I have been asked to speak on roads again at the elected course next month. It doesn't look to me as though there are any huge detours or new routes from either the AG or the courts.

Anything new ya'll want covered?

A little primer on telling SBC/AT&T/Whatever they're called this week to go fly a kite when they fail to bury their phone lines deep enough and your county's road graders wind up cutting them.

Oh, yeah. And the joys of irascible (or, if they're hefty campaign contributors, "colorful") landowners who insist on their God-given right to erect gates/fences across public roads.

Any one else running into the use of the right of way or ditch by those claiming to be a public utililty? i.e. wind farm tranmission lines?

Couple of our commissioners seemed to be hell-bent on closing county roads, I suppose to placate grumpy landowners. I originally thought we needed to keep all county roads open because it increased our R & B funding. One commish told me, however, the loss of revenue is not that significant.

Another trick here, especially among groups of neighbors, is to put a gate across a class C road, but leave the gate unlocked. I guess the idea is to trick people into thinking the road is legally closed, when it is not.

I am glad to hear that my county is not the only one to be harrassed by AT&T/SBC. I am considering drafting an invoice to them for the time and expense our motorgrader operators accrue while using their equipment to locate and remove their unburied cables.

Oh yes, we get a steady stream of bills from them. Road and bridge has been instructed, (requested), to routinely measure the depth and location of the line whenever one is cut. So far they are always planted more shallow than grass seed.

I used to try and communicate with these people. The lawyer who (is/was?) over the matter was polite and promised to put an end to it. Ha Ha The collection people are, well, collection people.

Now we just have a paper trail that ends up in a file in my office. Sometimes I wish (the modern equivalent of) Ma Bell would just file suit, but who needs extra work?

The stern, finger-shaking demand letters we get from Ma Bell almost invariably relate to our road graders cutting lines in the roadways or drainage ditches, where the lines are buried to about the same depth as a penny dropped into loose sand. They uniformly come from a lawyer with a firm in Wichita, Kansas, who is not licensed in Texas. Typically, after pointing out that his claim won't fly under the Utilities Code, ergo that pesky governmental immunity thing raises its head, I also remind him of a quaint little provision in section 15.015 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. You know. The one that says if you're going to sue a county, you have to sue it in that county. Thus, I generally tell him that I'll enjoy going to lunch with him when he comes to visit with local counsel.

We dealt with a wind farm within the last couple of years and one issue was the use of the county right of way for their transmission lines. We ended up doing a formal easement. Actually, they already seemed to understand that they were not in the same position as utilities regarding right of way use. You guys must have done a good job educating them.

SBC/ATT has a position that some of the statutes were modified to improve their ROW position. Unfortunately, the statute was modified when it was non-substantatively codified into the Utilities Code but the Courts have routinely been adverse to the SBC/ATT position. If you look for a case involving a City and County west of Dallas and the movement of some phone lines for the construction of a Convention Center one might get the impression that collateral estoppel would work against certain Bell grandchildren.

What about avenues for recovering payments for damages to county roads by large trucks when some new drilling activity occurs?

Dealing with a citizen who believs a road is a "county" road and there is no evidence of it.

Not infrequently, those citizens are dealt with through chapter 574, Health and Safety Code.

When landowners try to deny access to a county road, I respond with a John Deere letter, followed by a little Caterpillar justice.

I like your ideas! Somehow the presentation has taken a back seat to creating a manadamus action against a judge....