Maine's Tumbledown Mt. is on a Road to Ruin

 Yeah, why should you repair a public road if there's no 'taxpayers' on it?

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Access to the Tumbledown Mountain trails has been hampered by flooding, and state and county officials have entered talks to see who foots the repair bill.

By Emmett Gartner 

The Maine Monitor

July 30, 2023

 

After a torrent of late June rain, the road to the popular Tumbledown Mountain hiking trails has taken on the rough look of a mountain trail.

Water washed out the pavement on the road’s edges and exposed chunks of loose rock. In one section, the center buckled and cracked, and land around the road’s culverts slipped into the brook they feed.

Though remedial repairs have already been made to this 2.5-mile stretch of Byron Road in central Franklin County, county officials and the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands are grappling with a $70,000 to $100,000 question of who will pay for the rest.

The initial repairs have made the road navigable, but county officials said they would soon put up signs warning travelers of the damage and corresponding risk.

Both parties were hesitant about that prospect during a July 25 meeting between county officials and Tim Post, the western regional land manager for the Bureau of Parks and Lands.

The road is owned by the county but has no county residents alongside it, Commissioner Bob Carlton said during the meeting, and most of the land abutting it is owned by the state, disincentivizing the county from footing the entire bill.

“From our standpoint, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to … spend a lot of money on a road that has no taxpayers on it,” Carlton said.

Further complicating the issue, according to County Administrator Amy Bernard, is the road was already in bad shape before the flooding hit. Bernard said the culverts were undersized and the road itself was too wide, stretching from brook to brook in the valley.