A road in the Wright City area is crumbling, and residents are frustrated that nothing is getting done to fix it.

The road in question is Indian Head Lodge Road, located along Wright City’s northern boundary. The road is the sole access for multiple neighborhoods containing more than 100 homes, a fact that is becoming problematic as the road deteriorates to the point of being dangerous, said area resident Patricia Jones. She aired complaints about the road’s condition to the Wright City Board of Aldermen on Aug. 25.

“For the 21 years I’ve lived there it’s always been decent, but now it’s not even safe,” Jones told the aldermen.

So why isn’t Wright City moving to repave the road? Because while some of the homes accessed from the road are inside city limits, the road itself is not, and Wright City has no ownership or maintenance duty for Indian Head Lodge Road, said Mayor Michelle Heiliger.

“We’re trying to come up with other opportunities to help the folks on Indian Head Lodge Road, but we can’t take city tax dollars to fix a road that’s not ours,” Heiliger said. Wright City was never granted that road after it was installed by a builder, she continued.

Jones replied this is not the first time she’s been given this answer to the residents’ complaint, and that she tried contacting the Warren County government to ask about the issue. She was told that the county government doesn’t own or maintain that road either, leaving Jones and other residents frustrated.

“I don’t know who takes care of it. ... I don’t know what we can do about it. It’s just terrible,” Jones complained.

Members of the Warren County Commission later confirmed to The Record that they have no history or documentation of Indian Head Lodge Road ever being a county-owned road.

Commissioners said they conducted a thorough review of that question with county road department staff and records after previously being contacted about the road.

If the Wright City government and Warren County government don’t own the road, the only option left is that it’s a privately owned road, commissioners said.

The Record also reached out to Bart Korman with Lewis-Bade Inc., one of the authorities on surveying and property boundaries in Warren County. Korman said the question of who is responsible for Indian Head Lodge Road goes back almost two decades and was never resolved. Piecing together who has clear ownership of the road would likely require a lengthy search of property title records, Korman said.

Without a clear authority to demand a solution from, Mayor Heiliger said residents may have to take the problem into their own hands by forming a semi-governmental entity called a neighborhood improvement district (NID). An NID is a hyper-local tax district formed to pay for improvements such as roads or water mains in a single residential area.

There are a couple ways that an NID can be formed, by petition or election, said Wright City Attorney Paul Rost. At a minimum, this would require majority support among all the properties that are accessed from Indian Head Lodge Road, and then every property owner would pay a little extra in property taxes each year, Rost explained.

But even getting to the point of formally proposing an NID would require detailed plans and cost estimate for the road project, Rost said.

It wasn’t made clear who would be responsible for getting that planning phase done, nor was it clear whether custody of Indian Head Lodge Road needs to be resolved before the work can be initiated.