HILO, Hawai'i — When Christine Mingo began to build her Papa'ikou home in 2003, she knew she would be living on one of the Big Island's "roads in limbo," but she didn't know how bad it would get.

Initially the dirt Ka'ie'ie Homestead Road almost three miles up the shoulder of Mauna Kea was rough but passable. Then the rains came, creating a mini-river that washed out the road.

Mingo hit a rock one day, causing $4,000 damage to her Honda. She began carrying a shovel in her car to toss dirt in the deepest ruts so she could get through.

When Mingo's sister visited from Australia, she refused to drive up the road for fear of damaging the rental car. Instead, she parked a half mile from Mingo's house and packed groceries up the hill.

"It was just really crazy. We'd have parties, a gathering up at the house, and only half of our guests could make it because most people have regular cars," Mingo said. "We were developing a shuttle service, basically."

There are more than 152 miles of "roads in limbo" on the Big Island, which are old government roads that both the county and state have traditionally refused to maintain.

Neither government wanted the added expense of maintaining the roads, and neither government wanted to accept the legal liability for any accidents that might occur on those roads.

After years of finger-pointing between the state and Big Island county officials, Mayor Harry Kim's administration held meetings this year to finally inventory the old government roads and develop a plan to have the county take full responsibility for them.

PREPARING A PLAN

It is an undertaking that will take years and cost millions of dollars and likely will require a county tax increase or injections of money from the state to pay for the necessary paving and maintenance, said county Chief Engineer Bruce McClure.

"That's roughly a 20-percent increase in our road system, so we can't do it with our existing bodies," McClure said. "The county is saying we accept that responsibility, and it is significant for us because we have 152 miles of it.

"We're just trying to do the right thing," he said.

Public works officials are preparing a plan for the County Council that will describe which roads are covered, how to pay for repairs and maintenance, and what standards the county will follow in maintaining the roads. The county is considering adopting a federal "low volume road standards" that offer design specifications for the relatively narrow paved lanes the county hopes to construct.

McClure estimated it will cost $12 million or more to pave the existing "limbo" roads. State lawmakers last year contributed $2 million to the effort to bring Big Island "roads in limbo" up to standard, but it isn't clear whether the state will offer additional help.

There is no accurate estimate of how many Big Island residents live on properties served by the roads, but county officials guess it may be several hundred, including a number of ranchers and farmers.

Most of the "roads in limbo" were created by the Territory of Hawai'i in the 1920s and 1930s at the time when the territory was chopping up land and selling it off to raise money, county officials said.

In the 1960s, state lawmakers handed over all responsibility for government and homestead roads to the counties. Big Island officials objected, saying the state didn't upgrade the roads to county standards before turning them over and didn't provide money to maintain or improve them.

The sugar plantations maintained some of the roads as part of their operations, but those roads deteriorated in the years after the Big Island plantations closed.

Many of the roads are little more than eroded dirt tracks. For some roads that are particularly bad, county Civil Defense officials intervene to ask county road crews to make repairs so emergency vehicles can get through to residents.

PROJECT REACTIONS

In other cases, the roads exist only on planning maps. Some 286 miles of old government roads on the Big Island are merely "paper roads," meaning they were drawn on the old territorial maps but never built.

Many rural land owners want the county to build those roads so the property owners will have legal access to their land. Those people are likely to remain unhappy because "I don't see us doing anything immediately for them," McClure said.

Not everyone is endorsing the county "roads in limbo" project. Danny White, who grows hardwood trees on land off Kaupakuea Homestead Road above Pepe'ekeo, wondered if the county might be identifying all of the paper roads as part of a plan to legally renounce all responsibility for the paper roads.

That possibility worries White, who has to cross state land to get to his property. The builders of the homestead road serving his neighborhood deviated from the legal government road route, and now White is going through a complicated process to try to have the existing road made legal.

If that process fails, White hopes to be able to fall back on the paper road as an alternative, building a new and legal access route there.

Mingo said county crews recently came to her neighborhood to repair her road so that emergency vehicles can get in, a development she said renewed her faith in local government.

"I still hold out hope for pavement one day, but if the road stays this nice over the years and we never get pavement, we'll be way ahead of the game from where we were last year, definitely," Mingo said. "People can come and visit us now."

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.