In The Beginning

The Saddleback Road District had an interesting start. Not very legal, but interesting.

A developer, Dan Kelly, bought the area, a mostly undeveloped swath of land, sometime in the late 1990’s. It was being used to run cattle for years. The main road was simply a cattle trail. Mr. Kelly divided the area up and in 2005 he formed a road district that included the first portion he developed. It was developed in three projects.

It was named Ghost Canyon Road District. At first, it appeared that he did everything right. No reason to think he didn’t. However, after we started looking into everything, it did become questionable (as was mentioned previously) that there were other landowners within the ‘district’ being incorporated, and yet none of them appear on the voting roster.

Anyway, somewhere along the line somebody put some gravel on the cattle trail and called it a road.

In 2016, a married couple with a property on the road, who wished to sell that property, looked into starting a road district. Instead of creating a road district in their neighborhood (covering THEIR section of road) they instead elected to ‘activate’ a road district that was incorporated in 2005. To be clear, their property (and that of the other supporters of the idea) were NOT within the district they were activating.

If you have property you wish to sell but the road it is on is crappy, and you want other people to help subsidize the cost of improvement, a road district is a fairly easy solution. Especially if you don’t plan on sticking around to see the aftermath.

File some papers, and voila… other people are paying to pretty up your road.