General: A lot of mountain homes are on private shared roads that branch off county roads. County roads are managed and maintained by the county, typically without any direct input from the public that uses the road. But once you turn off a county road, typically the county is not going to be automatically maintaining that road for you. 

Road maintenance and repairs can be expensive and can create stress and drama. Our weather, underlying geology, the road alignment and grade, and usage can have an effect on what is required to maintain and repair your road. The Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County  has a lot of information and even consulting services for maintaining private rural roads. 

Maintenance: The most common items needing attention for your private road are maintenance and emergency repairs. Maintenance includes:

• For pavement, keeping the surface in good condition by street sweeping, topcoating asphalt, filling cracks, patching pot holes, and touching up the edges
• For dirt roads, maintaining waterbars or drain dips, scraping the surface to clear debris and fill ruts, and adding rock to fill potholes or as a top coating.
• Clearing culverts and ditches to maintain proper drainage.
• Cutting back overgrown shrubs and trees.

Emergency or Preventive Repairs: Repairs include things like clearing mud or rock slides onto the road, repairing or preventing slope failure leading to loss of road width on the downhill side, and clearing large trees down across the road. 

Agreements:  If your road is shared by one or more other parcels, then the landowners will need to have an agreement on road maintenance and repairs. If you bought on an existing private road used by several parcels there is probably a road agreement and/or road association already in place and mentioned in your title report. 

The road agreement spells out the rights of the legal users, responsibilities for maintenance and repair and any financial considerations like annual road dues. If there are only two or three parcels sharing right of way a road agreement may be all you need. More than that may make the case for a road association and the benefits that may result.

Road association agreements are not unlike homeowner association agreements. The worst time to find out you do not have an agreement is when there is a major expense like repaving due and there are multiple owners all trying to decide what they think should be done and how much to spend if anything. 

Private roads can also be managed through a more bureaucratic County Service Area (CSA), which will add a special fee to your property tax bill, and create an account specific to your CSA that can be used for costs associated with the road's maintenance and repairs. CSAs help ensure the dues are paid by everyone.

Legal Right of Ways or Easements usually are the determining factors for sharing a road. Easements are normally granted for the right of way and are called out as such in the title description of the property owners where the easement exists and also for those receiving the right of way easement. Usually the easements are recorded with metes and bounds just like the property boundaries, or they may have just a width stated. Sometimes the road is not entirely within the right of way. Occasionally easements are implied rather than deeded. Sometimes easements and right of way for maintenance are also granted on private roads for providers of power, telephone and cable. If so they are not normally parties to a road association and agreement but their right of way is not impaired.

A good agreement (road associations or just among individuals) spells out the annual assessment for each owner, how expenditures will be decided upon and dealt with and how future decisions and changes will be made. A good road association has built up a reserve so when a major expense occurs owners do not have to pay out of pocket, or at least very much out of pocket. Road association agreements should be good solid legal agreements that are signed by all of the parcel owners and then recorded to bind owners and future owners to the terms of the agreement. The agreement becomes a part of the recorded title and will reduce future potential issues with new owners. Road agreements are available from many online and other legal document services and can be customized if needed by a competent contract attorney rather than having a contract written from scratch at considerably more expense.

Most road associations have periodic road meetings to discuss upcoming issues and expenditures and vote on the issues. Often road groups will have volunteer work groups one or more times a year to perform simple tasks like clearing draining or removing downed tree limbs and brush. Road associations are often a great opportunity to build social connections that might not otherwise occur. Usually the more people that share a road the more useful a road association and agreement will be because costs are spread over many parcels.

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