Vermont landowner tells committee Senate trail language would create unconstitutional taking

John Echeverria, owner of the Dodge Farm on the Tunbridge–Stratford border and a plaintiff in a Tunbridge lawsuit, told a legislative committee that the Senate version of bill 488 would “create a new scope, a broadened scope for the … easement, without the constitutionally mandated requirement of a necessity for the taking and without the required payment of just compensation.”

Echeverria, who said he is also a professor at Vermont Law School and has litigated takings claims, told the committee that the proposal would change decades of statutory practice and could expropriate private property rights now exercised by landowners who hold land subject to legal trails. He urged lawmakers to pause and let an ongoing Tunbridge superior court case resolve who has authority to maintain legal trails before altering state law.

The matter matters because, Echeverria said, the proposed language would broaden the scope of public maintenance and use of legal trails without the constitutional prerequisites for a taking under the U.S. Constitution and the Vermont Constitution. “This legislation would create an expanded trail easement,” he said, and would do so “without the required payment of just…