More than 100 owners of properties in unincorporated Boulder County’s residential subdivisions have expressed interest in adding their names to a lawsuit that’s challenging the county’s ability to form a Local Improvement District and bill homeowners the bulk of the costs of rehabilitating their subdivisions’ paved roads, according to one of the original plaintiffs in that suit.
Chuck Wibby, a co-founder of Boulder County Fairness in Road Maintenance (FIRM) — an organization formed to oppose the county’s proposals to have property owners pay the bulk of those road rehabilitation costs — said he and the other seven plaintiffs whose attorney filed their lawsuit in Boulder District Court on Nov. 20 have gotten requests from more than 100 people for the paperwork they’d need to fill out to add their names as plaintiffs.
Most of those requests have come within the past week, Wibby said, after FIRM started circulating invitations for others to join the lawsuit.
“I’m not really surprised,” Wibby said, “given the amount of interest there has been” in the road-rehabilitation issue.
FIRM has posted information on its website, bocofirm.org, about how residential subdivision property owners can become plaintiffs. They’re being asked, for example, to describe the condition of the county roads in front of or alongside their own homes, as well as the general condition of their subdivision’s roads — as well as any work they know of that the county has ever done on that subdivision’s roads.
FIRM tells people on its website that if they’re added as plaintiffs, they won’t have to be financially responsible for any attorneys’ fees or other legal costs.
FIRM also is advising, however, that state law requires any would-be plaintiffs to pay the county’s full Local Improvement District assessment for their properties by Dec. 23 — rather than paying it in annual installments over the coming 15 years — in order to be able to have legal standing to question the county’s authority to form the LID and bill the road-improvements costs to property owners.
John Fryar can be reached at 303-684-5211 or jfryar@times-call.com.
