Court Opinion

ID: 9721451
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:59:42.710535+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:25.982922
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring). My endorsement attests full agreement with the Court’s opinion per curiam. A compendium should be added, however, lest impression remain that we have not considered carefully the enormity of the Attorney General’s position that natural and altogether privately owned Wood Lake, being navigable in fact, should by force *516of the statute (1965 PA 291) be opened to public use.
By the aforesaid opinion we reaffirm and reapply a settled rule of property law. The plaintiff owners of Wood Lake and all of the riparian environs thereof, to which the public has no lawful right of access, are upon this plain and factually ascertained record entitled—as in Giddings and Putnam1—to injunctive relief against the continuing trespass all defendants have threatened.
No thought seems to have been given, by the appellant Department of Natural Resources and the Attorney General, to the property-destructive consequences they would have us visit upon the plaintiff landowners. Let the public have access to Wood Lake, by the private roadway that leads westerly some 1500 feet from US 131 and ends at the lakeside home of Mr. and Mrs. McMullen, and the ear-splitting roar of racing outboard motors in summer and of snowmobile motors in winter is bound to replace the utter quiet of plaintiff’s picturesque sylvan retreat.2 The photographed littering shown around the testimonially described “landing” will in short order extend predictably to all of the beaches and wooded shores of the lake. Trespasses and pollutional deposits upon the fast land around the lake will be beyond all practical control. The lake will no longer be owned in fact by the plaintiffs but will instead have become a place of invitational public recreation with no compensation provided for the constitutionally unlawful usurpation of plaintiffs’ private rights.
*517The appellant department suggests no means whereby plaintiffs’ continuing obligation to pay ever-burgeoning taxes upon their entire freehold will be relieved, in any minimal or substantial way, on account of the proposed partial destruction of their right to the exclusive enjoyment of that which they have acquired. In sum, what the appellant department proposes is that this Court by force only of the mentioned statute should authorize the uncompensated takeover for public use of plaintiffs’ privately owned lake and the shores thereof. I cannot subscribe, our country as yet not having gone collectivist or wholly socialistic.

 Putnam v Kinney, 248 Mich 410 (1929); Giddings v Rogalewski 192 Mich 319 (1916).

 The lake extends roughly from east to west and is approximately 3500 feet long by about 1200 feet wide. According to an old conservation record shown in evidence its average depth is 35 feet. Substantially eliptieal in shape, it is just right for a laid out one mile course of winter and summer motorized racing.