Opinion ID: 2779091
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Plat Interpretation

Text: A plat is [a] map describing a piece of land and its features, such as boundaries, lots, roads, and easements. BLACK's LAW DICTIONARY 1337 (1Oth ed. 2014). In construing easements in a plat, the dedicator's intent controls. Roeder Co. v. Burlington N., Inc. 105 Wn.2d 269, 273, 714 P.2d 1170 (1986). We determine intent from the marks and lines on the plat itself. /d. If the plat is ambiguous as to the dedicator's intent, courts may consider surrounding circumstances, id., including extrinsic evidence. Rainier View Court Homeowners Ass'n v. Zenker, 157 Wn. App. 710, 720, 238 P.3d 1217 (201 0). Here, no ambiguity surrounds the easement in question. Moreover, even if we were to read the plat as ambiguous and consider extrinsic evidence, the City's attempts to disclaim responsibility for the interceptor pipe would fail.
The intrinsic evidence unambiguously demonstrates that the drainage easement contained on the plat includes the interceptor pipe. The plat shows that Tract 999 contains a 25' sanitary sewer (A.W.D.) and drainage easement. Three of the plat's four pages include the following text in bolded letters: Drainage easements designated on this plat are hereby reserved for and granted to Snohomish County for 8 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n eta/. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 the right of ingress and egress for the purpose of maintaining and operating stormwater facilities. This comports with the general rule that the burden of maintaining an easement lies with the holder of that easement rather than the owner of the servient property. E.g., Camus v. Culpepper, noted at 157 Wn. App. 1046, 2010 WL 3420379, at  (Generally, the duty to maintain an easement is on the owner of the dominant estate.). 5 Because the County assumed responsibility for maintaining the Tract 999 drainage easement, it necessarily follows that if the interceptor pipe falls within the scope of that easement, the City-as successor in interest of the Countyhas responsibility for maintaining the interceptor pipe. 6 The parties in this case do not dispute that the interceptor pipe is buried in Tract 999 or that the pipe serves the purpose of drainage. Although no pipes appear on the face of the plat, the record establishes that the drainage easement contains only two 5See also 25 AM. JUR. 2o Easements and Licenses§ 72 (2014) (Whether by agreement or a common-law right or duty, the owner of an easement must keep it in repair. The owner of the servient tenement ordinarily is under no duty to maintain or repair it, in the absence of an agreement imposing such a duty. (footnotes omitted)). 6 The dissent asserts that the drainage easement merely granted the County a right of access. Dissent at 5. Neither party has ever advanced this argument. The City has argued that the dedication does not include the interceptor pipe at all because the pipe is not a stormwater facility; it has not advanced an alternative argument that the easement does cover the interceptor pipe but that the easement bestowed only a limited right of access with no attendant maintenance duties. The intent of the dedicator controls the scope of the easement, and the record contains no support for the argument that the dedicator intended (or even contemplated) that any entity other than the County would maintain the pipe. Certainly, nothing in the record suggests that the plat's drafters intended for the HOA to assume responsibility for maintaining the pipe, as the City argues. What would be the point of granting the County a drainage easement in Tract 999 for the purpose of maintenance without expecting the County to maintain the only drainage facility inside the tract? None. 9 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n eta/. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 pipes: the interceptor pipe and the AI derwood Water District sanitary sewer pipe. 7 Because the plat expressly dedicated the only other pipe within the easement-the sanitary sewer pipe-to the Alderwood .Water District rather than the County, the interceptor pipe is the only drainage facility located within Tract 999 that could possibly have been dedicated to the County. Consequently, the only reasonable construction of the drainage easement shown in Tract 999 on the face of the plat is that the easement includes the interceptor pipe. The words and markings on the plat document thus establish that the dedicator intended to convey responsibility for the interceptor pipe to the County. The City seizes on two words in the plat-stormwater facilities-to argue that the plat drew a distinction between stormwater facilities and groundwater facilities. According to the City, the County assumed responsibility for maintaining only stormwater facilities while maintenance of groundwater facilities remained the duty of the HOA. We will not read the City's proposed distinction into the Crystal Ridge plat. Nothing in the plat indicates that the HOA reserved the right to maintain groundwater facilities, and a stormwater/groundwater distinction appears neither in the plat nor in the contemporaneous documents in the appellate record. We will not read a distinction into the plat where the record is completely devoid of evidence suggesting that the 7 The City argued before the Court of Appeals that they had not heard of the interceptor pipe prior to 2008. This is untrue. The hearing examiner required the construction of the pipe in his 1984 decision, which the Examiner sent not only to multiple county officials and agencies, but also to the City itself. Similarly, we reject the City's attempts to attach significance to the pipe's absence from the face of the recorded plat. As noted above, the plat does not depict any pipes at all in Tract 999 or in any of the other drainage and sewage easements that appear on the plat. Regardless, the hearing examiner's decision, combined with the plat's clear dedication of the Tract 999 drainage easement to the County, sufficed to place the City on notice of its responsibility for maintaining the pipe. 10 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n eta/. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 plat's drafters contemplated the distinction. Cf. Hollis v. Garwa/1, Inc., 137 Wn.2d 683, 696-97, 974 P.2d 836 (1999) (rejecting a party's interpretation of a restrictive covenant contained in a plat because adopting the interpretation would require this court to redraft or add to the language of the covenant).
