Court Opinion

ID: 9741161
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:50:29.765357+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:22.629632
License: Public Domain

CRIPPEN, Judge
(concurring specially).
I concur in the result. But the importance of this case may lie more in what it does not decide than in the decision itself.
Subject to often-stated limits, a landowner may cast surface water onto the property of a neighbor. Although the reasonable use doctrine is clear in most of its parts, there is remarkably little authority to guide us on the question of draining surface water by directly connecting a tile line into an existing line of a neighbor.
The controversy here involves a tile line, running on respondent Kral’s property and crossing onto appellant Boesch’s land, that has been in place for several decades. The trial court’s decision simply requires that the line be left as it has been. And appellant Boesch does not question Kral’s right to connect to his tile; rather, he asks for relief due to increased use of the drain by Krai and the expenses he anticipates when his own system has to be repaired.
In sum, the case does not require a decision on respondent’s right to connect his tile with the tile of his neighbor. Thus, for example, a decision in the case does not speak to the situation where a landowner is challenged immediately after connecting into the tile line of a neighbor. And it certainly does not deal with the more provocative suggestion that a landowner might have the freedom to cross a boundary line in order to tie into a tile line that the neighbor has constructed to a point near but short of the line.
In Evers v.Willaby, 444 N.W.2d 856 (Minn.App.1989), a landowner gained access to a neighbor’s tile line by paying an intervening neighbor for the right to connect to the tile system. Id. at 858. In other words, access to the neighbor’s line extended to a point beyond the neighbors’s boundary and where the respondent landowner clearly had a right to make a connection. Like the present case, *601Evers gives us no guidance on the right to make a boundary line connection to buried tile or to cross a boundary for such a connection.
One other point flows from the preceding description of the issues in the ease. Respondent Krai has asked for prescriptive rights only to have the tile line restored to its condition before appellant obstructed the line. And appellant has not disputed respondent’s rights to prior use of the existing tile line. Prescription law need not be determined to resolve the issues of the case, and an opinion on prescriptive rights is merely advisory. Moreover, Duenow v. Lindeman, 228 Minn. 505, 27 N.W.2d 421 (1947), discusses prescription law in the context of a claim for removal of a drainage obstruction; the case does not deal with the question of whether the right to preserve a tile line connection, at a boundary or even across it, might exist as a matter of prescriptive easement.