Restricted access road
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Interesting story.
tl;dr version: Guy buys property near national park 40 years ago. The previous owner (1926) had a contract with the government to allow an easement on the property for an access road to be used only by park personnel. Now the government is permitting visitors to use the road to access the park. He's suing.
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Street view of the road in question, not that it helps.
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Interesting. One thing they did not provide to the reader is the text of the easement. It's public record and should have been in the article. This muckraking is what passes for journalism these days. You're not supposed to know the facts, just get the feels.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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Wish him luck. Seems clear cut based on the article. And annoying he even has to sue to get the government to follow its word.
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Another land dispute situation:
"In October of 2021, four hunters were cited for criminal trespass in Wyoming. They had not entered a private building, nor had they touched private land.
What they had done was place an A-frame ladder across an intersection of property boundaries, the location where four parcels of land meet at a point. They climbed up one side of the ladder from public land, and down the other side of the ladder, stepping kitty-corner onto a different parcel of public land. But in doing so, their bodies also crossed through the airspace of the other two parcels meeting at that point, which were private. Their trial, set for mid-April, will decide if they trespassed when they passed through that private airspace."
Quite a dilemma
https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossing-report -
Interesting. One thing they did not provide to the reader is the text of the easement. It's public record and should have been in the article. This muckraking is what passes for journalism these days. You're not supposed to know the facts, just get the feels.
@Mik said in Restricted access road:
Interesting. One thing they did not provide to the reader is the text of the easement. It's public record and should have been in the article. This muckraking is what passes for journalism these days. You're not supposed to know the facts, just get the feels.
Mik, this was an opinion piece written by one of the lawyers working the case. It was never meant to be journalism, but an op-ed.
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Seems like it's not about the easement, per se, but about when suits were filed.
Wilkins and Stanton said that since the sign was posted, there’s been all manner of problems on the road. They claim to “have had to deal with trespassers on their private property, theft of their personal property, people shooting at their houses, people hunting both on and off the easement, and people travelling [sic] at dangerous speeds,” — and once, the shooting of Wilkins’ cat by a passing traveler.
Frequent use of the easement has also caused land erosion, which in turn resulted in sediment build-up on neighboring properties; those properties then suffered “washout,” which is a serious concern for future use of the land. Meanwhile, the claimants contend that the Forest Service has done less and less to maintain its easement, despite their many requests for assistance.
Wilkins and Stanton eventually sued, and the dispute before the justices Wednesday relates to the timing of that lawsuit. The lower court said, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed, that the plaintiffs’ lawsuit was too late as it had been filed after the 12-year statute of limitations had run.
The relevant statute is the federal Quiet Title Act, which allows litigants 12 years within which to file their claims. The legal question before the justices is whether that statute of limitations is a “jurisdictional” or a “claims-processing” rule. If the justices say that it is a jurisdictional regulation, then the rule goes to the power of the court to hear the case and the landowners will lose. If, on the other hand, the rule is simply considered a procedural claims-processing rule, Wilkins and Stanton may still have a chance to move ahead with their lawsuit, because the claimants’ lateness could be excused as an equitable remedy.
The appellants’ arguments rely in large part on a 2021 SCOTUS decision in Boechler v. Commissioner in which SCOTUS ruled against the Internal Revenue Service that a 30-day time limit in a tax case was not jurisdictional, and was therefore subject to equitable tolling. The dispute before the justices brings up an important question: should SCOTUS follow a modern trend of its own creation that require “jurisdictional” statutes to reflect their nature within their own wording, or should it stick to older precedents involving the Quiet Title Act in particular?
