Boom in Riverside County Leaves Roads in the Dust

Mariposa Avenue defies definition as a road. Paved in fits and starts, deeply rutted in spots, freshly asphalted in others, it hiccups across the hills of western Riverside County, an emblem of how the region’s unslaked need for moderately priced housing is devouring the Inland Empire.

There are at least 300 miles of dirt road in Riverside County, and potentially thousands more that have never been mapped, remnants of a bygone era when the Inland Empire was Southern California’s rural frontier.

Now, thanks to a red-hot custom home market and the handiwork of some builders subverting weak zoning laws, the tattered dirt lanes weave past hastily erected stucco mansions in neighborhoods built without drainage ditches or street signs.

“It’s kind of cockeyed,” said Gaelyn Matthews, 45, who moved into a new four-bedroom home on Mariposa Avenue with her husband 11 months ago. Out front, half the road has been paved by neighbors who pitched in for some asphalt; the other half is soft dirt.

“It’s not safe at all having both,” Matthews said. “It’s scary. People come flying down here.”

The county, the fourth-largest in the state in area and one of the fastest growing in population, is ill-equipped to keep up with new roads and other infrastructure. Roads that recently meandered through orange groves now serve booming neighborhoods, turning from dust to mud when it rains. Emergency vehicles face potentially deadly delays because of disconnected streets that dead-end into gullies. Traffic jams the few paved arteries that span neighborhoods, and fatal accident rates on these connectors outstrip accident rates statewide for such arteries.

“It’s the dirty linen of our whole county,” said Supervisor Bob Buster, whose 525-square-mile district covers Mariposa Avenue and many other unpaved miles in the Woodcrest, Glen Valley and Mead Valley neighborhoods. “We need something like rural electrification

Some people love their dirt roads, though, and hate to see the new homes, increased traffic and other changes.

“When I give people directions, I tell them ‘first dirt road on the left,’ ” said Bruce Rauch, who has lived on Cedar Street in Woodcrest for 14 years. “We like it out here. You know how those private communities put in speed bumps? Well, we have our own natural speed bumps.”Out front, rainstorms have leached away portions of Cedar Street, opening irregular crevasses in the middle of the road.

“The only time it presents any problem is when it rains, and that’s only a couple of times a year,” Rauch said. “I just rent a tractor and smooth it out. Put it this way: It’s never come to the point where we couldn’t get into our own house.”

“You don’t want pavement because the horses skid on it, see?” explained Rauch’s neighbor, Gary Hulbert, 66. Hulbert, an equipment broker, just sold his home and 1.4-acre lot with horse arena for $310,000.

“It’s changed here, and we’re leaving. Going to Oregon,” Rauch said. “We’re getting to the point where there’s no place to ride anymore, there are so many houses being built.”

A few years ago, someone polled Cedar Street residents about whether they wanted their street paved. Most said no after hearing the cost -- in Hulbert’s case, $150 a month for 15 years.

“I don’t know what they were going to put in, but it must have had a lot of gold in it,” he said.

County officials say there is no comprehensive program for having the roads dedicated to the county, so there are literally tens of thousands of homeowners who own the tiny patches of road in front of their homes.

If they want paving, they may get some matching funds, but mostly they’re going to have to do it themselves. At $400,000 a mile, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize the county road system, said Deputy Transportation Director Juan Perez.

That’s a cost the county should pay, many say, for public safety.

When Lucy Zaragoza, 73, called 911 in April 2000 because she thought she was having a stroke in her Newman Street home, no one came. Her husband finally called back, and 25 minutes later a firetruck arrived. Fortunately, she was fine.

“Aren’t I an emergency? I guess not,” she said. “I called up twice to 911. I know it’s a dirt road and very bumpy, but still.”

County staff said the dirt roadways aren’t the problem -- it’s the lack of interconnected side streets. An ambulance driver relying on a Thomas Guide map thought Zaragoza’s block could be reached from the nearest main road. But that road dead-ends in a wash a few houses away from the Zaragozas’ before picking up again on the other side.

Capt. Rick Vogt of the Riverside County Fire Authority said firefighters are required to learn their coverage area, but when ambulances or backup firetrucks from other stations run into a maze of unmarked side streets, it can cause delays.

“They might not be as familiar with local landmarks -- a boulder or a tree stump,” he said. He urged people to clearly mark their houses and streets.

Lucy Zaragoza’s husband Louis did just that after the incident, standing in his pickup on the corner to nail up a sign for the unmarked cross street.

The Zaragozas also checked county maps, because they were sure they had deeded the road in front of their house to the county years earlier, meaning it should have been paved and marked.

But just because a homeowner donates a road does not mean it will be accepted. In a classic Catch-22, the county will not assume ownership or liability on such roads until they are “improved” -- graded and paved.

In poor neighborhoods, state and federal grants have been cobbled together to pave main streets. State gas-tax funds also can be used for paving, but Riverside County officials say they get less funding than more densely populated counties, and those funds are used to maintain 2,600 miles of paved road.

Many say that’s unfair.

“We pay in $1,600 a year in property taxes as it is. We have paid taxes for years and received no services,” said Cindy Gudino, a longtime resident of Dallas Street in Woodcrest.

She and others say that if the county can’t afford to pave the roads, developers should have to pave existing streets around new projects.

But officials say new home fees cannot be used for existing roads unless they provide direct access to the new housing project. In other words, even if cars from a 300-home project will crowd area streets as they head for schools, grocery stores and elsewhere, the developer is not required to help pave them.

Soaring home prices in the Inland Empire have also exacerbated a process known as “quartering” or “four-bying,” an abbreviation for dividing a parcel into as many as four lots. If an owner subdivides land into fewer than five parcels, he or she doesn’t have to obtain a tract map, and therefore doesn’t have to pave roads around the new houses.

That’s the case on Mariposa and adjoining streets in Woodcrest, neighbors charge, where builder David Dieterle is constructing two or three custom homes at a time with little to no grading, and no road improvements. Neighbors say Dieterle has built more than 30 homes in less than two years. Because he builds fewer than five at a time, he is not required to put in storm drains, grade or pave roads.

Dieterle did not return calls seeking comment. Gudino said her street and backyard have flooded because of runoff from Dieterle’s new homes.

If someone complained officially about Dieterle’s practices, “it certainly is the kind of thing code enforcement would investigate,” said Scott Barber, assistant director of the Transportation and Land Management Agency and former head of the Building and Safety division.

“I think that’s something code enforcement would be interested in.”

“We’re the unadopted stepchild of Riverside County,” said Gudino of owners such as herself who can’t get the county or developers to fix their roads.

As bad as the physical consequences of breakneck development have been, she said, even worse is the loss of a community.

“Two years ago everybody had horses, we had a hay ride once a year, everybody would help maintain the roads. We were all in good harmony,” she said.

“Now since this developer came in, all we have is fights.”