Shortcut Route Is Seen by Many as an Accident Waiting to Happen : Santa Clarita: A stretch of Placerita Canyon Road becomes more treacherous as the city and residents debate who should maintain it. Both sides fear motorists’ liability claims.

If streets had parents, Placerita Canyon Road would be an orphan.

Unwanted, unappreciated and uncared-for, the shortcut between two main Santa Clarita arteries has been used and abused for years.

The road’s narrow lanes and twists and turns make it dangerous for motorists, while the contours of the canyon and the roots of the majestic oak trees lining the street make it inordinately expensive to fix.

Both the city and the property holders who actually own the road, some of whom may not even know they do, don’t want the road for the same reason: Lawsuit anxiety.

“We have a responsibility to all the city taxpayers not to get into tremendous liability questions,” said Santa Clarita City Councilman Carl Boyer III. “If we even fill a pothole, we open ourselves up to that liability.”

Similar worries may prompt the scores of property owners who hold title to swatches of the road between San Fernando Road and the Antelope Valley Freeway to shut it down to through traffic, forcing much of an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 cars a day onto already crowded main streets.

“When this road gets shut down, the outcry will be enormous,” predicted Ben Curtis, president of the Placerita Canyon Property Owners Assn., which emphasizes that it does not own any part of the road, a host of individuals do.

In the meantime, signs on either end of the private segment of the road read: End Public Maintained Road.

Consider yourself warned.

Motorists drive the road at the risk of their vehicles’ alignments, deftly dodging crater-like potholes while traveling at 50 m.p.h. or faster on the narrow road that features 10 curves along its two-mile run.

“One of the advantages of all the potholes and puddles and all that,” said Pat Willett, who lives in the canyon, “is that it’s the first time in years that people have gone through our canyon at appropriate speeds.”

So crowded and so treacherous is the road that The Master’s College, which owns property on both sides of the street, has a crossing guard on duty three times a week when the 775-student body goes to chapel.

The college has filled in the potholes on the portions of the road it owns, to the dismay of its legal counsel, said Dr. John Stead, vice president for academic affairs at the college.

“Our attorney would basically rather have us just shut the road down,” Stead said.

That’s one option, property owners said, they just might pursue.

About 350 property owners, who could be held liable for accidents on the road, contend Los Angeles County maintained the road for much of the last five decades and that the city, after it incorporated in 1987, continued to make improvements on it through a contract with the county.

Because of the tremendous traffic flow through the strip, residents in the area want the city to continue to maintain the street until a judge officially declares the road as belonging to the private citizens.

After that, however, the property owners said they may shut the road off to the public and create a quasi-governmental body, similar to a water district, to maintain the road and thus remove direct responsibility for it from the property owners.

The city, for its part, denies ever having maintained the road or hiring any other agency to do so.

City Atty. Carl Newton concedes, however, that the county may have maintained the road without the city requesting them to do so and that the city never ordered the county not to maintain the road.

The current impasse over who should maintain the road, however, has made a dangerous road even more so, with potholes from the recent rains going untended.

Placerita Canyon Road began as a private service road for a small oil company in the 1930s. As houses were built in the area, the land was parceled out to the newcomers, land that included the private road.

As the town evolved into a semi-urban community, traffic increased, mostly without incident.

When a motorcyclist got into an accident while riding along Placerita Canyon Road two years ago, however, he sued the city for damages.

After poring over property maps, the city officials realized that the road did not belong to Santa Clarita at all, and a judge excused the city from the lawsuit last summer.

Now, everyone is backing off the road.

Last year, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies stopped patrolling the privately held stretch of road, but continued to hold jurisdiction over the public strips of the road.

Consequently, the number of citations issued on the entire Placerita Canyon Road plunged from 293 in 1991 to 143 in 1992, an L.A. County Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.

Fearful that if they so much as fill a pothole on the street that they will have, in effect, assumed responsibility for the safety of those who drive it, Santa Clarita keeps its repair crews off Placerita Canyon Road--at least the private part.

Meanwhile, the property owners are left holding the bag, wondering how they ever got into this mess and whether someone might sue them before the road can be shut off.

“We’re just homeowners and people who work for a living,” Curtis said. “We would just rather not be involved in this.”