In Townsend
A nice little tourist town up the street from me that has fishing, boiled peanuts, those giant bears carved out of whole trees, and all that other stuff associated with mountain tourism. The state, however, has recently butted in:
Though the uproar has yet to reach the level of torches and pitchforks, business owners and residents of this gateway community are up in arms after state road officials ordered about 80 of them to remove structures, fences, signs and more from a state right of way by Sept. 1, including the sign in the above photo.
August 19th, 2010 at 10:08 am
Wasn’t Townsend your The City at one time?
August 19th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Well, the state made a big mistake not enforcing the ROW all these years. They’ll have a fight when the go to widen and take out the bike path in the photo. First rule, never, ever let the road ROW be used for anything else or you’ll have to fight to widen the road every time. Rule is, any excess land should be fenced or in-between divided roadways.
Not a friendly policy but let the public start using the property even public use like biking or walking and things get hard when it comes time to use the land for its purpose. One supposes, the DOT has plans 10 yrs down the road and perhaps decided to start the process of clearing the ROW since it’ll take that long to get through court on all these claims.
August 20th, 2010 at 1:49 am
To clarify and expand JKB’s comments: It is likely that the state DOT owns the easements to this property and therefore has the exclusive right to use the surface for the purposes of roadways and related matters. The DOT most likely paid for this exclusive use many years ago and has just been letting stuff slide. But in the end, all the property owners would have known in some way exactly where the easement began. This is a property boundary issue, not a government power issue.