Court Opinion

ID: 9885590
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 13:07:56.682272+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:55.247301
License: Public Domain

Desmond, J.
(dissenting). The State took over in 1910 and continued till 1925 the maintenance of a certain county highway in Ontario County. In 1925, the State, to eliminate a dangerous curve in that road, replaced about 1,100 feet of the old road with a new, differently located piece of road. The State then discontinued (as it had not only the right but the statutory duty to do, as we shall see) maintenance of the old strip. Since that strip was part of a county highway, the duty to keep it in repair or close it, could not, when the State so abandoned it, go anywhere except back to the County of Ontario. The State Superintendent of Public Works, in December, 1926, after the new section had been finished and opened, sent to the Clerk of the Ontario County Board of Supervisors a copy of an official order of the State Public Works Department, which order plainly stated that ‘1 the State shall cease to maintain said section upon the completion of the substituted section ”. That notice to the Board of Supervisors specifically quoted and called attention to the then section 181 of the Highway Law which mandated in such situations that the State should “ cease to maintain * * * [said] section # * upon the completion of the substituted section ”. Ontario County was thus officially put on notice of a public statute and an official order which, by requiring the State to cease maintaining the old section, necessarily meant that all future public duties as to that section of road would automatically pass to the County of Ontario. Since Ontario County owned the highway, such duties could not thereafter be lodged elsewhere. The State had lawfully, finally and forever (as both courts below held) divested itself of all responsibility for repair and maintenance of the old or 11 cut off ’ ’ road. Never thereafter did the State have, in fact or law, anything to do with that piece of highway.
Despite all that, the State is being held to damages because the dangerous condition of the road caused an accident, twenty-*196two years later. The sole basis for that result is a typographical error found in the notice (supra) which the State Superintendent sent to the County of Ontario in 1926. The last paragraph thereof said that the eut-pif section of highway was being turned over to “ Town of Geneva, Ontario County ” for future maintenance and repair. That was a mistake, since any such turnover or turnback of a county highway had to be to the County of Ontario, not to any town. But the error could not have misled anyone and there is no proof or finding that it did. Surely the county knew of its ownership of its own roads. Actually, as the majority opinion herein points out, the then statutes did not provide for any notice at all to be given by the State. But the courts (Isaac v. Town of Queensbury, 277 N. Y. 37, 48) held, in 1938,'that “ inasmuch as the determination, affected the rights of person and property, reasonable notice was required.” In other words, the State, having assumed the care of a road, could not, secretly and without notice, stop such care, otherwise the public might be left without protection. But, under Isaac v. Town of Queensbury (supra), no particular kind of notice was needful, só long as it was “ reasonable ”. Certainly, the notice given by the State to the Town of Queensbury in the Isaac case and there held to be sufficient, was no fuller or more informative than the notice here given to the County of Ontario. All the notice the Tówii of Queensbury got was a copy of a Public Service Commission order in a proceeding to which the town was a party, which order, among many other things, provided that the street in question should be discontinued. The State Department of Public Works as such gave the Town of Queensbury no notice at all until after the Isaac accident (see 277 N. Y., p. 49). Nor did the notice given prior to the accident in the Isaac case in the form of a Public Service Commission order, say that the reverter would be to the town. From all that it necessarily follows that the notice given in the present instance to the County of Ontario, was ample as to the only fact of which notice had to be given (see the Isaac opinion, 277 N. Y., p. 50) — that is, notice that the State was abandoning the old strip. And in the present case we had another and much more informative kind of notice not present in the Isaac case (supra). That better and fuller notice in our case consisted of the known and obvious fact that after giving the written notice in 1926 the State ignored the cut-off *197strip entirely for more than twenty years prior to this accident and instead took care of the new, substituted piece of highway.
The order appealed from should be affirmed, with costs.
Conway, Ch. J., Froessel and Burke, JJ., concur with Van Voorhis, J.; Desmund, J., dissents in an opinion in which Dye and Fuld, JJ., concur.
Judgments reversed, etc.