Utility take over

[Golfmanmike]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Texas
I purchased 45 acres of land in a small West Texas town. The tract is rectangular in shape.
There is a dirt road that splits my land and goes back to another tract of land that I use to get to my house. There are no written easments for the raod. A utility company has a substation on the land next to mine. I have asked them to stop useing the main road and offered to deed them some land on the North side of my place to access there sub station, there are other ways into their property besides my road. The utility company claims prescriptive easement to my road and are unwilling to work with me OR help in maintaining the road. Is there any way I can get them to stop useing the main road in front of my house or am I a victim of the almighty Texas Utility company.

 

[JETX]

Is there any way I can get them to stop useing the main road in front of my house or am I a victim of the almighty Texas Utility company.

Of course there is. Take a bulldozer and tear up the road. Pretty simple, huh??

Seriously though.... there are specific requirements for a 'prescriptive easement' to occur in Texas:
A person acquires a prescriptive easement by the open, notorious, continuous, exclusive, and adverse use of someone else’s land for a ten year period. Brooks v. Jones, 578 S.W.2d 669, 673 (Tex. 1979); Johnson v. Dale, 835 S.W.2d 216, 218 (Tex. App.—Waco 1992, no writ). Use of land by permission of the servient estate’s owner, no matter for how long, cannot subsequently ripen into a prescriptive easement. Othen v. Rosier, 148 Tex. 485, 226 S.W.2d 622, 626 (1950). But once a claimant has shown an open and continuous use of the land for at least ten years, a rebuttable presumption is raised that the use was nonpermissive, was under a claim of right, and thus was adverse, and the servient estate owner then has the burden of rebutting this presumption by showing that the use was permissive. Schultz v. Shatto, 150 Tex. 130, 237 S.W.2d 609, 613 (1951); Johnson, 835 S.W.2d at 219. A prescriptive easement can be proved by circumstantial evidence. Schultz, 237 S.W.2d at 615.

Only you know the specifics of this case... and whether they meet the requirements noted above and whether it is worth the legal costs of a lawsuit.

 

[Golfmanmike]

Utility robbery

This tract of land and the land next to me were at one point owned by one person. When the substation was built in the '50 or '60's they used the road for access. As far as I know they have never been denied access by any owner. I am not sure when the land was broken up, when I purchased the land from a University I had it surveyed and was under the assumption that if you did not have a right of way then you could not ude the road. There was never a written easement through the property to there substation. I guess the real question is do I have a lagitimate claim to the road or do I need to go back on the University and ask for some money back on land I did not get in the original deal. I do not want to waste money fighting a large corperation if I cannot win.