Editor’s Note: Artificial intelligence software was used to assist in compiling this report.

Eureka Springs Times-Echo

Carroll County’s long-running arguments over which roads the county can legally maintain — and what citizens should expect when they bring complaints to county government — took center stage during the Carroll County Quorum Court’s regular meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 17, as the county’s road foreman delivered a blunt warning: County officials and road crews can be sued, charged or even jailed if they work on roads that are not properly recorded as county or public.

Later in the meeting, justices of the peace aired frustration over what some described as an increasing volume of “grievances” arriving by email and other channels, with questions from the public about how — or whether — the quorum court is supposed to provide formal closure to people who file complaints.

The evening included public comments on a disputed road in the county’s eastern district, complaints about a temporary closure of the county clerk’s satellite office in Eureka Springs over Valentine’s Day weekend, and a lengthy appeal from a resident demanding enforcement of the county’s wind-farm moratorium ordinance. But the most pointed remarks came from county road foreman Jim Kelley, who said he has spent time digging through state statutes and county ordinances because of growing controversy over roads that residents have long believed should be maintained by the county.

“I’m here tonight since we’re having a lot of controversy about what is county and what is private roads,” Kelley told the quorum court. “As I told David (Writer, the county judge) the other day, I said before I got into studying this a little bit I was dangerous; now I’m really dangerous because I’ve looked up every one of the laws.”

Kelley’s core message was simple: Even if a road has been graded or otherwise maintained by the county in the past, that history alone does not make it legal for the county to continue doing so if the road was never properly accepted and recorded.

“The county judge is the overseer of all county roads,” Kelley said, citing state law. “The county judge shall operate the system of the county roads. The county judge makes the decisions on what roads become county and what are public.”

Kelley told the court Carroll County maintains about 963 miles of county/public roads and has about 296 miles of private roads. The county’s obligations — and limitations — depend on how a road is categorized, he said, and state law requires roads to be recorded in one of three categories: private, public or county.

Kelley said those categories are not just semantic. He warned that doing work outside the legal process “can draw a lawsuit from anyone,” and he recalled past conflicts in which residents, or even people who didn’t live on a road, monitored road crews to ensure they didn’t grade past the county-maintained endpoint.

“We face that every day,” Kelley said. “I’ve got grader operators in the past — I’ve been shot at. We put up with that every day.”

Kelley said the county wants to help residents and respond to problems but has to operate within the law.

“It’s like what I told David whenever I come back as road foreman,” he said. “I said, ‘You gonna do this the legal way?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘ ’Cause I’m too old. I’m 72 years old, folks, and I don’t do good in jail.’” Kelley said he found at least one case in which a county judge was sued and found guilty for working on a private road, describing consequences that included a felony conviction, fines and jail time. In his view, the risk is real for county officials and employees.

“So some people think: What’s it going to hurt?” Kelley said. “I ask the question: Are you willing to face those type of charges?”

He also addressed a recurring point raised by residents: if FEMA funds were used for repairs on a road now declared private, doesn’t that show it was a county road? Kelley said emergency exceptions exist, including FEMA work after disasters and situations where emergency access is needed.

“It was brought up about doing work on the road with FEMA — that was an emergency situation,” Kelley said. “We can go in on emergency situations and work on the roads legally.”

He gave another example in which a grader was sent to clear an overgrown road so an ambulance could reach a medical emergency.

But outside emergency conditions, Kelley said county judges are constrained. He cited a law he characterized as limiting private-road work by counties below a certain population threshold and only under specific circumstances, such as if a local ordinance authorizes it.

RESIDENT’S COMMENTS Kelley’s comments were closely tied to earlier public remarks by Susan Baumert, a county resident and property owner who said a road she and others have long treated as a county road was declared private “without any notice to us and without any documented legal process.”

Baumert told the court that, for decades, the road appeared as a county road on GIS maps, received maintenance, and even received FEMA repair funds. She said she filed a Freedom of Information Act request for eight items related to road status and received only one, with responses that the county had “no record” of the other requests. She argued that, under FOIA, the custodian of records must produce public records regardless of where they are stored, and she raised concerns about record retention, transparency and public access.

Baumert also said residents have reported vehicle damage, visitors hesitant to travel the road, and at least one delayed ambulance response. She said she had been told there was no court order for the road, but argued that in earlier decades the county did not consistently use court orders when accepting roads and that partial records exist.

