Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Roads topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Pickens County Council reviews road-ordinance rewrite that tightens connectivity, maintenance and design standards
Summary
Council members reviewed a redline of the county road ordinance that removes duplicated UDSO road language, gives the county explicit authority over new street connections, raises minimum new-road width to 24 feet and requires publication of an official road inventory; staff said a clean copy will be ready for the November meeting.
Pickens County held a special council meeting on Oct. 20 to review a redline of the county road ordinance that staff and consultants say will simplify conflicting language and align local standards with the state DOT where appropriate. Presenter (identified in the transcript as the official walking the council through the packet) said the draft removes redundant UDSO language and points readers to the county's dedicated road ordinance.
"So, basically, it takes the redundant and sometimes conflicting language," the Presenter said, summarizing the first change. Todd Carroll of Infrastructure Consulting and Engineering (ICE), who reviewed the packet as an on-call consultant, said ICE focused on technical updates and on making the ordinance clearer for designers and developers.
The draft makes a few of the ordinance's more consequential changes explicit: it adds a subsection giving the county final authority to approve or deny connectivity of new streets to a county road, it preserves existing minimum-maintenance roads while stopping routine additions of substandard roads into the county-maintained system, and it requires the county to maintain and publish an official road inventory so maintenance responsibility is clear.
Staff also proposed updated technical standards. The ordinance would add a Table 10.5 that codifies intersection sight-distance values (with separate passenger-car and truck values based on DOT formulas) and would raise the minimum width for new travel lanes to 24 feet (alleys may remain narrower at 16 feet). Staff emphasized that the change will be applied only to roads going forward and will not require the county to retrofit existing substandard roads.
Council members questioned several specifics, including the threshold for traffic studies and the differences between passenger-car and truck sight distances. The Chair asked why the draft requires traffic studies for subdivisions that generate "between 0 and 500 trips," which staff said corresponds roughly to developments of up to about 50 homes but that the county may always request a study based on local context.
Staff said they would finalize wording on abandonment procedures (distinguishing an abandonment that removes a county-maintained road from surplus right-of-way cases) and bring a clean copy back for a formal third reading in early November.
What happens next: staff and the consultant said they will clean up typographical errors and produce a consolidated copy of the ordinance for council consideration at the next regular meeting in November. The draft as presented did not yet proceed to a final vote during the Oct. 20 session.
