This is a common situation. A private easement is a legal right to use someone else’s land for a specified purpose. It is not uncommon for landlocked property owners without road access to obtain an easement in order to get to the road, which is often over a driveway. Your property may be encumbered with an easement from years or decades in the past, and now is the time to repair the property that is covered by the easement.
You were probably aware of the easement when you purchased the property. His attorney or his title insurance company probably told you about it. In many cases, there is also an easement maintenance agreement on file with the county clerk’s office. This agreement would address the issue of who has to pay for driveway repairs. If no such agreement is in place, you unfortunately have no good way to force your neighbors to pay for resurfacing, since you own the land.
Hopefully, if there is no easement maintenance agreement on file, you will be able to work out an agreement with your neighbor. You should approach your neighbor in a friendly way, talk about the problem, and offer to split the cost of resurfacing the driveway. You might even offer to pay a little more than your fair share to show a good faith effort to compromise and get the neighbor to agree. If your neighbor refuses, you have a few options.
First, you can choose to do nothing. If you do nothing, the driveway will deteriorate, obviously. This could damage your vehicles and could basically force the neighbor to negotiate with you and offer a reasonable contribution towards driveway repairs. However, this will take time. Your neighbor may be stubborn and might still refuse to help with repairs, which means you have to use a dilapidated driveway as well. You may have an alternate path you can take, and you might consider using it and allowing them to only use the bad driveway.
Another option is to hire a lawyer. The attorney could write a letter threatening to cut off the neighbor’s access to the driveway unless the neighbor agrees to a contribution. However, that is usually just a threat. They cannot be made to pay for the driveway, although a letter from a lawyer could go a long way in scaring them enough to pay for part of the driveway.
Finally, if friendly negotiations, inaction, and the letter are of no avail, you might choose to block the neighbor’s access to the driveway. However, it is highly likely that if they went to court, a court could force you to remove the gate if the easement the neighbors have is legal. To go to court, your neighbors will likely need to hire a lawyer, and the neighbor may realize that the money would be better spent on repairing the driveway than on court action. It is also possible for a court to find that the neighbor has a valid easement, you improperly denied the neighbor access to his or her property, and therefore you must pay the neighbor’s legal fees.
It can be very frustrating to own a property that is subject to an easement. Easement holders can be completely disregarded in the use of the property in multiple ways. Unfortunately, once an easement is established on property, it can be very difficult to get rid of. You can get the easement holder to release it, which is unlikely if the easement is needed to gain access to a road. You can also take action in court, which could legally terminate the easement.
