Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California
private road issues who has authorities and security guards
We live in a private road sub-division (undedicated) with one entrance to ingress and egress and common usuage of the road to about 35 houses, upscale estates
in the Santa Monica Mtns. In existence for 60 years. There is no home owners associations and everyone just went about there business with out interferrence.
Now a majority of the neighbors formed a group to bring in private security guards and put a security guardhouse at the entrance to check people in and out, record license plates, ask people for driver
licenses id's. There are a minority of
residence who oppose this.
The issue is do the majority have authority to employ private security to monitor the private road, build a guardhouse, and have guards watch over who comes and goes, while the minority oppose the duties of the guards, guardhouse, and the fact that a majority are trying take control and maybe form a homeowners association where done existed in the past. Is there any recourse for the minority to stop the majority from taking control and establishing their own rules. Calif. law says there is no homeowners association just because it's a private road.
2 Answers from Attorneys
Re: private road issues who has authorities and security guards
Who owns the land upon which the road sits. A private road is an easement, and those estates served by the easement must be given access to use the easement. Whoever owns the land can do what they want to so long as there is no substantial interference with the easement.
Re: private road issues who has authorities and security guards
I am not familiar with HOA law and I do hope one of LawGuru's experts in that area who knows the statutes pertaining to common-interest developments or whatever they're generically called will chime in here.
However, if there is no 20th Century (or 21st) specifically on point, I would say that traditional property law likely governs. If so, each of the 35 homeowners is very likely either a benefitted party under an access easement, or a cotenant, in the access road (or both).
Further, if the easements were not created formally, by grant or reservation in a recorded document, they would have arisen under the principle of easement by prescription.
The dissident homeowners should group together to retain a local real-estate attorney to do a title search or searches to determine ownership of the road and whether there are easements of record. The easements might even be mentioned in your deeds, but this is by no means essential to their existence.
The law of easements prohibits unreasonable interference with the use of the easement by the benefitted landowner by the burdened landowner, and also prohibits one or more of multiple parties sharing a non-exclusive easement from interfering with use by the other.
Over the years, there has been a lot of litigation over what's reasonable and what's unreasonable in the way of burdened landowners creating interference with use of the easement by the benefitted laddowners. Frequently, the litigation has involved the installation of gates by the owner, with or without locks. Even if the benefitted party (the easement holder) is provided with a key, the incremental nuisance of having to get out and manipulate a lock and a gate has been held unreasonable more often than not, but installation of locked gates has been upheld in scattered instances where there were serious security or cattle-retention issues.
I think if the road is a shared ownership situation rather than a multiple-easement situation that the legal analysis is similar (but I'm not 100% sure of that).
In your case, I cannot predict that this will boil down to a co-ownership or easement issue, and if so whether the gate-and-guards proposal is unreasonable, but I'd tend to think your side is likely to prevail. Of course, I haven't heard the pro-gate side's arguments.
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