Even assuming for the sake of argument, however, that the plat is ambiguous regarding whether the easement includes groundwater facilities, the extrinsic evidence contradicts the City's argument. The Snohomish County Code (SCC) at the time of the dedication specifically provided that drainage facilities shall be dedicated to the county where private maintenance would be inadequate. Here, the engineers' unrefuted declarations confirm that private maintenance of such a pipe would likely be inadequate and undesirable. Indeed, Theodore Trepanier, one of the engineers who worked on the platting of Crystal Ridge, stated in his declaration: Based on my personal knowledge, during the years that Crystal Ridge Division No. 2 was built and accepted, the County wanted to have control of all the retention/detention systems and their accompanying drainage structures .... The easements were required by the County so that it had the unquestionable ability to perform maintenance and repairs on these types of facilities) 81 Given the likely inadequacy of private maintenance, adopting the City's narrow construction of the easement would defeat the subdivision act's express goals of 8 The City strongly objects to this portion of the declaration, arguing that the court cannot rely on a declaration by a third party to divine the county's intent as to this particular project in 1987. We disagree for the reasons stated by the trial court during its oral ruling on summary judgment: [Trepanier] can't testify as to the internal intent of the county, but he can certainly testify as to what was the observable policy and actions of the county. No one's come in and said no, we never did that, et cetera, and it stands unrebutted. 11 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n et at. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 facilitat[ing] adequate provision for water [and] sewerage and promot[ing] the public health, safety and general welfare. RCW 58.17.01 0. We therefore decline to give the scope of the easement the unduly narrow construction proposed by the City. 9 The City's disclaimer of the interceptor pipe as a groundwater facility also fails for practical reasons. The record shows that the interceptor pipe was not designed to drain solely groundwater or stormwater, nor did it exist in a vacuum that permitted it to collect only groundwater without stormwater. Dr. Denby, the supervising geotechnical engineer who surveyed the property in 1984, testified that the purpose of the pipe was to drain both groundwater and stormwater runoff from west of the development. The hearing examiner's decision recognized that the most critical issue involved in the instant proposal is subsurface and surface drainage. Decision of Hr'g Exam'r at 7 (emphasis added). Geotechnical reports adopted by the hearing examiner likewise recognize that the drainage issues stemmed not only from groundwater, but also from infiltrating 9 Moreover, the sec itself contemplated a broad construction of storm and surface water: Storm and Surface Water Management Facilities and Features, as used in this chapter, shall mean any facility, improvement, development, property or interest therein, made, constructed, or acquired for purpose of controlling, or protecting life or property from, any storm, waste, flood or surplus waters wherever located within the county, and shall include but not be limited to the improvements and authority described in RCW 86.12.020 and Chapters 86.13 and 86.15 RCW. Former SCC 25.02.080 (1983) (emphasis added). The emphasized text above illustrates the breadth of the meaning of stormwater in the SCC. A surplus is the amount that remains when use or need is satisfied. WEBSTER'S THIRD NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY 2301 (2002). If this provision were meant to apply only to surface water as opposed to groundwater, then it would not have to include the additional references to storm, surplus, and other waters wherever located. Under the SCC, then, a pipe that controls excess water qualifies as a stormwater facility wherever that water is located, including underground. 12 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n et a/. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 rainwater and leaking municipal storm drains from upslope properties. In making recommendations to the developer, the supervising geotechnical engineer referred to an efficient comprehensive drainage system to deal with wet site conditions from all sources. Thus, regardless of whether one can conceptually distinguish stormwater from groundwater, the fact remains that the disputed interceptor pipe would be collecting both, and the City fails to cite any evidence in the record showing that any of the individuals involved in the initial development of Crystal Ridge contemplated such a distinction.
The Drainage Disclosure dated November 9, 1987 does not alter this result. That document requires subsequent owners of the individual lots in Crystal Ridge to be notified that [s]ubstantial surface and subsurface drainage controls have been necessary in the development of the subject property and that special and/or extraordinary drainage controls may be necessary on individual lots. The City urges us to read this disclosure as warning subsequent Crystal Ridge homeowners that they were responsible, as members of the HOA, for maintaining the interceptor pipe in Tract 999. This is incorrect. The disclosure notifies individual future homeowners that they may have to take extraordinary drainage precautions on their own lots to supplement existing drainage facilities, not that they were responsible for maintaining drainage facilities that had already been placed. As with the original plat, adopting the City's interpretation of the disclosure document would both run counter to the 13 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n eta/. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 document's plain meaning and read Tract 999's drainage easement out of the Crystal Ridge plat. 10
The City also notes that the relevant portions of the sec list several prerequisites that must be met before the County accepts responsibility for maintaining a drainage system and that those requirements were never met at Crystal Ridge. But the sec also mandates additional steps if the County is not going to maintain a drainage system, 11 and the record contains no evidence suggesting that those requirements were met either. Thus, the fact that additional requirements appear in the sec is not helpful in determining the issue before us.
The County accepted, via the signatures of several of its public officials including the director of public works, that drainage easements designated on this plat are hereby reserved for and granted to Snohomish County for the right of ingress and egress for the purpose of maintaining and operating stormwater facilities. Regardless of whether we limit our inquiry to the contents of the plat or examine 10 The City's interpretation of the drainage disclosure also runs counter to RCW 58.17 .165, which provides that dedications shown on the face of the plat shall be considered to all intents and purposes as a quitclaim deed .... The developer of Crystal Ridge thus quitclaimed maintenance rights to the easement contained within Tract 999, and the drainage disclosure that does not purport to alter the parties' rights and responsibilities cannot suffice to undo that quitclaim. 11 Specifically, the former sec required the developer applicant to make arrangements with the property owners for assumption of maintenance within two years and the county director of the department of public works must have approved those arrangements. Former sec 24.28.080 (1983). 14 Crystal Ridge Homeowners Ass'n eta!. v. City of Bothell, No. 89533-3 extrinsic evidence, the only reasonable interpretation of the plat is that the drainage easement in Tract 999 includes the interceptor pipe. 12