Opinion ID: 1905125
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Roadway Easement

Text: The first issue involves the location of the roadway easements, as opposed to the utility easements. Rogers argues that a roadway easement over the Hunters Ridge property was created for their benefit by the 1963 Deeds and that subsequent amendments, describing the roads as perpetual, and their use of the roads for more than 35 years, reflect the intention of the parties to the 1963 Deed to affix the easements on three roads traversing the Hunter's Ridge property. Hunter's Ridge contends that the plain language of the 1963 Deed created two options, both of which could be exercised without the consent of Rogers, by Hunter's Ridge as successor in interest to SDN and Landover Gardens. The trial judge and the Court of Special Appeals both applied a plain meaning analysis to the 1963 Deed and held that the servient tenant unilaterally could move the roadway easement from direct private roads, leading to Landover Road, to a series of public roads, leading to 75th Avenue and then to Landover Road. In so doing, the courts below recognized that general easements were created in the SDN Deed, but did not acknowledge the ambiguity of the easements' location, nor the ambiguity of the location of the easement in the Landover Gardens Deed, resulting from the unavailable site plan, which was referenced therein. The 1963 SDN Deed reserved an easement in general terms, because it created an option to set the easement either by private or by public roadway, and did not specify the easement's location. The Court of Special Appeals, in fact, recognized the general nature of the reservation, when the panel observed that if the parties intended that the roadways described would be in one fixed location without alteration, the deeds would have described the roadways to be built as perpetual easements defined by metes and bounds. The existence of the two options in the 1963 Deed, furthermore, exacerbates the ambiguity. The Landover Gardens Deed may have been a specific reservation when made, but the location of the easement became ambiguous by the unavailability of the site plan coupled with the provision calling for a permanent roadway within said development to provide ingress and egress from Landover Road to [SDN] property ... to be located approximately as shown on the site plan entitled: `Landover Gardens, Section one, dated 7/16/63.' As a result, the ambiguity in both Deeds cannot be resolved by plain meaning analysis, but may be resolved by reference to subsequent declarations and conduct of the parties, evidencing their intent.