Bringing the RIP back to life — County commissioners consider restarting road identification project
Weston County officials have long faced questions about ownership and responsibility for various roads in the county, and there have been renewed discussions on how to tackle this issue.
Chairman Nathan Todd raised the topic during a county commissioner meeting held on Oct. 7. According to the meeting minutes, Todd informed the board that Road and Bridge foreman Jim Hansen had not been able to locate documents designating parts of Old Highway 85 as a county road.
This matter, which county officials are still working on, highlights the bigger issue of road identification faced by the county.
Knowing whether a county road is a legally recognized county road is important for many reasons. For instance, different tax revenues come with different stipulations on how they can be spent. As Commissioner Marty Ertman pointed out in an interview with the News Letter Journal, diesel tax revenue can be applied to the maintenance and construction of any public road. However, gasoline tax revenue can only be used for established county roads.
“See how complicated this gets?” she said.
There is also the concern of expending county funds on roads that do not serve the public interest, such as private or disused roads.
According to former County Attorney William Curley, confusion over the legal status of county roads is worse in Weston County than any other county in the state. He attributes this, in large part, to the county road book being misplaced. This ledger, which collects the legal status of county roads, was missing when Curley was sworn in. He said that during his tenure, he suggested that the board pay for the creation of a new copy, and as far as he is aware, this never happened.
In 2016, Curley found and presented to the board what he called the best statute to ever come out of the Wyoming Legislature – 24-3-201 et seq., Identification of County Roads.
The legislation outlines the purpose of this road identification project, or “RIP,” process.
“The legislature finds that due to inaccurate and inconsistent records, there exist roads which are seldom used, not maintained and are not identified as or believed by the public to be county roads but are, in fact, county roads,” the statute says. “Recognizing the numerous difficulties resulting from the existence of such county roads, the legislature finds it in the best interest of the public to create a procedure to identify country roads, thereby altering and vacating these abandoned county roads without survey.”
Curley found the process promising, especially since it allows for road identification without the costly step of surveying. In the event of alteration or vacation of a road, the process requires public notice and the opportunity for stakeholders to object.
“The public can come in and say, ‘No way. We need that road to get to XYZ,’” Ertman said.
Curley presented the RIP process to the board, and with the assistance of then Geographic Information Systems coordinator Fran Lehman and other county staff, he applied the process to county roads in Weston. For instance, the process was used in 2016 to determine the status of North Raven Creek Road as a private, and not county, road.
“They spend hours gathering information, doing research, all of that. And they wrote up the public notices with the maps and everything,” Ertman said of Curley and his team.
They started by focusing on the far western side of the county, and Curley estimates that about 10% of the county was completed before the project came to a halt. In 2018, after Curley lost his re-election bid to Alex Berger, the project effectively ended.
“The election happened and (Curley) lost, and the next county attorney didn’t see the project as a priority,” Ertman said.
According to Ertman, the COVID-19 pandemic also pushed the RIP project to the back burner.
Commissioner Todd told the News Letter Journal that the RIP project is stalled but that the board is “looking at getting started on it again.” He said that the board would need to designate or hire people to work on it and that finding funds for the project could be an issue.
Curley said that he has approached current County Attorney Michael Stulken about his willingness to continue the project but has not yet been taken up on the offer.
In comments provided to the News Letter Journal, Stulken expressed interest in Curley’s assistance.
“From what I understand, Mr. Curley has a strong suit when it comes to this type of work,” he said. “Accordingly, if he can help the county in any way in this regard, I think it would be a good idea to have him involved.”