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.

Biden sweeping new green initiatives

 Biden sweeping new green initiatives

In 1984, GM started Saturn as an independent business to bring robotics into automobile manufacturing. Labor feared the job loss.  The Wang word processor replaced thousands of legal secretaries, and their IBM Selectric typewriters. Horseshoes changed shipping loads distances.  Technology advancements create an interloper phenomena event disrupting established secure social norms: the story repeats and repeats. 

The wagon with wheels and axle technology breached Native lands. The wheel and axle, the horseshoe, the robot, the computer are just things. Technology is the applied use of things and the source of the interloper phenomena. 

Since before WWII, the automobile industry has been on notice to save energy and reduce pollution. The interloper waits for presentation in the corporate board rooms, and greed defected the breach. GM claims to have all cars electric by 2035. That power demand will be a breach on the power grid—the workforce balance changes from automobile assembly plants to distributed grids of alternative energy power plants. 

The interesting effect of a technology interloper phenomenon is the return on investment. If the return on the investment is positive, the technology demand expands, and job growth expands. The interloper phenomenon becomes and sustainable enterprise.  

Damn It: Shingles, Postherpetic Neuralgia, Apathy and Grit

Shingles Then Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN) Then Apathy Then Grit

Shingles and Postherpetic Neuralgia

Selfie Picture

On April 7, 2017,  shingles broke out on the upper left side of my face. In about 2 weeks, the shingles pox left, but I spent the next 6 months in bed from postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) pain on the V1 of the trigeminal nerve on the upper left side of my face. The pain from itching was so bad I could not walk.  After more than two years, and the itching persists, but it is not as debilitating. The first PHN drug treatment was gabapentin. It did not work. Ice packs helped. I am glad I am a veteran, and my VA neurologist is a serious doctor.  He switched gabapentin to the drug to Lyrica, and that provided more relief, at least I stopped screaming.

I started wearing Lidocaine patches on my forehead.  I made my own concoction of Lidocaine, CBD and THC lotions to replace the patches. I read about some experiments using Botox injections for the PHN treatment. I have Medicare and my IBM retiree insurance, and the VA Cheyenne is over an hour away, so I try to use community providers.  My community neurologist, Dr. Tamara Miller runs the Multiple Sclerosis Center of the Rockies.  She used to give me Botox for a perpetual MS spasm in my left calf. The FDA approves Botox for migraines but not for PHN.  My VA neurologist, Dr. Kanter found a way to make an exception. Every 90 days, the VA ophthalmologist trained in Botox injection can give me about 13 Botox injections on the trigeminal nerve. 

In the days before the Botox treatment, I laid in bed, hour after hour, day after day, month after month. For the first time in 68 years, I became apathetic. And my mood kept getting worse. The bad news was during those days, I did not know I was apathetic. All I could think about was the constant itching pain. One day, I got sick of being sick.  Treatments sparked me just enough that I knew my attitude and mood did not belong to me.  Eventually, I did diagnose myself as apathetic. Before I did, I remember looking in a mirror at my shabby self and telling myself, “You are pathetic. You look like you do not give a shit,” I suppose telling yourself bad news about yourself can be the first step to change.

It is now November 2019, the itch is always there, like a bunch of small mosquito bites that have just about lost the itch. There are flare-ups, and the treatment is back to ice packs, patches, and lotions, The flare-ups begin about two weeks before the next Botox injection. After the Botox shots, it takes about a week before the Botox is effective. Even with the Botox, stress and weather can provoke itching again.

 I do not know if the PHN will ever go away, but life with MS and knowing MS is a lifelong medical condition did prepare me for the PHN. The pain-treatment pattern is the same. Itching is like an MS relapse alerting me to the fact that something is wrong. Steroid treatments help to put MS into remission. Likewise, icepacks and patches help to put the PHN itch into remission. With MS we take disease-modifying treatments to help reduce relapses. And with PHN, the Botox treatment helps to reduce the itching pain. 

Both MS and PHN cause fatigue. Both drain vitality and can damage the will to thrive.

Apathy and Grit

I am not exactly sure how I diagnosed myself to have clinical apathy. Ordinary, everyday apathetic feelings are normal. We have an internal judgment referee that enables us to show or feel no interest, enthusiasm, or concern for something.