Two roads and Six different right of way options.

It would really be a help to know the state.

Sometimes the landowners and local government don't care enough to expend resources to straighten things like this out. In the end, at least in my state if the road is open continuously for 10 years, by statute it becomes a public ROW (precise limits still undefined).

If it's a private ROW not subject to prescriptive use you can only try to get all the landowners to agree to set the limits of the ROW. Good luck on getting paid to do that. If they really care they will do it or they might just say let it go as it is. You can always stake a line for the biggest AH in the hood, tell him the fence off the road and send em to court. To really accomplish something in a apathetic world there needs to be a positive reading on the give a crap meter. Many times the meter never leaves the zero peg. That why things are like they are.

Maybe if you keep digging in the records the answer is there but probably not. Since the ROW is being used there was probably intent somewhere for it to exist.

It's a mess out there the question is are surveyors resolving it or adding to it. Maybe some are just making future work for others.

Hold the center of the one road. On rural county roads, I very rarely hold a right-of-way line.

We have many county roads that have been maintained for maybe 100 years or more with no documentation to prove they were ever opened. Now, presciptive easement would probably be the correct term for them. The width is whatever seems to fit, and not necessarily egual on either side.

> What are your thoughts on researching record right of way? My opinion is that barring a record fee right of way, the surveyor should not be 'creating' what shows on the plat as a fee right of way on the clients property.

Researching rights of way can definitely be a troublesome task at times. The main reason for that, though, is because some surveyor down the line (usually several) failed to do their job. Either the surveyor who was involved in the creation, the surveyor who first followed behind the construction, or the retracing surveyor who blew off the research work entirely just to "save a buck" (not for himself, but for his client).

You're right about the "barring a record fee right of way" part. If the right of way is a separately owned fee title strip of land, then there is a conveyance document that created it. If not, then the document only conveyed a right of use in the form of an easement, in which case, the abutting ownership extends to the center line, not the side line.

JBS

Well, Jon's in Kentucky, and their roads developed the same way ours did. Someone pushed out a ridge road years ago, and that ridge road has gradually developed into the road that is there today. No documentation at all exists on the creation of these roads. They're just there.

> Well, Jon's in Kentucky, and their roads developed the same way ours did. Someone pushed out a ridge road years ago, and that ridge road has gradually developed into the road that is there today. No documentation at all exists on the creation of these roads. They're just there.

If that's the case, then they're prescriptive easements, not fee title strips of land. Prescriptive easements can migrate over time and their width can change over time with changes of use. The width is typically "whatever is necessary for the use." As a prescriptive easement, the abutter's boundary should extend to the center of the right of way (the physical road). It's fine to set monuments along the sideline of the right of way, but they control the parcel sideline boundaries, not the front line.

JBS

Lack of research seems too common.

My wife mother (in Iowa) had a parcel created to give her grandson in 2004, adjacent to a road with a curve of about 8 degree delta. The surveyor apparently eyeballed the road, and set his version of PC, PI, PT.

Where the parcel boundary intersects the road he monumented both a POT and POC. His plat makes these look like one point, but one of his plat distances checks out by calculation to POC and another to POT. Very confusing.

The problem is that he didn't bother to look up the 1949 recorded easement describing the road. My metal detector says the 1949 PI is monumented about 20 feet along the road and 1 or 2 feet to the side of his 2004 monuments, in just about the relationship the calculations would say (both surveys use a common monument in a nearby road intersection that allows a comparison). There is no newer easement or boundary change recorded in the county recorder's office.

Another confusion is that the 1949 easement makes it clear the road was off the government lot line (similar to quarter section line), with the road and gov't corners monumented 8.25 feet apart in the nearby road intersection. So his set monuments shouldn't have been on either centerline curve. He just assumed the C/L was the boundary despite noting the gov't corner on his plat. (This mistake is in our favor.)

He also used a constant ROW width, ignoring the 1949 recorded easement that reduces the width outside the curve.

Is this mess he created something that should be brought to his attention, and should he do something to correct it? It isn't a big deal in practice (this isn't Paul's Los Angeles), but it's just wrong.

After you dig up the sound shot and determine what it is, you may have some grounds to pursue a correction. Until you dig up what is causing that buzz it, just may be a bolt that found its way into the base material of the road you are only saying gotcha, without supporting evidence.
jud

His 2004 plat compared to the 1949 easement record shows that there is a discrepancy. Proving that the buzz near the 2949 PI is the real thing would just be icing on the cake.

Besides, if he looked for that PI he would have found either a monument or scrap metal, and he would probably have removed anything that couldn't be somebody's monument.

Your explanation of how the roads get created is

spot on.

I think that there are several people who think that some statutory wording for a right of way on county roads equates to fee right of way as opposed to a simple right of way in the easement sense.

Kentucky has statutes for

establishing a right of way for a county road (as both roads I am working on are). It generally defines a width with the caveat that the width may need to be wider based on the topography and/or maintenance.

Unfortunately, some folks still treat this statutory easement as a fee conveyance in this area.

Your explanation of how the roads get created is

We used to always place property corner in the road near or at C/L if described that way. The trend now seems to set the sidelines on the ROW. Don't mind setting monuments on the ROW line but the drawing must clearly show what was done and why. Rewriting the description to the ROW is a no no unless the roadway is owned by a public body in fee, we do have a few, usually created by an owner deeding land for a road during a realignment process. You need to search the document out of the records because the county does not keep track and there are no warning flags in place.
jud

I worked in Southern California for the firs 20 years of my career, where we usually started with road cl. What an eye opener when I moved to southern Oregon where the chicken (surveyor) will not cross the road in fear of the can of worms he may find. Jp