ROAD FOREMAN’S RESPONSE

Kelley’s response, while not framed as a direct rebuttal to Baumert, addressed the underlying question: If a road was never formally accepted and recorded, the county could be forced to stop maintaining it — even after years of work.

“Just because it has been maintained by the county in the past does not make it to continue to maintain,” Kelley said, describing a case he said he found in which a county maintained a road for years, later discovered it was private, and could no longer maintain it.

Kelley also offered an inside look at how the county once tried to keep maintaining certain “drive-outs” or private roads — an approach he said is no longer considered legally valid.

He described a system in which residents signed affidavits agreeing not to gate the road or post no-trespassing signs and to keep the road open, allowing the county to grade it as if it were public access. Kelley said the approach worked for more than 20 years before someone sought an opinion from the Arkansas Attorney General.

“The attorney general said it ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” Kelley said. “So we can no longer do affidavits.”

He said the result is painful and politically charged, because many residents believed they had county service based on longstanding practice — and because county judges in the past sometimes promised to make roads official but never completed the process.

“We’ve got judges that made promises that said, ‘I’ll make this a county road,’ and you never followed through,” Kelley said.

He also pointed to a county ordinance that outlines the process for bringing roads into the county system. Kelley identified it as Ordinance 2012-24, which he said was originally adopted in 1977, revised in 1983 and updated again in 2012.

Under that ordinance, Kelley said, county or public roads must meet certain specifications, including a 50-foot right-of-way and limits on steep grades. When District 2 Justice of the Peace Jack Deaton asked about slope, Kelley said the limit is a 15 percent incline or decline and reiterated the right-of-way requirement as “25 feet from center, both directions.”

Kelley said the process to make a road public or county includes a petition — he said five people must petition the county judge — and also includes financial protections.

“There has to be a surety bond put up for anything that comes before the county to cover that,” he said, describing a scenario in which a landowner could seek compensation if a road crosses private property.

Kelley’s remarks also highlighted the legal process for removing a road from the county system — and the potential backlash when judges act unilaterally.

He said that to take a road out of the system, 10 people must petition for removal and the county must publish notice in the local newspaper for two weeks before a hearing, where the county judge considers arguments for and against the change.

“It’s on request,” Kelley said. “It’s not like the county judge goes, ‘I don’t want to deal with that road.’ Right, and that’s what happened before.”

Kelley said he believed a prior judge removed 16 roads without doing it legally and that a subsequent judge reinstated them.

In one of the meeting’s most candid moments, Kelley also suggested that the county’s historical approach has been inconsistent — and that fully enforcing today’s legal standards could create a new wave of conflict.

“I found out we hadn’t been following the law for a long time,” Kelley said. “You want to get some lawsuits started?”

He added that, in his experience, only a couple of judges he worked for truly tried to follow the law on road procedures, and even then mistakes were made.

“I’ve worked for every one of these county judges up here except for four,” Kelley said, referring to portraits displayed in the courtroom. “Out of those 10 judges that I worked for, there’s been two that have tried to follow the law.”

GRIEVANCE PROCESS

As the court moved later into discussion items, another process question surfaced — not about roads, but about how residents file complaints and what the quorum court is obligated to do with them.

District 11 JP Caroline Rogers said all JPs had been receiving emails from residents saying the county’s grievance process is “broken,” and she wanted to discuss what, if anything, the quorum court is supposed to do when grievances arrive.

“The key question that’s been asked in our emails is, how does the quorum court bring closure to a petitioner who has submitted a grievance to the quorum court?” Rogers said, adding that she had prepared a flowchart for discussion.

Rogers read three specific questions raised in the emails:

• What is the delivery process for a grievance to the Carroll County quorum court such that the delivery creates a public record?

• Where is the information recorded about decisions or actions taken — including a decision to do nothing — to address a grievance?

• When and how is the public informed that the quorum court’s decision- making process is complete?

Other JPs reacted by emphasizing that many complaints directed to the quorum court involve matters the court does not control, and they questioned whether the county has any formal duty to create a grievance procedure for general citizen complaints beyond the normal avenues of public comment and elections.

District 7 JP Kellie Matt said she had searched county procedure materials and found nothing addressing a grievance process for general citizen complaints, adding that the issue had not previously arisen during her time in office.

Deaton, who said he has served 14 years, cited a grievance filed in February 2025 and argued that many grievances have “no basis,” describing them as the byproduct of disputes over public meetings and the wind farm controversy.

