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 compensation.” He cited the Fifth Amendment takings clause of the U.S. Constitution and Chapter I, Article 2 of the Vermont Constitution in support of that claim.

Echeverria traced the statutory history he said supports his view. He told the committee that a review of Title 19’s provisions on rights of way shows specific grants of municipal authority to maintain class 1–3 highways, discretionary treatment of class 4 roads and, in his reading, no present grant allowing towns to maintain legal trails. He said the legislature in 1973 created the modern highway classification system and that a 1986 recodification removed town authority over trails. He said legislative history he reviewed at the state archives includes a colloquy in which agency staff warned legislators that leaving discretionary authority in towns exposed them to lawsuits and liability, and that the 1986 change was intended to remove that exposure.

Echeverria described his personal situation: he and his wife bought Dodge Farm about 10 years ago, placed a conservation easement on most of the property, and agreed with the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers (VAST) to move and clear a short stretch of trail so snowmobiles would avoid a fenced cow pasture created to comply with the Clean Water Act. Two legal trails on the property are central to the dispute: one that runs through a pasture and has been largely unmaintained, and a second, the Orchard Trail, that the landowners maintained and kept open for walking until bicycle advocates pushed to allow bike use.

He told the committee there are about “500 miles of legal trails in Vermont,” and that the system is a patchwork: some trails are valuable, others dead-end on private land or pass close to homes and farm fields. He said a Vermont League of Cities survey returned responses from about a quarter of towns and showed mixed practices by municipalities. Given that variation, Echeverria recommended the Legislature not act hurriedly and instead direct the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation to gather comprehensive information about legal trails statewide.

As alternatives, he said the Legislature could pursue a constitutionally grounded eminent-domain process to acquire maintenance rights if it wished to expand public trail uses, but he emphasized that such a process must include a showing of necessity and payment of just compensation. He also urged waiting for the pending Tunbridge superior court ruling to resolve the core legal question of who has authority to maintain legal trails.

Echeverria said the Tunbridge lawsuit has been fully briefed and pending for years; he estimated its outcome could be decided “any minute.” He warned that a superior court ruling would be binding only on the parties in that case and not statewide, which is why he proposed a careful legislative response if the court adopted his view.

He offered to provide the archival hearing record from the 1986 recodification to committee staff on request.

The committee asked follow-up questions about Echeverria’s archival research and about the specifics of the two trails on Dodge Farm. Representative White sought clarification of which trails were in dispute and whether VAST continued to maintain any trail sections after the landowners’ relocation of a snowmobile route. Echeverria said VAST maintains a short segment now on the legal trail after the cooperative move to avoid cattle pasture and that the town played no role in that change.

No formal action or vote on legislation occurred during the testimony; the item was a presentation and question-and-answer period.