Thetrue boundaries of properties comprising 10 square miles in and around Judge Magney State Park are currently unknown, but county surveyor Wayne Hensche wants to find them. Ten East End property owners along with numerous county staff attended a public hearing Tuesday, November 10, 2009 regarding the possibility of the county authorizing a survey of the entire tract.
“There’s this vast area of no corners,” Hensche said. He expects the land to come up over 200 feet short of what property deeds say is there. “If you built within 200 feet of your [presumed] property line,” he told property owners, “you may be in trespass already.”
The last official survey of the area was in 1910. Numerous surveyors since then have refused to touch that area, which is the last of a large tract of East End land that had serious boundary problems. “We’ve put 85% of Hovland back together,” Hensche said. “[This is] the last big keystone in the east end of the county.”
” The people with the largest tracts of land oppose area-wide surveys the most, Hensche said, because they pay the most. The cost for this survey would be $30.85 per acre, and that includes a $7,500 discount on the total cost since Hensche could not find a way to get the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to pay its share of the cost. He tried the DNR forestry division, the DNR park division, and the Lake Superior Coastal Zone. Hiring an outside surveyor, however, Hensche said, would cost three times more.
Some property owners could find out that they have developed someone else’s land and may oppose a survey because of that. In another portion of Hovland he surveyed, Hensche said, Jay LaFavor found out that he owned not his house, not his neighbor’s house, but the house two plots down from him.
Some property owners may hope their neighbors take the initiative of hiring a surveyor instead of the county surveying the entire area. “Everybody relies on everybody else to do the survey for them so they don’t have to pay,” Hensche said. Theoutside boundaries of this entire tract must be delineated, however, for proper delineation of parcels within it.
Discrepancies between what property deeds describe and what is actually there will be shared among property owners.
One property owner in attendance said he didn’t want to find out whether his family’s cabin was on state park land. Another property owner, on the other hand, said property disputes could not be settled unless people know where the boundaries are.
If the state park finds out that someone has a cabin on its land, they will get it appraised, Commissioner Jan Hall said, even though they have said they don’t have money to pay for a survey. Hensche mentioned a situation in which a private cabin found to be on forest service land had to be moved, and its concrete foundation had to be demolished.
The board voted unanimously to approve a survey of the area and to hire Wayne Hensche to do it. Hensche’s bid totaled $66,882.81. The cost of the survey will be assessed to property owners starting in 2011 and can be amortized over 10 years.
Fieldwork will start this fall, and final drawings could be completed as early as the end of next year.
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