Opinion ID: 170799
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Parties' Claims

Text: The relevant facts are not disputed. Utah filed this action in 1997 against the United States and an individual landowner, Richard Davis. In 1999, Utah amended its complaint to add approximately two hundred individual landowners, including the Clingers. In both complaints, Utah requested the district court to determine the boundary between the lakebed of Utah Lake (which it owned as a sovereign under the equal footing doctrine) and the adjoining properties. The Clingers contested Utah's claim, based on [their] title to the property and [their] possessory use of the same for in excess of one hundred twenty five years. Aplt's App. vol. I, at 264 (Answer to Amended Complaint and Counterclaim). The Clingers alleged that Utah had encroached on their property, and they sought a decree quieting their title and enjoining any further encroachment. In support of their positions, Utah and the Clingers advanced conflicting accounts of the lakebed boundary in the Powell Slough. Both parties invoked United States Geological Survey (USGS) determinations in 1856 and 1874. In those years, the USGS established two meander lines the mean high-water elevation [ ] segregating the land covered by navigable waters from land available for public sale and settlement. Utah Div. of State Lands, 482 U.S. at 205, 107 S.Ct. 2318. The first of these meander lines (established in 1856) was above the second (established in 1874). In the part of the Powell Slough at issue in this appeal, the 1856 meander line ran from the northwest to the southeast through the northeast quarter of Section 29, Township 6, South Range 2 East. The 1856 survey produced sub-40 acre parcels immediately adjacent to and eastward of the meander line. Those parcels included lots 1 and 2, which were subsequently acquired by the Clingers. Lots 1 and 2 did not extend below the 1856 meander line, and none of the land west (or lakeward) of the 1856 meander line was surveyed, subdivided, or opened for entry pursuant to the 1856 survey. Following the 1874 survey and the identification of a lower meander line, the USGS established Lots 3, 4, and 5 below the 1856 meander line. Those lots appear in the 1875 United States Government Land Office Plat, and they block the lake frontage that lots 1 and 2 had in the 1856 plat. Lots 3, 4, and 5 have not been patented by the federal government. [1] In its complaint and its amended complaint, Utah asserted that the upper (1856) meander line was the best documentary evidence of the ordinary high water mark at statehood, and that, as a result, the 1856 meander line should determine the boundary of the lake. Under that theory, neither the United States nor the private landowner defendants would have any right to property below that line. In response, the Clingers asserted title to lots 1 and 2 in section 29 pursuant to a patent first issued by the United States to James Clinger on November 15, 1881. Even though, in the 1875 plat, lots 1 and 2 did not extend below the 1856 meander line, the Clingers argued that they owned property below the 1856 meander line because they and their predecessors had possessed, used, [and] farmed under claim of right and under color of title between the [upper] 1856 and [lower] 1874 meander lines and because they had also paid taxes on part of the land between the meander lines. The Clingers also invoked deeds transferring the property after 1887, all of which stated that they conveyed property lakeward from the deeded ground to the waters' edge of Utah Lake. Aplt's App. vol. III, at 997 (affidavit of licensed abstractor William M. Hall). The district court resolved the dispute in a series of rulings between 2001 and 2005.