PARIS – Town officials listened Monday night to a brief history of the poorly maintained Colby Farm Road, which property owners along it say is public and the town says is private.
The long-standing dispute on the status of the dirt road began when landowners asked the town to fix it up. There is one year-round resident on the road, which runs for more than one mile from Biscoe Road to the West Paris town line.
Selectmen decided Monday to look further into who owns it and who therefore is responsible for maintaining it.
“We’ll do research of old town records, old maps, and registry of the deeds,” selectmen Chairman Raymond Glover said Tuesday.
Town Manager Sharon Jackson said Tuesday that, “You have to do this with a lot of the roads because roads were established years and years ago. And how they were established, and what happens to them from the time they were there, determines their status today.”
She said the town needs to find out when the road was created and if and when the road may have been discontinued at a town meeting.
She said that besides the one year-round residence along the road, there is also a camp beyond it.
At Monday’s meeting, attorney Dana Hanley, who represents landowner Raymond Colby of Oxford, said Lemuel Jackson built the road about 200 years ago, and it showed up on town maps in the 1800s as part of a town network. Colby owns the land along the west side of the road that abuts the West Paris town line. The road is inaccessible from the West Paris end, Colby said.
Hanley said the town cannot declare a road abandoned when it has done maintenance or improvements on it, as Paris has done on Colby Farm Road.
“I know there has been some ditching, filling in gravel, and some grading. Sometimes the town does a small act out of kindness to a citizen,” Glover said.
If the town decides the road is public property, it will cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix it, Glover said.
“It is in terrible shape,” he said. “We have to spend a lot of money to bring it up to reasonable condition.”
The issue of who is responsible for maintenance has come up regularly, Glover said, and the town has compromised by doing intermittent maintenance every few years at minimal cost.
“Now it seems everyone wants an absolute final decision on this to bind someone to the cost,” Glover said.
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