Lyon County puts criteria in place to accept non-maintained roads

YERINGTON - Lyon County residents have until June 30 to ask for roads to be included in the county's road maintenance system.

About 25 applications have been submitted over the past 18 months as the county has painstakingly spent many months drafting a road acceptance policy.

Lyon County commissioners this week finally approved the criteria that non-maintained county roads must meet to be added to the road maintenance system.

"This policy is long overdue," commissioner Bob Milz said. "It will take a lot of heat off us commissioners. We get blasted for not maintaining a road."

Commissioners hope the policy takes the politics out of road maintenance. Often residents will pressure a commissioner to have a road added to the maintenance list, Milz said.

The policy establishes a firm criteria and procedure to add or remove roads from the list. The county road division manager will weigh applications against the criteria and recommend which roads the commission should consider.

"I will say that was good governing," Commissioner Dave Fulstone said. "We worked on it and worked on it."

Lyon County's booming growth, second only to Clark County, has brought homes and neighborhoods to roads that only a few years ago had nothing but sagebrush.

"A lot are obvious roads that the county should take care of," Public Works Director Dan O'Brien said. "They have lots of residences and school buses go on them. Government is supposed to be taking care of these types of streets."

Only roads owned by the county or roads that have gained a right-of-way because of public use on a continuous basis will be added to the maintenance schedule. Private roads will not be considered, O'Brien said.

A single property owner or a group of property owns may apply to have a road considered for county maintenance. Applications are available at the Lyon County Public Works Department in Yerington.

Lyon County commissioners will consider accepting roads twice a year at meetings in September or March. Applications for the September meeting are due June 30 and for the March meeting the deadline is Dec. 31.

Lyon County has about 1,000 miles of roads with about half of the mileage maintained by the county.