Who owns the road?

     I live in the country.  There I said it.  A couple of years ago, we made a decision to get out of town. We purchased a small 5 acre farm in Cleveland Florida on a quaint little road.  The road we live on is a giant loop.  It curves back on itself and we have about 40 or 50 neighbors who share out little road.  Our road is not a thoroughfare—in other words, our road is not used for commuting.  If you are driving on the road, you are either going to or from a home on that road.    You can not really use Cleveland Drive to get from one destination to another.

      Now, because our road is not a thoroughfare, Charlotte County refuses to spend collective tax money to pave or maintain it.  They do not feel that the residents of the county should foot the bill for a roadway that only the residents of that road use regularly.  Instead, the county uses something called a Municipal Services Benefit Unit (M.S.B.U.) to tax the residents on Cleveland Drive to pay for our own roadway.  Let me put this into perspective for you.  Our annual property taxes are about a thousand dollars a year, give or take.  The MSBU charge is about twelve hundred dollars.  Those collective monies are put into an account that is used to pay for paving and maintaining our road surface. 

     Lately a growing group of cyclists has taken to using our roadway for a scenic Tour-De-Cleveland.   The bikers are not noisy, they don’t litter, and they certainly don’t tear up the road surface.  For the most part, the cyclists don’t bother me too much.  We have the luxury of some of the best neighbors one could hope for, and  I have heard some of them muttering about the bikers being road hogs and disregarding stop signs.  But that is a story for another day.  

Last week, I noticed that the county had come through our one way, dead end neighborhood roadway.  They have placed signs at nearly every intersection that are obviously  road markers directing cyclists where to go on their ride.   Now, I do have a problem with this.   When Charlotte County refuses to contribute to the upkeep of our roadway under the pretext that only we use it, then directs any traffic down our road, then the County needs to step up and start contributing to the upkeep and maintainence.   If the cyclists want to come down the road on their own accord, so be it.  But what business does Charlotte County have of turning our road into a racetrack, a tourist route, or any other destination for anyone other than the residents?

Furthermore, I would really like to know if our tax money is being used to install said signs.  A person who works for the Charlotte County Public Works Department told me that the cyclists had approached the county with the proposition that they would pay for the signage if the county would install them.  If this is indeed the case, again I have a problem with it.  Who are these people to determine what signage goes up on a roadway that we exclusively pay for?  I feel that if this is true,  then the cyclists should at the very least have approached the residents of the neighborhood before they started spray painting our road surfaces (they have been doing this for years to direct each other on their routes) or putting up signage that we neither asked for or wanted.