County at wit's end over road

Naming of 'glorified driveway' produces neighbor opposition

By ED COX
of The Dalles Chronicle

     Wasco County commissioners are nearing their wit’s end over a myriad of minor, misplaced, mis-platted and/or misnamed roads.
     “They’re all hard to deal with,” County Judge Dan Ericksen told Steven Bleiler at a Dec. 19 hearing on Bleiler’s request to change the name of a 1,600-foot-long glorified driveway from the tentative Fairmont Drive to a permanent Wit’s End Drive.
     That request was a case in point, as a neighbor’s opposition caused the hearing to stretch from an expected 10 minutes to an hour and 10 with still no decision — much less a satisfactory one — forthcoming.
     “I just need an address, your honor,” said Bleiler, who owns one of two parcels accessed off what! he described as a driveway he shares with neighbor Robert Dys.
     Meanwhile, Dys’ problem was the opposite one: He had nothing against the proposed name or the switch except the fact that it would take his longtime Sevenmile Hill Rd. address along with it, thus hurting his home-based business.
Complicating the situation is the fact that, according to Dys, the drive doesn’t go where it’s supposed to — falling a full 40 feet to one side of the public right-of-way, meaning it’s on his property.
     “They named my driveway,” said Dys of the random assignment of the name Fairmont, likely by an official in the county planning department. “They didn’t name the public road, they named my driveway.”
     It’s just one of many roads in the county that don’t match what’s on paper, and this particular conflict illus! trates the difficulties of a one-size-fits-all approach to cor! recting what Ericksen called the “sins of the past.”
     Some of those irregularities were created as far back as the turn of the century, he said, and increasing development pressure in rural areas is causing them to be found more frequently, usually as the result of planning-related requirement written into a county ordinance.
     “You write ordinances to deal with the issues as they should be, and of course they get to us because the issues are never as they should be,” Ericksen mused. “Nothing is clear, so we’re at wit’s end.”
     Over the last year, the court has heard multiple requests for road vacations because of such errors and one case in which a private road was being used for access because topography physically prevented a public, dedicated road from doing the job.
     “They’re all a little bi! t different animal, but they all have sharp teeth and big claws, and they all seem to bite back” Ericksen said, emphasizing the importance of staying in good humor when dealing with these “unsolvable problems.”
     They would be comical, he said, if they weren’t so serious for the people involved.
     In the case of the proposed Wits End Drive, commissioners seemed unsure whether — to borrow a couple of metaphors employed at the hearing — they should affix a band-aid or perform surgery.
     A motion by commissioner Sherry Holliday to rename the road but allow Dys to keep his current address died for lack of a second, and Ericksen and third commissioner Bill Lennox questioned whether it was even proper for the county to name a road not on a public right-of-way.
     In the end, the court arrived at a non-decision Bleiler c! haracterized as “positively Solomon-like”: they re! quested the planning department verify the separation of road and right-of-way and put off deliberations on the case until Jan. 2.

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Source: http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2007/12/news12-27-07-02.shtml
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