My Easement is Wider than Your Easement!

Many properties in Central California are accessed by easements.  An easement road is the right to cross someone's property to get to another property.  If the easement is written down, it is called an express easement.  In this article, I wanted to address the issue of the width of an easement road in California.  

In Scruby v. Vintage Grapevine, Inc. (1995) 37 Cal.App.4th 697, the plaintiffs owned some land with a house in the Napa Valley.  The defendant owned a winery next door.  Plaintiffs were landlocked.  They had to travel over a 52-foot-wide roadway and utility easement across the defendant's property.  

Here is where the dispute arose:  The plaintiffs only used 15 feet of the 52 foot wide easement. They became enraged and sued the wine maker when it put wine equipment on the part of the easement plaintiffs had not used.  The plaintiffs lost the lawsuit.  The court held, “that a deed granting a nonexclusive easement of a specified width does not, as a matter of law, give the [plaintiff] the right to use every portion of the easement. … [T]he [defendant has] the right to place improvements upon the easement as long as they do not unreasonably interfere with the right of the owner of the dominant tenement to ingress and egress.” (Scruby, supra, 37 Cal.App.4th at pp. 700, 708).  In reaching this conclusion, the court noted (among others) the following “controlling principles of law”: (1) “The owner of the dominant tenement must use his or her easements and rights in such a way as to impose as slight a burden as possible on the servient tenement”; (2) “Every incident of ownership not inconsistent with the easement and the enjoyment of the same is reserved to the owner of the servient estate”; (3) “The owner of the servient estate may make continued use of the area the easement covers so long as the use does not ‘interfere unreasonably’ with the easement's purpose”; and (4) “An obstruction which unreasonably interferes with the use of a roadway easement can be ordered removed ‘for the protection and preservation’ of the easement.”   (Id. at pp. 702–703.) 

Therefore, the key point is that express easements will not be interpreted by courts to unreasonably interfere with a property owner's right to use property.  

Ken Jorgensen, California Attorney
www.fresnolawgroup.com