A bill that lets the city repave and maintain a new series of Oahu’s private roads was allowed to become law by Mayor Kirk Caldwell without his signature Monday.
But Caldwell administration officials, who had raised strong objections to the bill as it was moving through the City Council, said they won’t be jumping at every opportunity to take on more responsibility when they’ve still got some 800 miles of standard city roads they’ve promised to pave over.
Current law allows the city to "maintain by either remedial patching resurfacing or repaving" a private road if it meets 11 criteria, including:
» The director of facility maintenance agrees to take on such responsibility.
» The work directly benefits six or more individually owned parcels.
» The work benefits the larger community.
» No signs or other obstructions make it private.
Bill 61, introduced by Councilman Stanley Chang and approved by the Council 8-1 earlier this month, expands the number of roads that could be eligible by broadening the definition of what could be accepted for repair and maintenance work to include six individually owned properties within a single parcel or condominium complex, including single-family condominium property regimes.
Caldwell, in a letter explaining his reasons for allowing the bill to become an ordinance without his signature, said that until a consistent source of funding can be found for road maintenance and repairs, "the city will remain challenged to keep up with the existing roadway network it is already responsible for."
City Facility Maintenance Director Ross Sasamura told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that about 700 lane miles are to be rehabilitated by the end of 2015 under a major Caldwell initiative begun when he entered office in January 2013. But an additional 800 miles will still need to be redone, he said.
Exactly how many more private roads are potentially eligible for city maintenance under the new law is unclear, Sasamura said, but he estimated "it could be potentially thousands of new, private streets that we previously haven’t maintained."
City officials will look at new requests spurred by the new law, but given the workload for existing roads, they will be hard-pressed to take on more streets, he said.
Many of those private roads are also likely to not meet city standards and cost more to maintain or bring up to standards, Sasamura said.
Chang said he introduced the bill in response to concerns raised by communities in situations such as when a private road owner is deceased or otherwise unresponsive.
"As a result, there’s no legal entity able to maintain those roads," Chang said.
Expanding the definition allows more property owners in condominium property regimes, living in structures that would be characterized as single-family dwellings except that they share ownership of a private road, to have a chance of receiving the same benefit other property owners may get, he said.
The number of new roads eligible is "smaller than what one might think," Chang said, although he had no estimates.
Jesse Broder Van Dyke, Caldwell’s spokesman, said the administration is not ruling out accepting responsibility for maintenance of any private roads under the new law.
"But the administration’s policy will be to take them on a case-by-case basis and in general approve very few," Broder Van Dyke said.
