KINGWOOD — Who is responsible for maintaining a section of South Price Street referred to locally as Hospital Hill?
That’s the issue Kingwood Council will take up when it meets in regular session at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
“It’s a question of who owns it,” Kingwood Mayor Jean Guillot said Friday. “The state has maintained it all these years.”
But no one is doing much maintenance now, judging by its condition. It’s a matter Preston County Schools brought to the city’s attention.
“It’s terrible. It’s just terrible,” Preston School Superintendent Steve Wotring said Friday.
The school system sent a letter last year about the road to Kingwood.
“Our comments were just basically that we have buses that have students, and that the road is just becoming unsafe. And because it is a hill and that we’re just asking them to please look at that road and make improvements,” Wotring said.
The section of road in question is about from the driveway of the Kingwood Pool and down the hill past the former Preston Memorial Hospital to the intersection with Shower Bath Road. Within the block, on the section the city acknowledges owning, are youth baseball fields, city tennis courts, the city pool and Kingwood Elementary.
About halfway down the hill are ball fields used by youth leagues. Land on each side of the road is owned by the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department, which also owns the former hospital property.
Kingwood does not consider the “Hospital Hill” section a city street. Halfway down the hill is the city boundary. A marker along the road denotes the border.
But when Kingwood paved what the city considers its portion of the street last year, “the state would not allow us to put a new crosswalk in front of Kingwood Elementary because it’s their road. Now they’re saying it’s not,” the mayor said.
And, at one time Kingwood was asked by the DOH to pave the hill, Guillot said. “Just because a road is in the city doesn’t mean it belongs to the city,” he said.
Wotring noted that the road is also important as a potential exit for Kingwood Elementary.
“If there would be an emergency on the other end of town, all of our students would have to exit that way,” he said. “It’s the only other way. If they couldn’t come out of their parking lot and go right, they just really don’t have very many other options here.”
The DOH did not reply to a request for comment in time for this report.
