As Joy Road deteriorates, residents wonder 'When will it ever get fixed?'
Over the last two winters, landslides have eaten away at Joy Road, one of west county's fire evacuation routes. Its fate is now in the hands of a struggling FEMA.
While the entirety of Sonoma County is notorious for poor roads, nowhere is as rough as the 5th District.
For years, the county split its road budget equally between its five districts—20% to each—even though District 5 had around 40% of the county’s roads.
That changed when Lynda Hopkins took over as Supervisor and notified the county of this unfair phenomenon. Now the 5th district gets a proportionate amount of funding from the county’s Pavement Preservation Plan (PPP).
Although things have improved, Hopkins says her team is still playing catch-up.
“We're kind of digging ourselves out of a pit that was built up over many decades of neglect,” she said.
This pit explains why Joy Road in Occidental, which is only one of dozens of pothole-filled roads in unincorporated west county, has only been partially repaved over the last several years—and why it likely won’t be finished until the 2026-27 PPP cycle.
What this pit doesn’t explain is why a certain section of Joy Road, one that is vulnerable to failure after landslides caused by storms the last two winters, isn’t being promptly repaired.
That section of Joy Road has now become one lane, and, because it is a fire route for hundreds of residents, it’s potentially a hazard in the case of an emergency.
Landslides have made it so that a part of the road now hovers with no support underneath it, which means it’s in even worse shape than it was last year after that winter’s landslides. There are also new cracks about a foot away from the edge.
After residents realized the problem, they assumed that, considering the road would only get worse with a repair getting more expensive, the government—either on the county, state or federal level—would work to find a solution as soon as possible.
“It’s currently in FEMA’s court,” said Hopkins.
But, with all of the natural disasters occurring around the country, FEMA is drowning in requests. Some government officials say it is the worst they have ever seen it.
“In general, we don't have the money at a local level to front all of the money for FEMA projects around the county,” Hopkins added. “FEMA has not commented on anything that we have submitted in the last few months, and their grants manager keeps telling us it is in the ‘eligibility review process’ but won’t tell us what that actually means.”
In the meantime, residents are frustrated about the lack of urgency with which situations such as Joy Road are being dealt with.
That’s why Andrea Oreck of Fire Safe Occidental and Amy Beilharz of Safer West County have been circulating a petition over email and Nextdoor. The petition has garnered around 400 signatures in two weeks and calls “for government officials to take immediate action before a potential disaster unfolds.”
“This slippage is a danger to our ability to get out of here,” said Oreck. “It's not so much that it would let loose when someone was driving and the person dies. It wouldn't be quite that dramatic. But perhaps next winter season we would start to see it reach failure when large trucks are bouncing along there and further pounding the substructure of support and contributing to further slippage. The road can't count on the soil. You can think of the Earth as a living, breathing creature. When it takes in the water, it fills in all the vulnerable places.”
Hopkins acknowledges the broken system involved in fixing the county’s most treacherous roads and looks forward to finding solutions in the future.
“When we have good budget years, that's when I think that we should be putting aside our surplus funds in a reserve to cover exactly these kinds of critical emergencies,” Hopkins said. “We’re trying to have a meeting with the community along with Jared Huffman’s and Mike McGuire’s staff to brainstorm not just Joy Road, but really kind of the bigger picture as to how the current system is broken. There's nothing that I would rather do than solve a problem, and I think that it's even more frustrating for residents, right? Because they're like, ‘Oh, well, you're just pointing to whomever, you know, everyone's kind of finger pointing, and yet, the solution still isn't moving forward.’”
Thank you for telling this story.
Many of the roads in west county are a major safety hazard. Joy road is a good example.