Legislature(2001 - 2002)
04/11/2002 01:37 PM Senate L&C
| Audio | Topic |
|---|
* first hearing in first committee of referral
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
SB 309-ADVERSE POSSESSION
CHAIRMAN STEVENS announced SB 309 to be up for consideration.
MR. JOE BALASH, staff to Senator Therriault, sponsor of SB 309,
said that the Department of Law had some concerns at the last
hearing and representatives from Sealaska Corporation have met
with them, but were not able to resolve their differences.
However, the Doyon Corporation sent a letter of support. Other
corporations had been contacted and had no objections, but he had
nothing more in writing.
MR. RON WOLFE, Corporate Forester, Sealaska Corporation, said:
I think the doctrine of adverse possession is one that
is problematic for our corporation with the rural
ownership that we have where survey boundaries have not
been well established or may not be in existence yet.
Land is interspersed with other land owners, such as
the Forest Service, coastal areas and these sorts of
things where someone could in essence squat on Sealaska
land and it would be very difficult for us to police
that and control that.
He said they contacted the Administration, but were unable to
resolve differences. They have contacted other regional and ANCSA
corporations and have learned of their support.
MR. JON TILLINGHAST, Counsel for Sealaska Corporation, added he
had two phone calls with Mr. Cummings and unfortunately there is
simply a philosophical disagreement between the state and his
client on the extent to which the government ought to be taking
private property without paying for it.
He thought the state overstates the impact in that he didn't
believe there is a danger of the state loosing any existing
right-of-way or any existing rights to any existing right-of-way
under this legislation because of the grandfather clause in
section 4.
It protects any adverse possession rights that have
vested before this law takes affect. It will grant the
state that if this law were to pass, that if the state
wishes to impose a right-of-way on a piece of private
property in the future, they will have to pay the
private property land owner for that right. The state
thinks that that's a bad thing; we think that's a good
thing.
MR. BILL CUMMINGS, Assistant Attorney General representing DOTPF,
said that he did have conversations with Mr. Tillinghast over the
last couple of weeks. He proposed that AS 9.10.030 be amended to
lengthen the period to 15 years. In other words, you would have
15 years in which to go forward and deal with people who were
"squatting on your land."
He would also like to delete sections 2 and 3 of the bill. He
wanted to correct one apprehension that Mr. Tillinghast has about
where the state is coming from. They are not talking about going
out and building highways and deliberately imposing the state's
facility on property. If the state builds a road that
inadvertently goes on to private property and the property owner
comes forward, the state has an obligation to pay. They are
concerned where people make mistakes between private owners and
the government. He gave them two examples from Southeast Alaska
where public facilities weren't built where they were supposed to
be. One of them is on the Haines Highway where the state had been
since 1944 when the United States built the Haines Highway as
part of the WWII effort. "Under this statute, the state wouldn't
have been able to protect its investment over time on the Haines
Highway and would have had to pay for it again."
The second example is a right-of-way out by Eagle River in Juneau
where the Unites States in the 1930s built the road and tied into
another road that allowed access to the Boy Scout camp at Eagle
Beach. The road was built about 400 feet from where it was
supposed to be and that was quite obviously a mistake. Without
the statute as it's currently written, the public could have been
dispossessed of that road. "In the context of DOT, what we're
looking at here is an ability to correct mistakes and to prevent,
as we illustrated in these two examples, an injustice from
occurring."
Last time he testified he talked about a case called Veasey V.
Green where a woman could have been dispossessed of her house,
but because of the doctrine of adverse possession, she was able
to keep it. He recommended, therefore, that the statute not be
changed at all or if they want some relief granted, they could
change AS 9.10.010 to a 15-year period and make the other
deletions in sections 2 and 3 and delete section 4(a).
SENATOR LEMAN said the last time they heard this, he flagged the
change from 7 years to 20 years on page 2, line 6, and asked what
was done with that.
REPRESENTATIVE ROKEBERG replied that 20 years was used because it
is the longest period of time in any other state in the United
States that this doctrine is used. Senator Therriault is not
wedded to a particular number of years. He thought it should be
bumped up a little bit from 7.
SENATOR LEMAN said he agreed, but he thought 20 years was a bit
long unless they could come up with some good reasons for having
it. He would like it changed to 10 years.
CHAIRMAN STEVENS noted that the brief in their packets shows the
further west we go, the more the number shrinks. It started at 60
years and now it's down to seven.
MR. BALASH said he is correct. The historical explanation for
that is that large land grants were given to the railroad
corporations as they moved across the country. They were kind of
sitting on the land and not getting it into productive use.
In Alaska we have large corporations such as Sealaska
who are holding large tracts of land that don't
necessarily need to be put into productive use to meet
the original intent of granting the land to those
corporations. They are holding them for cultural
purposes and preserving land for the purposes of
harvesting fish and game and things of that nature.
SENATOR LEMAN responded that section 2 has a fairly substantial
list of things that someone is going to have to meet and he
thought there was added protection there.
SENATOR LEMAN moved to amend 20 years to 10 years on page 2, line
6.
SENATOR DAVIS said she wanted to hear what Sealaska thought about
changing it from 20 years to 10 years.
MR. TILLINGHAST said they didn't object to that amendment.
There were no objections and the amendment was adopted.
SENATOR LEMAN moved to pass CSSB 309(L&C) from committee with
individual recommendations and the accompanying $0 fiscal note.
There were no objections and it was so ordered.
| Document Name | Date/Time | Subjects |
|---|