PANAMA CITY — The Bay County Commission amended an ordinance this month so resident-funded road paving projects could move forward with less support from property owners.
Previously the county required signatures from property owners who held at least 60 percent of the road’s front footage or 60 percent of all property abutting the road project; now it’s down to a simple majority. The old rule was impeding a couple of projects because the banks won’t respond when it holds foreclosure properties, said Ken Schnell, county public works director.
Commissioner Mike Thomas opposed the measure and was the only one to vote against it.
Thomas noted the U.S. Senate had just approved the “nuclear option” eliminating the filibuster in some circumstances, and drew a comparison. He said the Senate’s move “genuinely scares me to death” and this change bothered him too.
“I’ve been afraid that this was going to be one of those type (of) changes where we force people … to pay for things they don’t want,” Thomas said.
Via email, he said the program costs the county a lot of money and it still has hundreds of thousands of dollars in arrears from past projects, so he didn’t want make future projects any easier. Under the program, there are 402 delinquent parcels that owe a total of $353,558, according to a report by the Clerk of Court’s office.
Thomas also pointed out that part of the ordinance didn’t change. The proposed project can be shut down if property owners, who hold more than 40 percent of the front footage on the proposed road or 40 percent of all the property abutting the road, oppose it.
The initiative is called the Participating Paving Program (PPP) and the county pays 60 percent of the road paving costs and property owners pay 40 percent. It only applies to county roads. The program began in 1989, and since 2001, more than 26 miles of roads have been paved or stabilized, according to the county’s website.
Thomas said he doesn’t think that property owners should have to pay for something they don’t want, but said sometimes that’s the cost of living in a community.
“I think that’s why other people choose to live on private roads,” he said. “The majority rules throughout the county, not just on the county commission, but also on a public road,”
The County Commission also has the final say on the projects and can vote them down, but Commissioner Bill Dozier, who has served on the board since 2004, had no recollection of any being rejected.
Dozier stood behind the ordinance change, saying it was a way to help property owners get their roads paved.
“It’s a voluntary program, and I felt that there’s a number of neighborhoods out there that have dirt roads that if they want to pave them … I wanted to work with them in a positive way to be able to help them,” he said.
He acknowledged, though, that property owners can be forced to go along with the project even if they don’t want it to happen.
“It’s a system that’s set up (that) majority rules,” he said, noting it was majority in terms of front footage.
