THE ROADS........like the 1,000 pound gorilla in the corner of the room, the roads in our HOA have been the point of controversy for many years.  The HOA Board of Directors decided in Fall of 2024 to tackle this problem starting with consulting an attorney in Portland who specializes in legal/operational issues of HOAs.  The Board had two online consulting sessions with Kyle Grant, Tonkon Torp LLP, who analyzed our CC&Rs and numerous questions we had, including our roads.  All said and done it was learned that our HOA roads' origins started in 1969 when land developer, Ruel Chapman, signed off on the Lane County Surveyor plats that all roads within Mercer Lake Estates and Mercer Lake Heights are "dedicated public roads", with the exception of Mercer Lake Road(dedicated County Maintained Road).  The surveyor plats are on this website in the menu listing for Maps.  In 2019 after 40 years of residents demands, a landslide and a couple other emergency issues, Collard Lake Road was finally adopted into Lane County's "maintained roads inventory" as a feeder road coming off of Mercer Lake Road.

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We are not sure exactly when, but sometime after 1979, many counties in Oregon began using the terminology "local access road" to describe a dedicated public road that is outside of city limits.  Essentially a local access road(LAR) is a road and accompanying easements that is held in a "public trust."  In our case, Lane County has the appointed authority to oversee our LARs.  Lane County has established that the maintenance of LARs is the responsibility of the landowners whose property borders the LARs.  Only in the case of catastrophic damage(landslide, sinkholes, etc) to LARs will the County come out to repair/rebuild a section of the road to ensure that public emergency vehicles are able to respond to emergencies.  The LARs within our HOA are not the responsibility of the HOA.  If our roads were dedicated private roads of the HOA, then our CC&Rs would have language concerning an HOA Roads Association( a sub-association under the primary master HOA Association) which would have established committees for maintenance schedules and repairs.  But this was never part of the CC&Rs.  This was a rude awakening to the Board.  It is up to individual and collective efforts of the property owners to take care of the LARs, and in some situations it will take coordination with property owners that are not HOA members, but use these roads to get to and from their homes.

See below for a pdf document from Lane County that explains in more detail the regulation of LARs.

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