OWLS HEAD, Maine — Residents overwhelmingly voted Monday night to spend up to another $25,000 to fight a legal effort by a New York couple to erase the town’s easement at the end of Coopers Beach Road.
At a special town meeting at the community building, about 50 residents turned out to vote on the warrant article, Selectman Richard Carver said Tuesday morning.
He said all but a couple of the 50 residents supported spending the additional money. The town has spent about $85,000 so far to defend itself in the case filed in November 2011 by Darlene F. and Lewis M. Edwards III of Saugerties, New York.
Residents twice have voted at town meetings to support spending money to defend the town’s interests.
Carver said the town’s attorney expects the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will hear the case in February or March. The case is going there after the New York couple filed an appeal of a ruling issued in July by Justice Jeffrey Hjelm that a public easement exists, giving the neighbors and other residents of the town of Owls Head the right to cross a 300-foot-long slice of the Edwardses’ waterfront property.
The couple argues that the easement does not exist and that the land in question is their private driveway.
The Edwardses purchased the 1.7-acre lot at the end of Coopers Beach Road in March 2011 for $274,300 after a bank foreclosed on the previous owners. Coopers Beach Road runs from North Shore Drive to near the harbor.
“Homeowners, both year-round and seasonal, have developed strong friendships with each other. As an aspect of the relationships among them, they sometimes walk on or otherwise use each other’s property. Families visited with each other, and there were neighborhood parties and events,” Hjelm stated in his ruling, also citing property records that a public easement existed.
He stated that use of the beach by local residents was a long-standing practice, ruling that the record shows the neighbors have the right to use the intertidal area of the beach that the Edwardses own, for bathing and boating purposes.
The Edwardses also filed a lawsuit against their title insurance company. That case remains pending before the Maine Business and Consumer Court in Portland.