City may require gates to be installed on all private streets to cut confusion

Sonya Padgett

Wednesday, July 28, 1999 | 12:43 p.m.

The Las Vegas Public Works Department wants to require that developers install gates on all private streets to help reduce the confusion some residents have about who is responsible for maintaining those roads.

A lot of home buyers are moving into houses on private, ungated streets and don't realize the implications, Public Works spokesman Bart Anderson said Tuesday during a Planning Commission workshop.

"More and more subdivisions are coming in wanting private streets. Once you're private, you're outside the bounds of Public Works," Anderson said.

That means home owners on private streets are responsible for the repairs to their own roads, Anderson said.

Developers save a lot of money -- as much as $30,000 -- by not installing a gate on a private street, Anderson said. And constructing a private street is easier than building a public street, which must be a minimum of 51 feet wide.

This is an incentive for developers, Anderson said, because a private street only has to be paved. A public street must not only meet a minimum width requirement, but sidewalks have to be built, lights installed and other standards met.

Many residents already living on private, ungated streets have called Public Works for road repairs, but they have to be turned away, Anderson said. They realize then, because they have to foot the bill for any road work, that there is no benefit to living on these streets.

"A developer just says, '(The street's) private, you get to decide what to do with it.' They don't say 'In two years you'll be slapped with a $10,000 bill (to fix the road),' " Anderson said.

Planning Commissioner Leni Skaar likes the idea of requiring private streets to be gated but she also wants some standards to be set for private roads.

"My guess is 95 percent of people who buy on private streets don't realize" that the streets don't meet the same standards as public streets, Skaar said.

Narrow private streets can present problems for life safety issues, Skaar said. A private street can easily become blocked, making it impossible for an ambulance or fire truck to navigate the road, she added.

For now, however, Public Works wants to implement the proposed requirement, Anderson said.

"We're going to be proposing this requirement in August. We're hoping to get the Planning Commission and City Council's support," Anderson said.