Strength in numbers

By Hollis Walker

My first experience with living on a dirt road was when I moved to the country 50 miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Seven or so families shared ownership in a perfectly straight, two-mile-long gravel road. With fewer than 12 inches of precipitation a year, our road was less trouble than dirt roads in wetter climes. Still, when it snowed the road had to be plowed or it was impassable, and in the summer the dust whirled.

Luckily a few of the neighbors owned tractors and understood the principles of road construction. They voluntarily kept the road clear in the winter, reshaped the surface after spring thaw to replace the gravel and added new surface gravel every few years as needed. Homeowners belonged by default to a road associa tion. Ours was run quite informally; whenever money was needed to pay for gravel, a neighbor called us up, and we anted up $25 a month for a few months until enough was collected. (One neighbor refused to pay. We all just ignored his stinginess.)

That's typical of many road associations, according to Richard Casale, district conservationist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service in Capitola, California. Whether informal or formal - incorporated as a nonprofit and registered with the county or state - associations are necessary when more than a few families are sharing responsibility for a road, he said.

Good road maintenance should begin with a plan, Casale said. Get the neighbors together to talk about problems with the road (including issues such as emergency access and traffic speed) and make a list. Find a local government expert - through the Natural Resource Conservation Service or state-run soil and water conservation offices - to do a "road walk," helping to identify the most pressing problems and potential solutions.