NE Valley Times

At the request of property owners, the Fountain Hills Town Council discussed the abandonment of a 10-foot public utility and drainage easement during the council's meeting on May 2.

Town Engineer David Janover explained to the council the details of how and why the town uses easements such as the one along the south and west property lines of a parcel located at 9048 N. Leo Drive, as well as the process they went through to approve the request for abandonment. Janover explained that “if an easement is placed on someone's property, that property owner still owns that area. It's owned by the property owner for which the easement lies on, but it can be used or accessed by others depending upon the type of easement that it is," he said.

"All of the drainage public utility easements and drainage easement abandonments do actually come to this body," Janover said of the council. "They're usually on the consent agenda. So when you approve the consent agenda, you're approving them. And many, many times it's because someone wants to enjoy their property. They want to abandon or vacate the easement so that they can build a pool or they could build a wall, they could build a fence, they could do something and make better use of that, just have a planting garden."

Fountain Hills was planned with variety of different public utility and drainage easements known as public utility easements and drainage easements, Janover said, "and these we see a lot of these on our filed maps that were done pre-incorporation before the town was incorporated in 1989." 

Janover added that it it was not "uncommon to to just place easements as a matter of course, without really planning where you're going to need them," adding that the easements written before incorporation were "overkill." 

"I guess the thought was, pre-incorporation, that we were going to have lots of public utilities and things like that running behind lots between and between lots. But that's not really the case,” he said. Janover added that upon reviewing the easement, town officials found that it wasn't needed, and the local utility companies agreed to abandon it without any complaints, so the city is within its rights to abandon the easement back to the property owners.

The request to abandon the easement came from Eric and Jenny Palmer, residents of North Leo Drive, who said they wanted to plant trees and other vegetation that will encroach into the easement lines. They asked the town to reconsider the easement so that they could act on their landscaping plan.

Since the Palmers said they would accommodate any drainage, the council voted to approve their request. There were several public comments nearby residents who wanted to keep the easement, saying they felt the Palmers had plenty of room to plant elsewhere on their property, and neighbors had greatly enjoyed using the easement in the past. They were also frustrated that they weren't notified sooner.