J. Nelson – Writer

The Monongalia County Commission agreed last week to put up over $82,000 from its Orphan Roads Fund to help to address underlying drainage issues on Alpine Street and resurface the road, according to reporting by Ben Conley at The Dominion Post.

Orphaned roads, for those unfamiliar with the term, are streets that seemingly aren’t owned by anyone. They aren’t city roads, so the city has no responsibility for them. They aren’t state roads, so the state Division of Highways has no responsibility for them. They might technically be in the county, but counties don’t actually have responsibilities to maintain roads. (Despite the misnomer, “county routes” are considered state roads and are supposed to be maintained by the state.)

Orphan roads are usually ones created by developers to reach a development. One would think, then, that the roads are the developers’ responsibility. But once the developer has finished construction, sold all the units and/or handed over maintenance authority to a homeowners association (HOA) or neighborhood association (NA), then the developers no longer have an obligation to care for the roads. The result is that the street or streets — sometimes not made to the same standards as city or state roads — are effectively abandoned, or orphaned.

Despite not having any mandate over road conditions, the Mon County Commission launched the Mon County Orphan Road Grant Program 2021 to help remedy some of the worst orphan roads. However, the program has a few caveats: To qualify, the road in question must be bad enough to hinder emergency services, school buses or mail delivery; and there must be community buy-in, with stakeholders contributing money to the project.

Now, the Orphan Road Grant Program is giving its largest allocation yet to address the problems on Alpine Street, which connects the backside of Mon Health Medical Center to Riddle Avenue, then extends roughly another quarter mile to Bergamont Street. Riddle Avenue, along with Pineview Drive, connects W.Va. 705 (Chestnut Ridge Road) to West Run Road. According to Conley’s article last week, six households on Alpine Street have put up around $9,500 toward the work, and one resident covered the engineering costs.

The Orphan Road Grant Program is a wonderful thing our county does for its residents that is above and beyond. And for its beneficiaries, it may be a literal life-saver when a road has deteriorated to the point of becoming dangerous. But the fund cannot cover all orphan roads in the county, especially as new developments continue to crop up. So as amazing as it is, the grant program is not a sustainable solution to an ongoing problem.

So what is the solution?

There is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution to problems like these. But there are few different approaches, some of which could be combined.

One option is for the communities built around these orphan roads to be voluntarily annexed into the closest municipality, at which point the municipality would take over maintenance of the roads — an idea I encountered in a 2018 column by Brooks McCabe. The advantage to this approach is that the responsibility is now passed from the homeowners to a government body with access to a larger tax base and material resources to keep the streets in decent shape. The disadvantage is the community will now be subject to all the laws and taxes of that municipality, which the homeowners were likely avoiding in the first place.

Randall O’Toole ­— a senior fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute — analyzed North Carolina’s similar problems with orphan roads. Like West Virginia, North Carolina counties aren’t directly responsible for road maintenance. As such, one of O’Toole’s suggestions was for the legislature to allow counties to take ownership of roads that would otherwise be abandoned. In turn, the county would be able to levy property taxes to fund future road work. Similarly, the state could take charge of local roads and assess taxes from the homeowners serviced by those streets.

Also likely to be repugnant to homeowners would be raising HOA or NA fees. As Ben Abramson with Strong Towns writes, frequently, a developer will hand off responsibility for all a development’s infrastructure to an HOA, but will “undercapitalize” it — leaving it with financial systems in place that can cover short-term expenses (like keeping up community amenities) but not long-term ones (like roads or stormwater systems). If the HOA — which is usually made up of neighborhood volunteers — doesn’t understand just how underfunded it is, it may be caught with insufficient funds to cover major projects like repaving. Or, it may happen that an HOA will make the decision to keep fees low so as not to scare off potential homeowners (or anger existing ones) ­— with the same end result. So, in the current structure, when major projects do pop up, the HOA has to issue a special assessment to cover the difference. A possible solution, then, would be for HOAs and NAs to raise fees enough to pay for all the required maintenance, which would keep the coffers full over many years. However, the initial increase would likely be steep and deeply unpopular.

Of course, in Mon County specifically, the commission could finally deliver the subdivision regulations it’s been promising for decades — the kinds of regulations that would require adequate infrastructure and systems in place to prevent things like orphan roads. (For perspective, Conley’s 2021 article about the grant program’s debut said subdivision regulations were being finalized. Those regulations never materialized.)

All of these proposed solutions put the onus on local government and/or people who move into the development. Perhaps a little more of the burden should be placed on the developer.

Let the developer start a fund (preferably in a high-interest savings account) that contains a certain percentage of how much the entire development cost to build — say, 10%-25% — specifically to cover future infrastructure expenses. I tend to lean towards a creator having a greater responsibility to its creation, but many pro-business-minded folks would want to minimize the burden on the developer, so we’ll compromise and say 10%.

So for illustrative purposes, we’ll say it costs $200,000 to build a townhouse and a development has 100 townhouses. That puts the cost at $20 million, and we’ll add another $10 million for all the infrastructure, for a total of $30 million. The developer would put $3 million (10% of $30 million) into an account that it would eventually transfer to the development’s HOA or NA. The HOA or NA could then add a portion of the annual fees it collects to this account — again, specifically to cover infrastructure needs.

With a decent interest rate, basic yearly maintenance could probably be covered just by using the account’s interest, which would leave the principal available for major projects and hopefully reduce the need for major repairs. That, in turn, would lessen the need for local governments to step in when the roads become impassable, using tax dollars to fix what are otherwise considered private roads.