The forested, hilly land off Henryton Road where Shirley Collier and her neighbors live is wild and wonderful, but it's in Howard County, not West Virginia, and residents want government help to improve the half-mile unpaved private road that their developer installed three decades ago.
But county officials fear that relaxing the laws on private road conversions for Collier's community would bring dozens more expensive requests.
"It's our little piece of heaven out here," said Collier, a 23-year resident. "People are here to stay, but it's gotten to the stage where our safety is at risk."
"In winter it's pure hell. We've had people stuck sideways in ditches," said Wayne Jacober, who lives with his wife, Liz, and their family near the end of the gravel drive.
School buses are not driven on the road because there's no way to turn around, and ruts trap snow and water that turn into ice that lingers for weeks, residents said.
"It's like a toboggan run," said Collier, 55, who with her husband, Tom, lives in a log cabin surrounded by woods at the top of the long entry road. Residents worry that emergency equipment could not make it in icy conditions.
"Cars going down have minimal control, and children may be walking up from the school bus," said Lew Zitzman, 67, a federal retiree who has lived along the road since his home was built in 1977.
"Coming up, you have to go at top speed to make it," he said. If the car falters, "you'll be backing down an icy hill all the way."
The 20-home development is called a "Macgill subdivision" because of a 1975 court decision by Circuit Judge James Macgill that declared new subdivision regulations adopted in a County Council resolution technically illegal. In the 18 months it took to readopt the regulations, developers were able to cut costs by building cheaper private roads that were otherwise not allowed, said former county planning director Joseph Rutter. The county has dozens of similar rural driveways, he said.
But to convert a private road into a public one, county law requires unanimous agreement among residents and their payment of two-thirds of the construction costs.
Henryton residents who paid $10,000 to $15,000 for their lots in the late 1970s say the price to rebuild the road is more than $750,000 and that some cannot afford it, even under the 30-year repayment plan offered by the county.
"There's a reason this type of neighborhood is not legal anymore," Zitzman said.
