Opinion ID: 2631083
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the presence of material facts relating to nephi's control over the site of the trees bars summary judgment on the issue of whether it owed a duty to mr. elder

Text: A. Nephi's Common-Law Duty ¶22 Municipalities owe a duty of reasonable care to ordinary people, and this duty extends to travelers upon their highways. This court affirmed the existence of this common-law duty early in Utah's statehood when we stated: [I]t was the primary duty of the city to exercise reasonable care to maintain the streets in a reasonably safe condition and to guard against injury to persons and property by removing or making reasonably safe any dangerous objects in the streets. This duty was constant, continuing, and nondelegable. Morris v. Salt Lake City, 101 P. 373, 377 (Utah 1909). ¶23 The scope of a governmental entity's common-law duty to persons utilizing roadways under its control extends beyond the boundaries of the thoroughfare. See Ingram v. Salt Lake City, 733 P.2d 126, 127 (Utah 1987) (Streets from side to side, including the sidewalks and all area between, are primarily for public use.). The Morris case itself confirms this, as it concerned the duty to safeguard a home from trees located adjacent to a street whose roots had been cut in the course of installing a sidewalk. 101 P. at 377. ¶24 A governmental entity does not undertake a duty to remove vegetation from private land that may obstruct the vision of motorists utilizing its roadways. Nor does a private party bear a common-law duty to keep roadways free of visual obstructions caused by vegetation growing on his land. Our court of appeals correctly noted these principles of law in Jones v. Bountiful City Corp., 834 P.2d 556, 560 (Utah Ct. App. 1992), cited with approval in 19 Eugene McQuillan, The Law of Municipal Corporations § 54:112, at 373 (3d ed. 2004). The common-law duty of a governmental entity to safeguard those who travel its roads may, however, extend to visual hazards located on its land outside the bounds of the roadway itself. See Town of Belleair v. Taylor, 425 So. 2d 669, 670-71 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1983). In view of this legal principle, the question of ownership and control of the land occupied by the trees elbows aside virtually every other common-law analytical consideration. We turn, then, to assess Nephi's ownership and control of the trees and the relationship of its ownership and control to a duty owed Mr. Elder. ¶25 The district court ruled as a matter of law that Nephi did not, despite its ownership of the stand of trees, control them to the degree that its fee interest gave rise to a duty. Nephi's ownership interest and right to control were, in the district court's view, eclipsed by that of the irrigation company that owned an easement along the 300 West corridor where it maintained an irrigation ditch. It is undisputed that the trees sprouted from the embankment of the ditch. ¶26 The record before the district court contains little in the way of useful information from which one can gauge the scope of rights enjoyed by the irrigation company by reason of its easement. The flaw in the district court's ruling is its apparent discounting of the importance of this information. A fair reading of the district court's ruling, and of Nephi's arguments to this court, leaves us convinced that the fact of the irrigation company's easement and not its scope accounted for the district court's conclusion that Nephi owed no duty to remove visual obstructions at the crossing where Mr. Elder lost his life. ¶27 Not every easement relieves the holder of the servient estate from duties associated with land ownership and control. When a court must identify the locus of that ownership and control for the purpose of assigning duty, it will not do to apply a categorical rule that duty attaches to the owner of the easement and does not adhere to the fee owner. Rather, the scope of an easement holder's duty is dependent on the nature and scope of the permitted use granted by the easement. These duties may, as in the case of irrigation easements, be further defined by statute. See Utah Code Ann. § 73-1-8 (1998). ¶28 In the motion for summary judgment setting, a fee holder makes no legal headway by establishing the uncontested fact that another party owned an easement over the fee holder's land. Such a fact, standing alone, does nothing to shift the fee holder's tort duties to the easement holder. Thus, in this case, Nephi had to do more than merely show that the irrigation company may have retained an easement over the canal and adjacent trees in order to require Mrs. Elder to present any fact evidence that the scope of the irrigation company's easement did not include a duty to attend to the trees. The burden remained squarely on Nephi to advance factual support for the proposition that responsibility for the trees accompanied the irrigation company's easement. ¶29 Here, the record before us is largely barren of facts from which a court could conclude that the irrigation company had taken on whatever duties befell Nephi as the fee owner of the tree site. The presence or absence of a line of trees