Long-running land spat headed to court in March

COEUR d’ALENE — The outcome of a March trial will determine if a Coeur d’Alene landowner who is the head of a Kootenai County Republican group may legally use property his neighbor purchased in a tax sale.

A First District Court judge on Tuesday set the trial on the March calendar, along with another trial in which plaintiff Brent Regan charges his neighbor is failing to follow a court order.

Regan, chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee and the board chair of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, filed a suit against his neighbors Jeff and Karen Owen six years after they bought a small parcel with a dirt track road that Regan claimed he used enough to be entitled to a prescriptive easement over the land.

A prescriptive easement is established simply by usage.

The case has been appealed and heard three times by the Idaho Supreme Court, even resulting in a change in state law. So far, however, none of the appeals have summarily granted Regan access to the one-third of an acre parcel he said he needs to enter the far side of his 100-plus acre ranch at Sunnyside, east of Coeur d’Alene.

This week Jeff Owen denied obliterating the dirt track access road on his land, contrary to an order by the court to leave the road alone until the matter is adjudicated. The contempt of court charge will also be decided in a second March trial.

Regan, who has lived at Sunnyside since 1999, says he has used the dirt strip over his neighbor’s land — he jogs there three times a week — often and for a long time. He said he needs the access to work on his airport landing strip, and as a secondary road to his daughter’s house.

Regan’s attorney, Arthur Macomber, argued that the easement should remain in place because it was also used by others, and that Owen, despite owning the property since 2005, cannot erase the easement.

“He cannot destroy the easement,” Macomber said. “We believe we have ample evidence to show the roadway existed and was used.”

But Susan Weeks, who represents the landowner, said the facts are disputed, and that Regan did not claim he used the dirt track road with regularity.

“He testified to sporadic use,” Weeks said. “By his own testimony there are questions of fact.”

Macomber argued that getting rid of the prescriptive easement amounts to taking it without compensation from those who use it. Weeks has argued that Idaho law mandates that property sold for tax deed is unencumbered, meaning its ownership is passed without liens, mortgages or easements.

District Judge Rich Christensen said he would hold open a week in March for both cases.