No easy road ahead on Timothy Lane

The last neuron popping through my brain, I thought as my Chrysler continued to slide backward toward the ravine, should not be an internal debate as to whether or not this hilly stretch of Timothy Lane meets county width requirements.

“Oh, God,” I screamed into my car’s hands-free microphone. The exclamation — like that popping neuron — was out of my control, something instinctive and primal and not in the least bit dignified. It’s the kind of scream that comes from the realization that my fate is out of my hands. The woman on the other end of the phone — a confused octagenarian wondering what, exactly, was happening to her guest — was less than a hundred feet away, safe and sound up the hill.

Of course, I was fine. I was able to stop the car from sliding down the hill with five inches to spare. For that matter, had my car hypothetically ventured off the icy road above East Yellowstone Drive Friday evening and tumbled down the hill toward Lake Coeur d’Alene, I would have survived, protected by airbags and watched over by neighbors with cellphones of their own and slowed by trees breaking my fall.

I eventually was able to cautiously back my Chrysler up toward a more familiar East Yellowstone, park and pray. The woman’s neighbors would follow me down the hill and take me back up in a Dodge Ram with enough tread and torque and whatever else they require to make it up Timothy Lane.

But this isn’t a story on how I’m too lousy a driver for Timothy Lane. This isn’t about how ill-equipped my tires were to traverse Timothy Lane. This story isn’t about the ice or incline on Timothy Lane, or even about what it takes for those neighbors to live atop Timothy Lane.

This story is about whether or not Timothy Lane is even a road.

•••

“You came up here one time and saw it,” Lori Kay Baehr said in the safety of her neighbor’s house. “Imagine what it’s like with trucks going back and forth all the time.”

Those trucks haul wood and materials and everything needed to build a home. Or, in this case, eight homes.

Timothy Lane has been long-targeted by developers for a pair of soon-to-be subdivisions. The area itself and its densely wooded slopes are an objective sample size of North Idaho’s character: picturesque, quiet, remote.

“I don’t blame them for wanting to build up here,” Charlene Knudtsen said, flanked by family members, a blind dog named Koda, and Baehr, the neighbor who followed me back down Timothy Road and gave me a safe ride back up. “Look around. It’s gorgeous. Who wouldn’t want to live up here?”

Knudtsen’s question is one asked a thousand times a day by residents throughout North Idaho. The Coeur d’Alene area, in case you haven’t heard, is growing. Depending on how you view the numbers, you could make the mathematical argument that Idaho is the nation’s fastest-growing state, with Kootenai its fastest-growing county. (For that matter, by pure percentage spikes from decade to decade, you could remove Idaho from the equation altogether and argue Kootenai County is the third-fastest-growing county in America.)

Traffic on some Coeur d’Alene intersections has doubled in the past eight years, according to statistics from the Idaho Transportation Department. Excluding the passage of routine housekeeping items, 14 of the Post Falls City Council’s 17 votes cast in December were directly growth-related: Annexations, boundary surveys and land swaps fill the docket each and every meeting. Rathdrum residents don’t require the math; they need only look south toward the dwindling prairie to see the changes in the area’s landscape.

Kootenai County residents in the ever-increasing urban landscape don’t need to ask the question, “Who wouldn’t want to live here?” They already know. The residents of Timothy Lane are hearing the same answer, only in slow motion.

Knudtsen’s house was the first to be built on Timothy Lane, a landmark back in 1962, according to records from the Kootenai County Assessor’s Office. For 11 years, the small home represented the lone building on the rural road, until a second house rose in 1973. Then two more in 1976, and another two in 1978.

Back then, Baehr said, Timothy Lane could have likely supported its traffic enough to forgive the narrow lane. Today, however, 12 homes sit on Timothy Lane, with eight more under construction on Timothy and its two dead-end tributaries — Old Hill Road and East Melendreras Road — with 20 plats ready for more.

And with construction come trucks.

•••

“Imagine trying to come up that road,” Baehr hypothesized. “Imagine you turn, come around the corner, and there’s a big truck at the bottom, heading down your way. [The other truck’s] not going to stop; he can’t. You’re going to have to stop and back all the way back down or find a place to pull over, and sometimes there isn’t a place. Sometimes you have to drive all the way back down, just like you did. It’s just one of many problems this road faces.”

“For me,” Knudtsen said as she pointed to her northerly neighbors, “I’m worried about our neighbors. We have some people who live just over there who are in their 80s. Their health is failing. If something happens, and they need help, I’m worried help won’t get here in time.”

Her husband, George Parsons, agreed. “If there’s a fire and that road is blocked, we’re stuck. There’s nowhere for any of us to go.

