Joe Imel/Daily News Warren County magistrate Tommy Hunt had Gracies Lane in Oakland paved in this year's budget at a cost of $2,020.

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Record-high asphalt prices and two years of budget cuts have some people asking why two tiny county roads, Bobby Davenport Road and Gracies Lane, were on the short list of roads Warren County paved this year.

Bobby Davenport Road is just more than half a mile long and goes to only one house, on a dairy farm belonging to cousins of District 5 Magistrate Terry Young. Gracies Lane is much shorter, about one-twelfth of a mile, and its only residents are District 4 Magistrate Tommy Hunt and his wife. Together, they cost $70,037.19 to resurface, according to records from the Warren County Road Department. Gracies Lane was this year’s cheapest project, costing $2,020.93, while paving Bobby Davenport Road cost $68,016.26 - the third most expensive on the list.

Altogether, the county paved nearly nine miles of roads at a cost of almost $560,000, according to county records.

Bobby Davenport Road winds down a hill toward the dairy farm. There are few other roads around, but the main road, Riverside-Benleo Road, is in good condition - with the exception of a rough patch near the entrance to Bobby Davenport Road, which residents blame on the paving trucks. The small nearby roads are narrow and don’t appear to have been paved in many years.

The owners of the property on Bobby Davenport Road are James Davenport and Robert Thomas Davenport, according to county property records. Neither one lives there, however, and attempts to contact both were unsuccessful.

The nearest roads to Gracies Lane - including Oakland-Smiths Grove Road, with which it intersects - are well maintained.

Both Bobby Davenport Road and Gracies Lane are actually part of the county road system and have been for decades, though they don’t meet modern standards for acceptance, Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon said.

“There are many county roads throughout the county that wouldn’t be taken in today,” he said.

Several residents of District 5 say it’s unfair that Bobby Davenport Road got paved while they wait. Michael G. Brown, who lives at the end of Mercer Road, said he has asked Young to see that his road is paved, but has only gotten excuses.

“Then seeing Bobby Davenport Road get paved, it’s like a slap in the face,” Brown said.

The two roads are roughly the same length, but there are six houses and eight property owners on Mercer, he said.

Young described Bobby Davenport Road as one of his district’s many “farm to market” roads, which sees no passing traffic but is needed to carry farm products.

Previously the road, originally gravel, had been covered with chip seal - a mix of asphalt and gravel. That surface is fine for passenger traffic, Young said, “but when you put heavy vehicles on them, they don’t have the ability to hold up.”

A heavy truck regularly travels Bobby Davenport Road carrying milk from the dairy, he said, and as a former dairy farmer himself, he considers that important.

“The only answer I can give you for that is that I valued the perishable project that comes out of there,” he said.

Karen Hermes, a resident of Mercer Road, said she was told the same when she called to complain.

“I asked them if we needed to get cows to get our road paved,” she said.

Young portrayed himself as going along with the road department’s recommendation to put asphalt on chip seal roads. He showed “wish lists” of the district’s chip seal roads dating back a decade - Bobby Davenport Road has been listed the whole time, as the list around it shrank.

As for the family connection, Young said his family has lived and expanded around Richardsville for nine generations, meaning that after a few years it became almost impossible to pave a road in his rural district without aiding a relative in some degree.

Much of District 5 is between the Barren and Green rivers, with only one way in or out, and many county roads there serve single-house farms, Young said. The area also has a number of roads with a chip seal surface, and he tries to get a couple of them repaved every year, he said. After chip seal has been laid down a couple of times, it tends to “hump” in the middle, making it hard to clean with a snow plow, Young said.

Yet Mercer Road residents like Karen Hermes say they can’t get their road plowed or even salted in the winter. Several residents were trapped there by snowdrifts last year, including herself, although she needs daily medical treatments, Hermes said.

Young said part of Mercer Road was paved in 2001 and another part covered in chip seal in 2004. But Penny Wheeler, another Mercer Road resident, said she has lived at her home nine years and only a small amount of work has been done.

Neighbors had been calling for year about Mercer Road, and many were upset when they saw Bobby Davenport Road paved instead, she said.

“I don’t care what the county says - that’s a driveway,” Wheeler said. “We feel like we’re being treated like second-class citizens.”

Brown said Mercer Road was paved shortly after he bought the home 12 years ago, but that it has deteriorated from heavy truck traffic since then.

“I called Judge Buchanon’s office about us going to fiscal court, but his secretary told me to call the road department. The road department then told me to call the magistrate,” he said. “I’m done with the magistrate.”

Tommy Hunt was aware similar questions were being asked about Gracies Lane, and he prepared for them - Saturday morning, he held an envelope full of pictures showing the road before it was resurfaced and blamed criticism on “Warren County politics.”

“Gracie and I knew going in that if this was paved, there would be problems,” he said. “The county has not done anything to this road, other than resurface it (this year), since I’ve been in office.”

Gracie Hunt said it was difficult for her to pull trash cans out to the corner of Oakland-Smiths Grove Road on the old surface. Tommy Hunt said the old surface was “literally destroyed,” and his pictures show fragmented pavement with ragged edges.

The county’s recent work goes up to the blacktopped railroad crossing, laid down by CSX. Just beyond that, a gravel drive picks up the last few feet to the Hunts’ small house.

Hunt said he has nothing to hide, arguing that Gracies Lane and Treece Lane were the two worst roads in District 4. Both serve only one house, and both were paved this year, he said.

For his part, Buchanon said that each year magistrates list roads they’d like to see paved; road department staff recommends priorities based on condition cost and traffic; and magistrates have the final word on which are chosen.

The list is always longer than what the county can afford to do, so he tries to keep projects distributed equally within the three rural districts, where almost all county roads lie, Buchanon said.

In previous years, Bobby Davenport Road and Gracies Lane were determined to be low on the priority list, but magistrates for those districts asked for them to be done this year anyway, he said.

Buchanon said he advised against adding Gracies Lane and Bobby Davenport Road “because of who lived on the roads.”

“I thought the appearance of impropriety may have been there,” he said.