On Oct. 11, the Supreme Judicial Court decided that the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank may not use a 40-foot-wide easement to access a parcel it was not originally designated to serve. The decision was in favor of Hugh and Jeanne Taylor, owners of the Outermost Inn in Aquinnah, which is open from mid-May through Columbus Day weekend. The ruling, the end of a process begun in June 2010, preserved the “bright-line” status of interpretations of easement law created by a 1965 SJC decision, Murphy v. Mart Realty of Brockton, Inc.
The easement agreement predates the Taylors’ ownership of the burdened land. A Land Bank hiking trail crosses the Taylors’ property and provides access to three Land Bank parcels that are part of the Aquinnah Headlands Preserve. The trail is open between Sept. 15 and June 15. The Land Bank wished to extend the trail to an adjacent parcel known as the Diem lot 5, but the existing easement agreement included no mention of the Diem lot. The latter lot is accessed by a separate 20-foot-wide easement that also crosses land owned by the Taylors. The Land Bank wished to make a loop trail using both easements.
“We consider each of our properties to be one entity,” said Land Bank executive director James Lengyel of the Aquinnah Headlands Preserve, “and we permit only access by foot. When we design a trail system, it is to serve all the properties [of a preserve].”
The Taylors initially filed an action in the Land Court to prevent construction of the proposed loop trail. The lower court judge decided that the trail would not overload the easement, but forbade the loop design based on the precedent set by Murphy.
According to Michael Parker, writing online for the Massachusetts Land Use Monitor, in the appeal to the SJC the Land Bank did not dispute the Murphy rule regarding use of an easement to gain further access, but rather argued against the “bright-line” approach. In the language of the court decision itself, the Land Bank argued that “instead, this court should adopt a fact-intensive inquiry requiring consideration whether the use of a particular easement to benefit other parcels would increase unfairly the burden on the easement.”
The SJC decided that the benefits of preserving the bright-line rule “outweigh any costs associated with its rigidity.” Mr. Lengyel could not say why the court made its decision. It was clear to him that the proposed Land Bank trail was not overburdening the easement — assigning it a nondesignated use — nor was it overloading it — increasing the magnitude of use beyond that intended by the original easement agreement.
The trail to the three southern parcels was opened in 2010, but Lengyel said that the trail to the Diem lot has not been built, and the Land Bank has not as yet made plans.