GOULDSBORO, Maine — In the latest example of a dispute over public access to a Maine beach, a local couple is suing their neighbors for the right to cross the neighbors’ property in order to get to the shore.
Robert and Deborah Swan, who own a cabin on Jenny’s Lane in the village of Corea, say in court documents that Robert Swan’s family has been walking across abutting properties to get to a beach on the southeastern side of Crowley’s Island since 1947, when his grandfather built a cabin that he and his wife now own. That historic use, they say, gives them a legal right to get to the beach by walking across their neighbor’s land.
There is a provision in Maine law that can lead to the establishment of specific easements by adverse possession on privately owned land if that land has been used for a specific purpose “uninterruptedly for [at least] 20 years.”
The neighbors — Roberta Lochte-Jones, Beth Parks and Joan Quintal — argue that there are no easements on their property that allow the Swans or anyone else to walk across their land, though at times they have granted the Swans and other neighbors permission to access the beach on a case-by-case basis. In 2013, Parks sent the Swans a certified letter forbidding them from walking across their properties to get to the shore.
“When they served me a paper, I couldn’t believe it,” Robert Swan said last week, sitting at the kitchen table in the cabin, where he used to be able to see the ocean before the trees grew in on an adjacent property. “It really agitates you. You always hope you can talk things out.”
As Swan spoke, old family photos of his showing relatives and neighbors gathered on the beach were spread out on the kitchen table in front of him.
Oral arguments in the civil lawsuit were held on July 23 in Hancock County Superior Court in Ellsworth. Four other neighboring property owners testified in court in support of the Swans’ position about how the properties on Jenny’s Lane were used historically to get to and from the beach, according to court documents.
Written arguments were due to be filed by Monday, Aug. 10. Justice Robert Murray is expected to make a decision sometime this fall, according to people familiar with the case.
Contacted by phone last week at her home, Lochte-Jones declined to comment on the lawsuit. Parks, who shares her home in Corea with Quintal, said Monday that she and Quintal had no comment.
Ellsworth attorney Anthony Beardsley, who represents Lochte-Jones, Parks and Quintal, also has declined to comment on the case.
The Swans, who used to live in the Bangor area but now make the Gouldsboro property their primary residence, said they used to be cordial with their neighbors, who bought the abutting shorefront properties in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They said their relationship began to deteriorate in the late 2000s, as the Swans encountered more resistance to their forays across the neighboring properties.
“They started clamping down,” Swan said. “I was hoping that we could resolve it.”
Swan said he suggested putting in a trail for him and others at the edge of their properties that would go around the back of their homes to the beach.
“They refused,” he said. “They wouldn’t hear of it.”
The Swans have not spoken to their neighbors, or walked onto their properties, since receiving the certified letter from Parks two years ago, he added.
The case goes beyond whether or not the Swans can use properties at the end of Jenny’s Lane to get to the shore. The Swans, and their attorney, Ferdinand “Andy” Slater, also are arguing that members of the public have long used the lane to get to and from the beach, which has views of some smaller islands not far offshore and of the lighthouse on Petit Manan Island. One of the islands, owned and maintained by Maine Coast Heritage Trust, is publicly accessible and is connected to the beach via a sandbar that is exposed at low tide.
“Everybody in town thought of this as public access,” Swan said, referring to Jenny’s Lane. “We all gathered every night, the locals and us kids, and we’d go down to the beach and play. It was part of our existence.”
This claim that the public should be allowed to use Jenny’s Lane to get to and from the beach is why the Surfrider Foundation — a national nonprofit group that advocates for protecting public access to the shore, for conserving coastline from development, and for protecting ocean and water resources — petitioned the court for intervenor status in the case.
Murray denied Surfrider’s bid to become a party to the case, saying that the organization did not submit a timely petition to the court, but the group continues to follow the case.
Melissa Gates, northeast regional manager for the foundation, said recently that the foundation has tracked down copies of photos that show local schoolchildren eating lunch on the beach in the 1930s.
Gates said the foundation supports protecting public access to the shore because it helps to promote public awareness about and support for protecting the world’s oceans, the health of which is crucial to the health of the planet. She said only 10 percent of Maine’s tidal shoreline — which, including islands, is nearly 3,500 miles long — is publicly owned.
“The ocean isn’t owned by [shorefront] property owners,” Gates said “The ocean is a public resource. Without access to it, it is hard to encourage people to advocate for conservation.”
There is existing public access to the beach across a privately-owned parcel near the eastern end of Crowley Island, Gates and Swan said separately, but that access is not protected by an easement. That owner has classified the land as open space and granted the public access across it for tax benefits, they each said, but can revoke the access at at any time.
The beach access lawsuit in Gouldsboro is at least the third such dispute that has ended up being argued in the Maine court system in the past few years.
In one of them, a case about public access to Goose Rocks Beach in Kennebunkport, the Surfrider Foundation was granted intervenor status. In that case, which is still pending, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled last December that the legal dispute could be taken back to the Superior Court level and argued on a parcel-by-parcel basis.
In a separate case in Harpswell, a Superior Court judge ruled last September, after several years of legal wrangling, that the public has a right to gain access to Cedar Beach via privately owned Cedar Beach Road. The issue also has surfaced — but so far without any legal filings — in York in a dispute over whether the public is allowed access to Cliff Walk.
Disputes over access to beaches in Maine date back at least 368 years to the Colonial Ordinance of 1647, which established private land ownership rights all the way to the low-water mark but preserved public access for fishing, bird hunting and navigation.
More contemporary recreational beach activities were not considered by the 17th century rule.
The premises of the Colonial Ordinance were upheld by the state supreme court in landmark cases such as 1989’s Bell v. Town of Wells, which regarded public access to Moody Beach, but were not expanded to include walking, sunbathing or sports.
