meet today’s standards for newly constructed streets is not normally a reason to deny maintenance. Roads do not have to be rebuilt before they can be maintained — as demonstrated by the many older County Roads already maintained today.
The Report Maximizes the Cost of Inclusion
The framework chosen by Public Works significantly increases the projected cost of addressing LARs.
The most obvious example is the $91.9 million reconstruction estimate, which assumes roads should be upgraded to current urban standards.
The same assumption also drives much of the estimated $1.2–$1.7 million cost simply to evaluate roads for acceptance. The evaluation process described in the report is built around determining whether roads satisfy current design standards and identifying what improvements would be required to bring them into compliance.
It includes extensive engineering analysis, reconstruction estimates, and review of features such as drainage, accessibility, and road design. That may make sense when evaluating a newly constructed road built by a developer. It makes far less sense when evaluating decades-old public roads that already function as neighborhood streets.
A more appropriate question would be: how can these roads be incorporated into the county maintenance system, with deficiencies addressed over time the same way they are on existing County Roads?
Answering that question would require a much narrower and less expensive evaluation.
The same issue appears in ongoing maintenance estimates. The report applies urban-road maintenance costs ($31,000/mile) even though many LARs lack the sidewalks, curbs, gutters, and stormwater infrastructure that make urban roads more expensive to maintain, compared to non-urbanized maintenance costs at $13,000/mile.
Different assumptions would produce a very different picture of the true cost of inclusion.
A Process Designed for Developers Is Being Applied to Homeowners
The same framework that increases county cost estimates also creates extraordinary burdens for residents.
The report relies on Lane Manual procedures (which are not law) requiring applicants to demonstrate that roads meet county acceptance criteria for new roads. That process makes sense when a developer builds a new subdivision road and asks the county to assume future responsibility. In that situation, it is reasonable to require the developer to prove the road was properly designed, dedicate adequate right-of-way, correct deficiencies, and pay for necessary improvements before transferring responsibility to taxpayers.
But LAR residents are not developers building new roads. They are homeowners living on public roads that have served established neighborhoods for decades.
Under the process described in the report, residents could need to organize complex petitions (gaining 60% approval of homeowners to go through this process), hire engineers and surveyors, resolve legal and title issues, dedicate private property for additional right-of-way, remove fences or structures, and pay for required improvements — after which there would still be no guarantee their road would be accepted.
Meanwhile, homeowners on county-maintained roads have faced none of these requirements.
Public Works has rigidly applied Lane Manual policies, and yet Lane Manual is silent on how to address longstanding inequities.
Older County Roads Have Legacy Issues Too
Many county roads were accepted decades ago under earlier standards. Like LARs, they may have conditions that would not meet today’s requirements, including narrower rights-of-way, missing sidewalks, drainage limitations, older pavement structures, encroachments, or other grandfathered issues.
The county does not require homeowners along those roads to bring them up to current standards before receiving maintenance. Those roads remain in the system, and improvements are addressed over time.
Applying modern acceptance requirements only to LAR homeowners means the residents left out decades ago must now satisfy standards their neighbors were never asked to meet.
That does not resolve the inequity. It exacerbates it.
The County Has Been Part of This History
The LAR problem did not happen overnight. Many residents have lived on these roads for decades without ever being notified that their roads were excluded from normal county maintenance.
The county has regulated these roads and made decisions affecting them for generations. The county has even maintained these roads when timber taxes filled county coffers, apparently including resurfacing LARs and county roads when sewers were installed in the 1990s. (Though this report seems to assert that there are no maintenance records for LARs.)
This is not simply a homeowner problem. It is a decades-old governmental problem requiring a governmental solution.
We Need Solutions, Not Just Obstacles
Lane County’s equity policy states that residents should have equal access to services. That principle should apply to public roads.
The Equity Program acknowledges that “different people face different barriers, and policy choices can exacerbate or reduce those barriers. Equity means striving to create policies, structures, and systems that reduce the barriers faced by individuals and communities.”
The Public Works report identifies real challenges. Those challenges deserve discussion. But identifying and exacerbating barriers is not the same as creating a path forward.
Commissioners asked for a roadmap to inclusion.
Residents are still waiting for one.