In a nut shell, Gem County has been forcing people on shared driveways to enter into road maintenance agreements with their neighbors and to bring a shared driveway up to county standards. The major issue with this is the force, I don’t have anything against a road maintenance agreement, I only have a problem when I’m told I must have a road maintenance agreement. In addition to the road maintenance agreement, the driveway will be converted to a private driveway, brought up to county standards and they will assign you a new address. We believe this is an end-run for eminent domain and to eventually seize these private driveways.

I’ve been told by an individual that self professed that he used to be the head of Fire in Horseshoe Bend and that the county is being threaten by insurance companies for these shared driveways. I’m surmising the county will be held liable for loss of property or life if this occurred. I personally asked a person of authority from Gem County Road and Bridge “was this the reasoning for forcing these maintenance agreements between property owners”, he confirm yes among other reasons.

So, to summarize what is going on here, with a very large dose of speculation, it seems as though the county has gotten itself in a pickle with these shared driveways and are now trying to right the ship with forcing us to convert our shared driveway into a private road, sign a maintenance agreement, bring the private road up to county standards and force us to pay for it. This sounds like Gem County is trying to take the easy way out of this pickle.

Personally, I do not want to enter into a road maintenance agreement because I’m happy with the current arrangement of nothing. If there is a problem, ether me or my neighbor fixes the problem, nether one of us want to give a third neighbor the ability to force us to spend money, we have differing opinions about being frugal. We would be giving up our autonomy and independence, which is the reason I purchased property without Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions (CC&Rs) or a HOA. nether my neighbor or myself wants to be embroiled in bureaucracy over a driveway.

Its our stance that the county should grandfather us into this ordinance because we find this backward to force all existing home owners to comply with the third building on the subdivision. The county should have done this when the property was subdivided before anyone received an address.

I’ll add each of our arguments to this thread going further, if you follow this thread, you’ll be notified when someone posts too it. More to come…