Breach of an Easement Agreement

What Can You Do if There’s a Breach of an Easement Agreement

What are your options if there’s been a breach of an easement agreement affecting your land?  Attorney Philip Hundl talks about some of the actions you can take in this video.  If you’re a landowner facing condemnation or your land is subject to an easement agreement, contact Mr. Hundl for help in protecting your interests.  Call us at 800-020-1725.

This a question about the breach of an easement agreement.  The question followed Mr. Hundl’s presentation on Landowners’ Rights in Property Condemnation.

Questioner – Have any precedents right now? When they went through before they was standing in water and they were out there with their equipment. It was in the arrangement, in the [easement] agreement they weren’t supposed to do that.

Mr. Hundl – Right.

Questioner – Are you including that in the–

Mr. Hundl – Right, well there’s lots of terms about drainage, the restoration, making sure, you know, if you’re laying bench level, laser level, and water doesn’t stand on it then we’re going to want to make sure it’s that way after they’re done.

And then, okay, listen, now jump to happens, we’ve got this easement agreement, they’ve put in the pipeline, and they haven’t done what they said they were going to do. Well, that’s a breach of the easement agreement.

So now we potentially have a lawsuit against them, right? Okay, well how does that work? Normally, it would be, hey pipeline company, you didn’t restore the land properly. You left a lot of the, they put these board mats out there, let’s say, or we pushed for rubber mats, and in the end it’ll be fine, we’ll put these road mats out. If it’s wet we don’t have to worry about it. No problem. There’s not going to be any debris, and all of a sudden there is all this broken up mats, right?

Well, it needs to be cleaned up. So then they go clean it up. Or they don’t clean it up at all, well then how much is it going to cost for us to clean it up? And then you breached, you need to pay us, and in the end if they don’t, well our alternative, you know, our option is to file suit against them for breach of easement, breach of the contract. It’s a contract.

Have we had to do that? You bet. Most of the time, reluctantly they will comply with what they’ve agreed to, so. We face that a lot with boring, when they’re boring or supposed to bore under something, and sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing, so the pipeline company hires a contractor to go out and do this work, and, you know, once again, I don’t know what the contractor knows does or doesn’t know, but the next thing you know they open-cut it and they haven’t bored under the creek or whatever, and they tremendously damage the integrity of the creek banks to create an ability for the pond to hold water, you name it. So now what?

Well, they need to fix it, and if they can’t fix it they have to pay the amount of damages that compensate you for that, fix it, right?

Those are all the things that, like I said, unfortunately, when you have an easement burdening your property, you just need to make sure that they uphold their end of the bargain, that’s all.

All right. Thank you all very much once again. We’ve got kolaches and coffee in the back. Grab one on your way out. Just save some for my kids, that’s all.

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