Colorado DOT Regulation on Private Propertry Roads

Colorado Department of Transportation Regulation
2024-12-01

This letter was sent to the Colorado DOT regulations committee to help prevent Larimer County Planning from taking private property rights.

DOT Rule Makers:

With one simple rule, the State can stop the government's bureaucratic and institutional theft of private property roads.

Rule: "Roads, streets, or other byways designated with the terms public property or government-owned property mean the government is the recorded title and deed named owner and under government jurisdiction."

Enforcement: All government records, representatives, agents, media, plots, maps, GIS, or other sources using the words "public property" constitute a legal and binding testament by the author indicating that the government is the lawful owner.

Regulation: The County has the supervisory duty obligation to install "Private Road" or "Restricted Road Ahead" signs at the general street system to private property byways. The subdivision's byway driver caution signs will have a standard uniform design and installation presence to maintain a comprehensive and uniform fair notice to general street system drivers state-wide.

Reason: All roads and streets, public or private, have seven conditions: named owner, title, deed, maintenance, liability, access permissions, and use rules. Named owner, title, and deeds are asset facts. Owner authority choices include maintenance, liability, access permissions, and use rules. The Private Road sign protects the planned community private road owners from mutual liability risks and provides a legal trespass fair notice to the general street system drivers.

Definition:
~ Highway driver – A driver with the right to use any government-owned public road, other public way on land, or general street system.
~ Division driver – A subdivision unit owner-driver has the right to use the subdivision’s common property road and to access the general street system. A unit owner may grant a highway driver a division driver’s permission to visit the unit owner. Public, commercial, or the like services with private insurance have division driver road use permission.

Use Case: When Larimer County chose not to accept planned subdivision roads as county-owned roads, it made a business decision to reduce the costs associated with maintenance, liability, and access permissions. Instead, the County passed private property road costs on to the subdivision unit owners. By doing so, the unit owners remained as the title and deed named owners. The county did not make provisions to protect the subdivision unit owners from private property road trespassers; rather, County Planning approved construction plans for the road to blend into the general street system. A private road sign is a legal gate notice separating general public property from community private property. Without the private road sign, highway drivers cannot be held accountable for trespassing. If a highway driver liability event happens without a private road sign notice, the highway driver can claim all the unit owners.

Blended Roadways: In communities that use a mixed general street system of public property roads with abutted subdivision private property roads, the roads appear to be public property roads from a driver's perspective.

However, if a driver exits the public property byway road onto a private property road, the driver is unintentionally trespassing and consequently liable regardless of the risk event. Residential communities are not county ranch lands where the rancher can post private property roads. When the County accepts development contacts for private subdivisions, the County is legally obligated to protect property before any unit owners have possession. At the instance of the development contact's acceptance, two critical changes happen. The developer's land becomes County subdivision supervised, and thereby, the County is legally responsible for protecting new private property.

Motivation: Counties across Colorado have multiple private subdivisions that abut the general street system. The subdivision's byway driver caution signs represent a significant driver route choice decision and an immediate personally liable risk. The sign creates a legal gateway separating the general public property from the community's private property. Counties choose blended private and public road transportation networks to let private property unit owners pay the maintenance and take the liability risk. Planning mandated HOA bylaws and GIS maps to compound unit owner risks that private roads have public access. This mandate is fiction. The ”Restricted Road Ahead” regulation dissolves fiction.

Acceptance: The State has a public safety duty to educate drivers about the significance of private and public property. The Restricted Road Ahead sign's reason, presence, caution, and legal consequences allow all drivers to demonstrate respect for other's property. The regulation rule defines the term public property for land. The regulation is not grief experience; it is the remedy before the grief experience.

Action: Adopt the rule, "Roads, streets, or other byways designated with the terms public property or government-owned property mean the government is the recorded title and deed named owner and under government jurisdiction." and implement as standard sign design with an education program for all Colorado licensed drivers.