Horry County looking for ways to help residents living on dilapidated private roads

Nathan Livingston carefully maneuvered around the spots of sunken earth on Bill’s Place Road. He drove slowly through the smaller holes, not wanting the pock-marked dirt to rattle his minivan.

Bill’s Place spans just two-tenths of a mile, yet the road holds 195 potholes.

“It’s like a puzzle,” the 57-year-old said of driving down his road in the Poplar community. “You’ve got to try to figure out how to duck the holes. And you can’t duck them all. … You’ve got to go through some just to miss the hairy ones. And when your car hits it, it sounds like you’re breaking something up under your car.”

The reason the road is in such bad shape is because no one maintains it. Bill’s Place is among the more than 1,500 miles of private roads throughout the county. Many of the paths are in decent shape, yet others are barely passable, even for school buses or emergency vehicles. Most of those roads lie in the county’s rural districts and the residents there often lack the resources to make the necessary repairs.

But some county leaders insist they should help patch these pothole-laden pathways. They recently directed county staff to research the feasibility of an emergency road maintenance program.

“It’s our obligation for health and safety,” councilman Paul Prince said. “That’s what we’re elected for.”

During county council’s budget retreat earlier this month, staff discouraged county leaders from allocating money for private road work.

The county offered an emergency road maintenance program for private roads from 1998 until 2010, but that initiative was canceled because of rising costs and complaints from residents.

“I personally got more comments from people that were upset because we had the program,” said Public Works Director David Gilreath, who noted that some homeowners felt slighted when they saw the county spending public money to improve their neighbors’ private road and not their own.

From 2004 through 2010, the county received 85 requests for emergency road work. Although most of those requests were not approved, those the county agreed to support began to eat into the public works department’s budget. In the last year of the program, nearly 10 percent of the department’s maintenance supply budget went to private roads.

“It was snowballing,” Gilreath said, “to the point that if we didn’t stop it we were going to go bankrupt.”

Some county leaders suggested a one-time road repair program for emergencies, but Steve Gosnell, the assistant county administrator over infrastructure and regulation, cautioned that doing so wouldn’t be a long-term solution.

“It didn’t make sense,” he said. “A year later, you’d be in the same boat again.”

Gosnell, however, acknowledged there is a problem.

“You go out to some of these roads and they’re bad,” he said. “I wouldn’t take my truck through some of them. Unfortunately, right now we don’t have the ability to go out there and do anything. I’m not sure we should.”

Some council members also question whether the county needs to be spending public money on roads outside the county network.

“I don’t see where we’ve got the responsibility to maintain private roads,” councilman Johnny Vaught said.

Yet other leaders argue that some developers never followed through on plans to improve the roads, leaving the residents with few options. Other homeowners bought their properties in developments thinking the roads were maintained by the county.

“It’s not their fault,” councilman Al Allen said. “They didn’t know. You’re kind of caught in the middle.”

Councilman Prince disagreed with the idea that an emergency private road maintenance program would place an unnecessary burden on county coffers.

“We’re spending millions and millions of dollars up and down this beach,” he said. “We’re talking about maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year or something on helping people that’s born and raised in this county. I don’t see why in the world we sit here all day long figuring out some way not to help somebody.”

Council members agreed there should be no money spent on repairing or scraping private driveways, but most viewed the roads used by school buses, ambulances and fire trucks differently. They hope county staff can come up with a plan to help address the problem. Officials plan to take up the private road issue again at the April 12 meeting of the council’s Infrastructure and Regulation Committee.

“I don’t think there’s a real good answer anywhere,” council chairman Mark Lazarus said. “But there’s an answer that we’re going to have to live with.”

For Livingston, the Bill’s Place resident, he hopes the county will find some way to improve his road.

Horry officials have said that they can accept a road into the county system if it is brought up to county standards. That means the road would have to be paved and Livingston can’t afford that.

“They talk about if I pave this road here,” he said. “How am I going to pave it?”

His mailman has raised concerns about the road, especially during wet weather. And Livingston’s 52-year-old brother, Issaac, lost a mobile home on Bill’s Place several years ago in a fire.

Emergency vehicles couldn’t reach his place because of the road’s condition.

“It’s awful,” Nathan Livingston said.

The frustrated homeowner worked as a roofer for more than 30 years and now subsists on disability. He has had both knees and a hip replaced.

“It’s not like we didn’t ever work or we ain’t paying no taxes or nothing,” he said.

Nathan Livingston has lived on the road for 21 years. He’s offered to pay the county to scrape the avenue once a month, but officials have said they can’t loan out their services. He is not sure what else he can do.

“We just need a little bit of help,” he said. “That’s all.”

This story was originally published March 20, 2016 at 10:16 PM with the headline "Horry County looking for ways to help residents living on dilapidated private roads."