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

The disaster Timothy Lane residents envision is one reason she began a letter-writing campaign. She and others reached out to Kootenai County’s Board of Commissioners, Fire and Rescue, and Planning and Zoning departments, as well as the Idaho Transportation Department. The most response the neighbors received, Baehr said, was from John Pankratz, supervisor of the East Side Highway District, the governing body of Timothy Lane itself. Pankratz visited Timothy Lane on Monday and met with concerned residents about the road ahead.

“He was very kind,” Parsons said. “It was good of him to come up and listen to us. But he lives within the guidelines he has. It would be foolish to think that after one meeting, something’s going to get done ... If anything happens, it’ll be years before this is resolved. But it was a good first step.”

“It was a good meeting,” Pankratz agreed. “We talked about where to go from here and the challenges ahead. We talked about the lack of funding, and we talked about the next steps.”

The next step, he said, is to put the neighbors in front of East Side Highway District commissioners Graham Christensen, John Austin, and Mark Addington. Pankratz said the Timothy Lane residents will have a forum to present their concerns at the district’s Jan. 20 meeting. That said, Pankratz and the residents agree there is no quick — or easy — fix.

“This is going to take some patience,” Pankratz said, “some time, some engineering, and a lot of funding that doesn’t exist right now.”

That funding, he admitted, would need to be addressed before any realistic changes could even be accurately discussed, changes that sound both extensive and complicated to implement.

“I also suggested at that meeting that maybe [the residents] share with their legislators the problem with the lack of funding for these local roadways ...,” Pankratz said. “First, funding has to be available to even start the engineering process. That’s not cheap.”

Engineering doesn’t merely involve widening a road in places. It might also involve building a new road: a thoroughfare to faciliate traffic to the north or west, giving residents an alternative. When asked if that was possible, Pankratz hesitated.

“Anything’s possible,” he said. “But keep in mind: Any work you do there is a real challenge in its proximity to [Interstate 90]. I-90 is right there. You have to ask, ‘How do you design road improvements without impacting the freeway ... Anytime you degrade the natural hillside slope structure and there’s construction in close proximity, it can impact the integrity of the freeway. And without surveying, and extensive geotechnical work, I don’t know what that means [from a financial standpoint].”

Ultimately, Pankratz said, building out Timothy Lane to connect to another road would be a steep challenge.

“Unfortunately, an alternative ingress and egress route impacts private property,” he said. “Unfortunately, for that to happen, a private landowner would have to build that road through their own property and meet highway district standards and then dedicate it to the public. I don’t see that as a viable option in the near future.”

While Pankratz said county roads matching Timothy Lane’s problems is a list that shrinks with each new subdivision built, the underlying issue facing residents remains the same.

“The lack of funding we have is primarily a result of growth not paying for itself,” he said. “Anytime you add more people and more cars, you add more need for services. The burden actually comes back on property taxpayers and [people paying] gas taxes and fees. And then you look at how many people are impacted by this: Not saying we don’t understand improvements could be made [to Timothy Lane], but there are other roads out there that, frankly, get a lot more traffic.”

Pankratz said he has measured the road portions in question on Timothy Lane in the past. His narrowest measurement came in at 11 feet, six inches, well below the county’s fire and rescue 20-foot requirements.

While Pankratz said a dire medical issue could be quickly resolved on Timothy Lane by helicoptor, a fire would present more challenges to first responders.

“At the meeting, I told them, ‘They can put a helicoptor right down on Timothy Lane.’ But that doesn’t really alleviate their concerns about a fire.”

“If there’s a fire,” Parsons repeated, “there’s not much we can do. We’re just kind of stuck up here.”

•••

Late afternoon descended on the intersection of East Yellowstone and Timothy Lane. The temperature, already below freezing, dipped into the high 20s as Baehr dropped me off at my car.

“This is really just a safety issue,” Baehr said. “If a truck gets going too fast down that road and a car can’t stop — like you couldn’t today — somebody’s going to get killed. We’ve already seen cars go over the edge. We’ve already had rollovers. This road is so dangerous, one wrong move, and it’s tragedy.”

That point is up for debate, at least (again) mathematically. State funding is available, Pankratz said, to help correct dangerous roadways. But to qualify for that funding, the state of Idaho needs crash data. That data is collected on a revolving five-year period. For example, Baehr said her daughter rolled over and down the hill approximately 13 years ago. While the police responded to the crash site and marked it as reportable, that incident is essentially removed from the books five years after it occurs.

“There’s safety money out there from the state,” Pankratz said, “but Timothy doesn’t meet that criteria. It’s a double-edged sword, really: If you’re eligible, that means it’s a problem area, but if you don’t qualify, it means your road doesn’t qualify. It’s actually designed to be a good thing if you don’t qualify, but that doesn’t really help people trying to go up and down Timothy Lane.”

Parked beside my still-kinda-sorta-trusty Chrysler was a flatbed, its payload emptied of lumber, its driver de-chaining its 14 wheels. We chatted for a moment. He said he was washing his hands of his day on Timothy Lane, happy to be headed home.

So was I.