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Opinion Easements aren’t always easy

City hall reporter shares her own experience with easements
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“No Trespassing” violation signs were posted on every side of the fencing.  And sitting across the road in a pick-up, rifle in tow, was a rancher and his battle-axe (in the truest sense of the word) wife. They were not about to allow us, or anyone, to cross their property to get to the house!

When I attended the Dripping Springs Planning and Zoning meeting on Oct. 22 to report on business of public interest, I noted that several of the agenda items focused on landholders seeking a recommendation of approval from the Commission, in order to divide their parcel of land in two, where only one half has road frontage, and the other half is located behind the first. This means that an “easement,” or a type of roadway, must pass over the first lot to get to the back lot. A house could be built on each.

“Easement” is defined as “a right to cross or otherwise use someone else’s land for a specified purpose.”

One such property is located in Johnson Park on RR12, another at Lanier Ranch on Creekwood Drive, and a third is in Springlake on Homestead Lane. All division requests were unanimously approved for recommendation to the DS City Council. As I understand it, per the Commissioners’ discussion, the easement through the front lot to the back lot is for perpetuity. 

I wish them luck. I have a story to tell.

My ancestors are from the Austin area. When I attended the University of Texas, I use to come to Dripping to scoop up piles of angora goat hair (mohair) from the big shed off Mercer, to produce hairy wall-hangings in my weaving class.  A few years after graduating, I moved to Hawaii, and then back to Texas in 1990 with a family of five.

At that time, Austin was in a sorry slump, and many houses were foreclosures. We had returned to Texas because my husband was offered a job as a broadcaster at KLBJ FM, when Ladybird still owned the station. As it turned out (to our dismay), the job was only part time for peanut pay. We had no other income. So we took all the cash we had left over from the sale of our Hawaii home, searched diligently, and finally found a foreclosed house we could buy with what we had. It was in Andice (in Williamson County)- down a rocky road dotted with pleasant houses on “lots with acreage.” 

Andice consisted of one general store (“Beer, Wine, Andice” was the signage) and a post office, located in the remote countryside between Georgetown and Florence.  We put earnest money down on a nice little house, which had been sitting empty for 10 months. It was “love at best price.” 

It was also “landlocked.” That means that we had to cross an “easement” over private property to reach the patch of land which belonged to the house.

This is where the fun begins.

We expected to close within a month.  After all, we were paying cash. But we did not. Month after month, we burned our savings on an apartment in Round Rock, wondering why we were not closing. Our realtor was very evasive. He told us nothing, but “wait.” With two babies, a daughter suffering from middle school transfer-itus, and a husband looking for a 2nd part time job, I hovered untethered, woeful with no surefooted grounding.

What could be wrong? 

One day we travelled out to visit our almost-home-to-be, and found the gate to the easement strung with barbed wire and triple-locked! More barbed wire and chicken wire and posts backed up the gate. “No Trespassing” violation signs were posted on every side of the fencing.  And sitting across the road in a pick-up, rifle in tow, was a rancher and his battle-axe (in the truest sense of the word) wife. They were not about to allow us, or anyone, to cross their property to get to the house!

As it turned out, the bank who owned the house, and the rancher who owned the frontage  property, had been duking it out with lawyers over the easement. The rancher was trying to eliminate it. My family was simply caught in the crossfire, with absolutely no knowledge of what was going on, before we closed four months later.  

Once the house was ours, the bank sent over a tall 70+ year-old Texas cowboy, who astutely observed the drainage lay of the land between the frontage road and our acre of land, then built us a perfectly engineered new caliche easement alongside the cruddy old one we were barred from entering. At the head of our new easement, a new stockade gate was installed. We had no idea why. Nevertheless, that old cowboy really impressed me.  

Not accepting defeat, the rancher told us he was running cattle on his land and if we did not build a fence around our house, they would trample our property and break our windows. I called Animal Control for help, and they informed the rancher that he had to build the fence to keep his cattle off our land. So he did, at the same time adding padlocks to the stockade gates, and threatening us with the stench of a hog slop yard he planned to install next.

Honestly, we had nowhere else to go, and were starting our lives again from scratch more than a little traumatized.  Drama aside, I am not one for conflict. We never fought with them, and I was very cordial in my attempt to make friends and work things out at every turn. However, the rancher’s wife flatly informed me she had friends, and no need of another.

The rancher ended up running heifers, rather than hogs, on the land our easement crossed over. For the seven years we lived there, we kept the gate padlocked to secure the cows that were never rotated into other pastures. Whoever rode shotgun got their exercise jumping in and out at the gate. The intention of the rancher’s wife was to make our home a prison camp. She made no bones about it, and she never relented her grudge.

I remember how my youngest daughter, (who grew up to be a fine physician), would run like the wind over that easement, lickedy split, from the gate to our home. She has never gotten over her fear of cows.

One can take a positive point of view and believe, as I did, that it was a good place to raise our young children, and the landlocked house was our safe country haven. In many other ways, our lives were fortunate.   

To this day, I have a genuine appreciation of a well-made caliche easement. Rarely do I see one correctly engineered to meet the lay of the land, and built for drainage. But even if it was perfect, would I ever live across private property by way of an easement again? Nope. 

 

 

 

Dripping Springs Century-News

P.O. Box 732
Dripping Springs, Texas 78620

Phone: (512) 858-4163
Fax: (512) 847-9054