may be of interest to an irrigation canal operator, but it may not. It would certainly be reasonable for a canal operator to ignore a stand of trees that poses no threat to the normal flow of water in the canal. The allocation of rights and duties to the land occupied by the stand of trees is fact-dependent and those facts are simply not before us, nor were they before the district court. We therefore vacate the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of Nephi on the issue of common-law duty. B. Nephi's Statutory Duty ¶30 Utah law requires owners of real property to remove vegetation which, by obstructing the view of any operator, constitutes a traffic hazard. Utah Code Ann. § 41-6-19 (1998). [4] Mrs. Elder contends that, as the owner of the property where the line of trees was located, Nephi was subject to this obligation. The district court ruled that as a matter of law the statute did not contribute to the creation of a legal duty in Nephi to remove the trees. We agree. ¶31 Our court of appeals conducted a comprehensive review of section 41-6-19's application in Jones v. Bountiful City Corp., 834 P.2d 556 (Utah Ct. App. 1992). [5] That case concerned a collision between a motorcycle and an automobile at an intersection. According to the injured motorcyclist, rose bushes growing on private property impaired the ability to see oncoming traffic as he approached the intersection. He contended that Bountiful owed him a statutory duty to remove the rose bushes. The court of appeals read section 41-6-19 as creating a three part mechanism. Id. at 559. Subsection (1) imposes a duty on property owners to remove obstructing foliage. The statute conditions this duty, however, on the receipt of notice from the department of transportation or any local authority based on an engineering and traffic investigation that the vegetation has created a traffic hazard. Subsection (2) of section 41-6-19, like subsection (1), imposes a duty. In this case, it is a duty assigned to the entity which has conducted an investigation and determined that a traffic hazard exists to notify the owner to perform his subsection (1) duty. Third, the statute exposes the property owner to a class C misdemeanor in the event he fails to remove the obstruction within ten days. ¶32 Because Bountiful did not own the property upon which the rose bushes were situated, the court of appeals concluded that Bountiful owed the injured motorcyclist no duty to remove the obstruction. Moreover, the court noted that the statute imposed no duty on Bountiful to conduct an inspection, but rather burdened the city with a more limited responsibility to order the removal of the rose bushes if, after conducting an investigation, the city concluded that they constituted a traffic hazard. We find the court of appeals' reasoning in Jones to be sound and moreover to be amenable to extension to this case. ¶33 Of course, while Bountiful did not own the property upon which the rose bushes were growing, Nephi did own the land where the trees grew. Nephi, however, occupies the same position as it would had it not owned the property where the trees were located. The city's statutory obligation to remove the trees would have been triggered by receipt of notice from the department of transportation or a local authoritypresumably including itselfthat an investigation had deemed the trees to be a traffic hazard. ¶34 The statute, as the court of appeals correctly observed in Jones, does not impose a duty on Nephi, or any other governmental entity, to conduct an investigation of potential visual obstructions at the intersection of Center Street and the railroad tracks. In this respect, section 41-6-19 imposes a lesser duty than that created by common law, which would appear to require a property owner to exercise reasonable care to monitor the risks associated with vegetation growing on his property. ¶35 That Nephi should be treated for the purposes of evaluating its statutory duty as though it did not own the property upon which the trees were located is reinforced by the fact, made clear in subsection (2), that other governmental entities besides municipal agencies may be assigned the task to inspect for visual obstructions within the scope of their responsibilities. Most tellingly, the department of transportation is required by rule to have a program to identify railway crossing improvement needs. See Utah Admin. Code r. 930-5-7(1) (1998). [6] The department of transportation is also required to oversee a diagnostic/surveillance review team composed of members from railway companies, the department of transportation, and local government agencies. Included in the review team's tasks is the responsibility to [s]pecif[y] removal of trees, brush and foliage from the highway and railway rights-of-way and private properties to provide better sight distance for motor vehicles. Id. r. 930-5-7(2)(b)(vi). ¶36 Under this regulatory scheme, it is clear the statute did not intend to assign exclusive responsibility to municipalities, like Nephi, to monitor railroad crossings within their boundaries for visual obstructions. We accordingly affirm the district court's determination that Nephi owed no statutory duty to Mr. Elder.