Country Road Districts Overlapping Sometimes a Revenue Challenge

People are heading out of the cities to surrounding subdivisions, a diffusion from higher to lower  concentrations that has paralleled the growth of cities, to escape dangers, noise, taxes, and pandemics.  Those in rural developments soon confront the financial burdens of water system and roadway maintenance.  

      Forming road and water districts are sometimes a solution because they simulate, on a much smaller scale, invisible municipal governments by collecting taxes and administering what’s to be done.  Better systems usually mean higher taxes, while lower taxes often hint at more potholes.

       Rural subdivisions often base water payments on usage metering.  The more water you use in your home, the more you pay.  It’s easy to shut the water off when people don’t pay. The inherent equality of this is why fewer actual water districts need to be formed.

      But roads are not metered as easily. A retired couple may use the roads far less than a busy family with more drivers.  Some homes are situated at the far end of the road network, using miles of roadway, while others are located near the entrance gates.  You could use a “metering” approach by measuring the distance from home to the entrance/exit point.  This is easily done using a vehicle with an odometer that measures tenths of a mile, a point-to-point step toward more fairness. Counting the number of drivers in households and their driving patterns would be cumbersome to keep track of.

  Others might have homes in the subdivision but use an alternate way of coming and going than using HOA roads.  Most of these people, however, tend to use the community water system, so are forced into a road district.  As we know, without being taxed many find it convenient simply not to pay.

    One subdivision’s road district (#1) on the outskirts of Rapid City, South Dakota, actually passes through another subdivision’s road district (#2) to get to a county-maintained road.  Both now share costs equally for the strip that’s driven in common.  But a few neighbors on the far end of RD #1 found that building a narrow private road to a different county road was far more convenient.  They use none of  RD #2–and less than a block of RD#1 (some none at all)–but still have to pay equally to #1 and #2, in addition to the costs of the new private road.

    Now an even newer subdivision (RD #3) has made a connecting road to what was a cul-de-sac in RD #2, so some people nearer to this new connecting lane find that it’s easier to come and go that way.  The newer RD # 3 drivers aren’t being approached by RD #2 to pay equally, though they are surely paying to their home’s road network.

    Ironically, those newer folks who cut through RD #2 without paying extra are about the same in number as those others in RD #1 who maintain the private road off RD #1. The private road is very narrow, with steep drop-offs in some places.

    Country living is smaller scale and cheaper, but road-district or community governing districts may make some wish they were back in a tax-collection system with no further worries than deciding what to gripe about.  Then again, the mill levy approach puts Republicans back into Bernie Sanders-type thinking, making the better-off pay for the lesser-achievers.  Not exactly equality.