Deaton, who stepped down from the court’s District 1 seat in March 2025, was participating in his first meeting since being appointed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to complete the unfinished term of former District 2 JP Bruce Wright, who resigned. Also participating in his first meeting was newly appointed District 1 JP Gary Capcik. Capcik will complete the unfinished term of the late David Blankenship, who died shortly after being appointed to replace Deaton.

“I’ve been here for 14 years, and we never had this situation until the wind farm deal came up,” Deaton said at the Feb. 17 meeting, referring to Scout Clean Energy’s controversial Nimbus Wind Farm near Green Forest. He suggested many grievances boil down to residents being unhappy with an outcome.

County government, Deaton said, cannot be expected to resolve every complaint.

“This is… 90 percent of these are because, well, I didn’t get my way,” he said. “I didn’t like the answer I got or whatever. It’s not a legitimate grievance.”

District 3 JP Harrie Farrow said she had contacted the Arkansas Association of Counties to ask whether counties are required to have a grievance committee for citizen complaints and said she was told there is no such requirement. She said the association’s staff initially assumed she meant personnel grievances — which counties do handle through established processes — but citizen grievances about general government actions are different.

“They’re so confused because this doesn’t exist in Arkansas, because it’s not in our procedural guide,” Farrow said, describing how she was told no counties have a formal process like what some residents were requesting.

In the end, Rogers framed her flowchart as a discussion tool rather than a proposal to create a new process.

Farrow noted that citizens already bring complaints to their JPs, speak during public comments, and ultimately can “vote us out if you don’t like it,” as she put it.

Other JPs echoed that theme. District 6 JP Craig Hicks said many complaints target departments that are under the county judge’s executive authority or that of other elected officials, not the legislative authority of the quorum court.

“We have no authority to tell the county judge what brand of grader to buy, or the sheriff what tow company to use,” Hicks said. “That’s not our job.”

TENSION BETWEEN RESIDENTS, OFFICIALS The discussion reflected a broader tension visible throughout the meeting: residents want answers, records and formal responses, while county officials and JPs say their authority is limited and that the county’s legal responsibilities — especially on roads — are narrower than many citizens assume.

That tension played out repeatedly in the meeting’s public comment period, including from Eureka Springs residents upset about the county clerk’s satellite office being closed during a major wedding weekend, and from former county judge Richard Williams demanding that Writer immediately order Scout to halt operations on the wind farm project because of what Williams argued are violations that negate the moratorium’s specific exemption for Nimbus.

But it was Kelley’s road presentation — part warning, part history lesson — that put the county’s position in the starkest terms: If a road is not properly recorded, the county risks legal consequences for treating it like a county road, regardless of how long residents have relied on past practice.

“We want to do what we can do, but we have to go within the law anymore,” Kelley said. “So we’re going to follow the law as best we can.”

OTHER BUSINESS

In other business, the court heard a report from Rexanna Lilly, chief clerk for the Berryville District Court, about the success of an effort to translate court forms into a variety of languages. As a result of the program, Lilly said, instances of defendants failing to appear for scheduled court appearances declined dramatically, while the court’s fine and fee collections increased in a similar fashion. Lilly drew praise from JPs and applause from the audience after describing the success of the program.

JPs approved several pieces of legislation:

• a resolution confirming the appointment of Missy Godfrey to the Grassy Knob Volunteer Fire Association Commission; • an emergency ordinance approving an exchange of vehicles between the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office and the city of Diamond City, with the sheriff’s office receiving a 2017 Dodge Charger and Diamond City receiving a 2018 Ford Explorer;

• two resolutions approving the sale of three tracts of county-owned land to the state, involving a total of 39.76 acres, for a total of $36,265, with documents describing “area of acquisition” from the three tracts totaling 3.89 acres; and JPs explaining that the property acquired by the state will be part of a project to widen a section of Arkansas Highway 21 south of Berryville;

• and an appropriation ordinance transferring $18,261 from the county’s general fund to the sheriff’s office’s leased vehicle fund after the county received an insurance settlement for a sheriff’s office vehicle that was deemed a total loss following a November 2025 accident.

All votes were 9-0, with District 4 JP Hunter Rivett and District 10 JP Jerry King absent.

The next regular meeting of the Carroll County Quorum Court is scheduled for 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 17, in the courtroom of the Eastern District Courthouse in Berryville.