Allenbrook roads in question

Residents in the Allenbrook community in Lenoir City are requesting action be taken to help fix roads in the subdivision that remain unfinished years after the developer went bankrupt during the recession and left without completing the job.
 
The roads in question are Flora Drive, Tristan Court and part of Lancaster Drive, which resident Barrett Hobbs said have not been dedicated to the city and are still considered private.
 
At the time of the bankruptcy, Lenoir City did not have its own planning office and instead carried operations through Russ Newman, a shared employee between the city and Loudon County. A letter of credit lapsed on the developer.
 
In September 2006, two plats of Allenbrook, which include the three roads, were approved by Lenoir City Regional Planning Commission contingent upon a $20,000 letter of credit each for maintenance and completion of the reseeding of the right of way.

Those were never obtained, Hobbs said. Residents are worried the roadways will only get worse.

“You could see in front of our place how it’s deteriorated,” Sharon Farr, Allenbrook resident, said. “We’ve lived here 4˝ years now and it’s gotten worse and worse.”
 
“All the neighbors, it devalues property that has a road that isn’t finished,” Barry Perkins, Allenbrook Homeowners Association board member, added. “That’s probably the concern of everybody in the neighborhood, even those that don’t live on it.”
Hobbs, who serves on the HOA board and lives on Flora Drive, described the road as “rough.”
 
“None of the stormwater from the rain, the runoff, actually ends up in the stormwater drains, and all of the silt from both sides of the hill run down into the last storm drain that is between Bob and Sharon Farr’s house and my house,” Hobbs said. “Basically once every couple months either Bob by himself or I’ll sometimes go out and help him, we end up shoveling a couple of 5-gallon buckets of road silt before it actually gets into the storm drain.
 
“… There’s four or five potholes,” he added. “There’s portions of the storm drain where even if they decide to come in and fix the road you’ll never get water into certain storm drains over here.”
 
Residents let their concerns be heard at the Jan. 14 Lenoir City Council meeting, which was attended by more than 50 people.
At the time of the meeting, city representatives expressed concern over using taxpayer money with the roadway in question not being accepted as public. They cited a response from University of Tennessee Municipal Technical Advisory Service consultant Angie Carrier, who said the city could not use public funds on a project not deemed public.
 
Hobbs noted the city in April 2012 approved purchasing two street lights from Lenoir City Utilities Board and installing them on Flora Drive for public safety. He referenced an MTAS attorney opinion from the 1990s that notes if the city “acts in a manner that is consistent with public use and ownership, ‘acceptance’ of the dedication is implied.”
 
He said residents of Flora Drive, Lancaster Drive and Tristan Court are city and county taxpayers.

Bradshaw were scheduled to meet with HOA representatives on Tuesday after News-Herald presstime. Aikens hoped to discuss the possibility of splitting the cost with the county.
 
“Obviously, there is a lot more houses on that road now and those people are paying city and county taxes,” Aikens said Monday. “I don’t think legally they could do anything because the time is expired, but morally I think that we need to try to help them because it was a shared employee between the county and the city, even though the county did obviously have full control over it. I’m not passing the buck, I’m just telling like it is, and so they’ve got an issue there and in my opinion the county employee failed to do their job for whatever reason and they let the bond expire when the developers went belly-up.”
 
After speaking with city attorney Gregg Harrison, the plan could be to adopt the roadway, Aikens said. A decision would not be made until he learned what the county planned to do, which was set for discussion at the Loudon County Commission workshop Tuesday. As of Monday, Aikens was only aware of Flora Drive.
 
“Those people are paying city and county taxes, and we want to be good stewards of taxpayers’ money,” Aikens said. “We also want to treat the citizens right, and I don’t think that we’re treating those citizens out there right by delaying it and not being able to do something. I asked early on for the homeowners association to try to come up with some money, but it’s a very small nominal fee that they pay out there and they just didn’t have it. But they’ve continued to pay city and county taxes for the last five years or so and I just think that we need to try to help them. It’s the right thing to do.”
 
Bradshaw before the workshop believed commission could be split on the issue.
 
“Some are going to be for and some are going to be against,” he said. “I think we look back at the time it happened I think it’s important to get all the facts straight and go from there. ... I think it’s important for (residents) to have a voice, be heard, to be approachable. This is the third or fourth time we’ve run into this just in the last few years. A lot of these neighborhoods have been victims of the recession that occurred in ‘07.”
 
Fixing the roads should not be the responsibility of the homeowners, Hobbs said.
 
“Even though I’m a Flora Drive resident, I’m looking at this from the perspective of the entire Allenbrook Homeowner Association,” Hobbs said. “I mean it doesn’t really matter if this was a road that I didn’t live on, it’s a matter of doing what’s right for the community.”

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2/11/19