Town officials on Tuesday voted unanimously to eliminate an old, disused drainage easement from a residential New Canaan property whose owner said it lingered on land records long enough to cause a sale of the home to fall through.
200 White Oak Shade Road in New Canaan. Credit: Michael Dinan
William Rhodes of 200 White Oak Shade Road told members of the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting that the two-part easement on his 1.05-acre property was to have disappeared with the installation of storm drains nearby, on his own property and four others.
“And it never happened,” Rhodes said at the meeting, held in Town Hall. “It was never caught by the town to be released. So now I have hired engineer and lawyers to go through this process and acquaint the selectmen with the situation and get it released because I had a sale on the property that fell through because of the easement.”
First Selectman Kevin Moynihan and Selectmen Kit Devereaux and Nick Williams voted 3-0 to release the property from the easement.
According to municipal property records, the drainage easement had run along two sides of Rhodes’ home—a well preserved 1850-built antique that fronts White Oak Shade at Green Meadow Lane, with ready access to the YMCA, Waveny and downtown. Yet a stormwater sewer system in the neighborhood that includes a catch basin and manholes long has conveyed runoff there.
Joe Zagarenski, a senior engineer in the New Canaan Department of Public Works, said the easement had been put in place in the 1960s and was tied specifically to projects that were completed by the early-‘70s.
Williams asked whether the town has a handy list of easements on private properties that residents could check.
“We don’t want this to happen to another resident, where a sale situation and all of the sudden this pops up because of something that happened 50 years ago and didn’t come to light,” he said.
Zagarenski responded that all easements are recorded in documents on file in the Town Clerk’s office and it likely would fall to residents to look up their individual properties there.
Deveraux asked Public Works Director Tiger Mann whether he supported releasing the easement and he said “absolutely.”
Moynihan said he had met already with Zagarenski, Mann and former DPW Director Mike Pastore and found the release of the easement “entirely appropriate.”