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Neighbor easement problem
You really need the expertise of a lawyer experienced in land disputes rather than the idle doodlings of the members of a computer email list.
First of all, the correct answer is dependent on your state. Secondly, some of the comments here are close to right but some are not. For instance, the term prescriptive easement means.....
prescriptive easement
n. an easement upon another's real property acquired by continued use without permission of the owner for a period provided by state law to establish the easement. The problems with prescriptive easements are that they do not show up on title reports, and the exact location and/or use of the easement is not always clear and occasionally moves by practice or erosion.
See the problem? A prescriptive easement won't be recorded with the deed and it exists without the landowners permission after a period set by state law.
I don't know how you found the attorney you spoke to but if s/he is not a specialist in land disputes, contact the County Bar Ass'n (there's one in every county) and ask for names of attorneys who specialize in land disputes.
You asked about setting damages. The question will be what have you had to do to repair damages caused by the failure to maintain his access? That will have to be reduced to dollars.
I really encourage you to secure the services of an experienced attorney in this area as this is exactly the kind of dispute for which we keep them around. There's no sense in trying to solve it yourself by blocking access or similar approaches. Ultimately this could lead to a requirement for a criminal defense attorney.
Eric Johnson (not a lawyer, btw)
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Neighbor easement problem
Cherymax-
I'm less concerned about whether you pursue this in court than that you know what your position is and what your options are. I certainly wasn't advocating "Sue the SOB."
There's been a lot of incorrect or partially correct information in the thread and you need to make certain you have dotted i's and crossed t's. For instance, the concept of prescriptive easement and adverse possession are being intertwined in the discussion. An easement relates to use of land owned by another. Adverse possession relates to acquisition of one person's land by another person. From your description of the situation, one or more elements of adverse possession seem to be missing. For instance, adverse possession requires the gaining party to have paid property tax on the disputed land.
Dealing with land disputes is a specialized area of the law. If you see this going forward into some form of dispute, seeking the advice of an attorney with special expertise in this area would be a good first step.
Eric (still not a lawyer)
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Neighbor easement problem
Ncrunch-
Just looked at your pics. Nice house. That was quite a patio project.
Anyway, what you may well have run into is the issue I'm sort of leaning on. A lot of general practice attorneys think that land disputes just aren't a big deal. They recall vaguely about them from law school and take the case. Then they discover just how intricate a land dispute can become and they either screw it up or bail.
A typical adverse possession is a case where a fence is mis-located such that it is say 5 feet inside the property line. Depending on what happens from that point, at some future time the neighbor might be able to acquire that 5 foot strip under adverse possession. Prescriptive easement and adverse possession are commonly confused. The memory trick is that easements don't convey ownership, merely use. There may be a lot of restrictions on the owner's use that go with an easement but the owner is still the owner. An example is the utility across the back property line of houses in suburbia. You can plant your shrubs and grass there to a fairtheewell but the utility company doesn't have to take any precautions to protect them if maintenance is required on the buried cable. On the other hand, don't try to build your swimming pool so that it lies atop the easement. The power company will fuss like you've not imagined until you remove it.
One of my tasks at work is management of almost 300 parcels equaling about 15,000 acres of land owned by a department of state government. We are forever wrestling with easement and access issues and I've sort of given up trying to guess what's right in a new situation. It seems like the general rule of thumb is that the general rule doesn't apply.
Eric
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Neighbor easement problem
Billy-
The answer is .... it depends.
The Georgia law was just quoted and it clearly states that the easment must be maintained. However, that doesn't mean that the user can be required to pave it and put in street lights. The user is normally required to maintain the easement in such a condition as to not adversely affect the surrounding property.
However, consider an easement which is used once a month for a farmer to get back to his property to mow. The rest of the month he's in the next county. Can you as the landowner require him to mow the easement so as to make it conform to your standards of lawn care? Probably not. If in a month it is so overgrown that it is filled with noxious weeds and pests, then you could perhaps get something done. However, the most likely "something" is to mow it yourself.
It's tough to answer specifics in this venue as the nature of the terrain can significantly impact the problems the landowner is confronting and the solutions available. Again, we're talking the general rule and generally it doesn't apply.
Eric
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