February 20, 2019
By: Dwayne Page
A legal dispute between the county and a landowner over a road and whether he can keep a gate across it has been resolved with a settlement in Chancery Court.
A hearing had been scheduled for Monday, February 18 to determine whether Robert Grant Manning should be permanently enjoined from keeping a gate across Sunset Drive off Allen Bend Road in the Belk Community. Sunset Drive branches off to Hidden Hollow Way, both of which dead end on property formerly owned totally by Manning. Bart Lay later bought a portion of the property in October, 2015.
The case had been lingering in Chancery Court since 2016 but a settlement between the parties was reached in the days leading up to the hearing. Chancellor Ronald Thurman approved and signed the agreed order on Monday.
The county claimed Sunset Drive had been on the county road map and county road list since the late 1990’s and that Manning could not legally keep a gate across it but Manning denied the county’s claim asserting that Sunset Drive, a nine foot wide gravel road, was a private drive which ran through his property and belonged to him.
Following a two and a half hour hearing in August, 2016, Chancellor Thurman granted the county’s petition and issued a temporary injunction to enjoin Manning from obstructing Sunset Drive with a gate. During that hearing, Mr. Lay, the adjoining property owner testified that the gate had forced him to access his property through a field off Allen Bend Road and that it had hampered his efforts to rent a trailer on the property and farm land.
In the settlement approved by the Chancellor on Monday, the county will abandon the portion of Sunset Drive currently traversing 1.841 acres of property owned by Manning and reroute it off Allen Bend Road onto Bart Lay’s property. Mr. Lay is dedicating to the county a strip of land to allow for the new section of Sunset which will join the existing road past Manning’s property. Meanwhile a portion of Hidden Hollow Way extending fifteen one hundredths of a mile east of the intersection of Sunset Drive will also become a county road while the remainder of it will continue to be a private driveway belonging to Lay, the property owner. Manning and Lay will be permitted to erect gates at designated points where the respective roads become private driveways to protect easements and access to their properties. With the approval of this agreement, the temporary injunction against Manning has been set aside.
During the 2016 hearing, Chancellor Thurman sided with County Attorney Hilton Conger who contended that Sunset Drive was a county road based in part on a subdivision plat signed by Manning on July 21, 2004 dedicating all streets and alleys on his property to the county. In 2006 Manning also signed a deed of transfer conveying a portion of the subdivided property to his ex-wife which referenced Sunset Drive as being a county road. She sold her property to Mr. Lay in October, 2015.
Manning’s attorneys, Sarah Cripps and Brandon Cox disputed Conger’s claim stating that Manning had made no public dedication to the county of Sunset Drive nor any right of way dedication and that the DeKalb County Regional Planning Commission approved Manning’s subdivision plat on July 12, 2004 with full knowledge that Sunset Drive was nothing more than a private gravel driveway.
Cripps and Cox asserted that deeds also revealed that Manning reserved an easement unto himself so he could have access to the rear of his property after it was subdivided. They claimed no easement would have been necessary if Sunset Drive were already a county road. They also pointed to the fact that Sunset Drive served no other property owners, other than Lay, and that there were no school bus or mail routes on the driveway, which consisted largely of two strips of gravel with grass growing in between.
Manning testified in 2016 that he and his former wife purchased the 120 acre site in the Belk community in 1990 and that he later developed the driveways now known as Sunset Drive and Hidden Hollow Way but had never sought making them county roads. Manning said he named the driveways himself at the request of the DeKalb County E-911 Board in 1992 and erected road signs as a joke since the driveways only traverse a cow pasture. Manning said he has always maintained the driveways himself and had never asked the county highway department for any gravel or road work on them.
Manning said he erected the gate on Sunset Drive in May, 2011 to keep drunks and ATV’s off his property and had not before been challenged by the county to remove the gate. When the county commission became aware of it in the fall of 2015, they voted to instruct then Road Supervisor Butch Agee to take the necessary action to have the gate removed. It was taken down in January, 2016 but Manning later erected it again and locked it with a log chain. The gate was again removed in August 2016 but Manning put it back where it remained although it was opened and did not block the road.