In Tunbridge, a legal battle over public trails could restrict access across Vermont

There's a legal battle playing out in Tunbridge over who should maintain the so-called legal trails in Vermont.

Legal trails are former public roads, which aren't used for traffic anymore, but are still open for walking and other recreational uses. The eventual court ruling could have an impact on more than 500 miles of public trails across the state.

The fight's been going on for almost five years. The town has spent almost $40,000 so far defending itself in court.

And the whole thing started with a small sign that was pounded into the ground along a public trail that's less than a mile long.

"The sign that I put up was here," said Tunbridge resident Todd Tyson as he stood along the Orchard Road trail, one of four legal trails in Tunbridge that is open to the public.

Tyson is one of the lead organizers of the annual Pedal Power to the People bike tour.

The tour takes a different route every year, and back in 2019, Tyson wanted to have the riders go across Orchard Road, which he said bicycle riders have been using for decades.

So Tyson said he was pretty surprised when the property owner called him up to say he didn't want the bike tour going on the public town trail that crosses his land.

"He called and said that I needed to remove that sign at once, and that I had no right to bring our event, or bicycles, through this legal trail," Tyson said. "He was adamant — that would be a lesser term than some other ones that could be used. He was adamant about this."

Tyson was a little freaked out by how strongly the property owner reacted, so he took the sign down and sent the bicyclists over a different route that year.

But he showed up at the next select board meeting seeking clarity on who controlled the town's public trails.

This led to the property owner, who happens to be an attorney who specializes in property law, pleading his case to the select board.

Eventually, the property owner filed a lawsuit against the town, and the case has been bouncing back and forth between the Orange Superior Court and the Vermont Supreme Court.

A resolution might finally be coming soon, and Vermont League of Cities and Towns Executive Director Ted Brady said a lot of people are now watching the case.

"This is not a small decision," Brady said. "This would have an enormous impact on just about every corner of the state."

Vermont's so-called legal trails are former town roads which have been turned into public rights-of-way.

They're used by hikers and hunters, mountain bikers, snowmobilers and anyone else who likes to ramble across Vermont's forested landscape.

A little more than half of the towns in Vermont have a legal trail, and for the most part, they run across private land.

The debate in Tunbridge has taken a lot of twists and turns, but the lawsuit right now centers on the question of who has the authority to maintain trails.

Literally, when a tree falls, who has the right to cut it up and move it; the town or the landowner?

Brady said if the court rules against the town's ability to clear trails, then property owners can let brush grow up near trail entrances, or not move fallen trees, and eventually open trails will be lost and forgotten.

"It's a sad reality in Vermont that there's less land open to hunting, there's less land open to outdoor recreation than we'd like," Brady said. "And over time you lose trails. Trails close. And when landowners say you can't do it, that's going to be one segment of trail at a time. Over a decade or more, they're going to disappear."

John Echeverria, the property owner who filed the lawsuit, purchased the 325-acre Dodge Farm in Tunbridge in 2015.

And he said he didn't pay a lot of attention to the legal trail that ran across the property when he was contemplating the land deal.

"It was, to our knowledge, a walking trail, and that was not a concern to us," he said. "So we said, 'Sounds good enough.' And then peace reigned for five years until the bikers said, 'We want access,' and went to the select board, and started this battle."

Echeverria and his wife don't live on the Dodge Farm. They live in nearby Strafford.

And he said they purchased the property to conserve it, and make sure it remains open to the public.

They've secured an easement on the land, which means it can't be developed, and they allow the local snowmobile club to maintain their trails and ride through the land during winter.

And there's a well-known overlook there, known as White Rock, which has an amazing view of the Green Mountains off to the west.

Echeverria said White Rock is open to anyone who wants to park along the road and go for a hike.

He just doesn't want bicycles, especially large groups of cyclists, riding through the property and chewing up the trail.

"I just think that it's the aggressive effort by bicyclists to open up access to whatever they think they can get access to that is the root cause of this problem," Echeverria said. "Now they've run into a lawyer, turns out a property law professor, who can read the statute and is pretty confident of his position, so we have to resolve this issue. I'm not going to accept a kind of casual opinion offered by a lawyer at a select board meeting."

Echeverria is a professor at Vermont Law School, and before moving to Vermont, he spent most of his career in Washington D.C. arguing property and environmental law cases, occasionally at the U.S. Supreme Court.

He said he didn't set out to saddle Tunbridge taxpayers with tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

And he doesn't believe a court decision in his favor will lead to trails closing across Vermont.

Whether it's in Tunbridge, Tinmouth or Townshend, Echeverria said neighbors should be able to work out solutions without going to court.

"Our legal argument has been: Well, we have the legal right as the owners of the property to determine whether and how to maintain the legal trails. And if we can't come to an agreement about uses, we're not going to maintain the legal trails," Echeverria said. "And I think that the solution is for communities to sit down with trail owners and say, 'What do you want? What do we want? And how can we work it out?"

But after more than four years of debate, Tunbridge resident Dan Ruddell said everyone wants to move on.

"To my disappointment, it has split the town to some degree. I think it has caused some divisiveness that wasn't present before," Ruddell said. "There are people that stand on both sides of the issue. There are some people that support the landowner. There are people that vehemently oppose his position."

Ruddell is trail steward of the Orchard Road trail.

The select board set up the trail steward program in town to try to ease this whole process along; to make some plans for trail use and keep the public informed.

Ruddell hates seeing all of that tax money used to pay lawyers, but he does think it's something worth fighting for.

"When I moved here, you hardly ever saw posted signs. You see a lot of them these days," he said. "And this town has very little public land. We have a small town forest in two different lots. And four legal trails. So it's been a laborious process that I think has tied up a lot more time and energy than any of us would have liked, but we'll get there."

There are a few large trees lying across the trail, which Echeverria refuses to move.

The town's attorney has recommended that the town not send a crew in to move the logs while the case is pending.

Frustrated residents are calling for the town to act, as biking season gives way to cross country skiing and snowmobiling.

And as autumn gives way to winter, the future of Vermont's legal trail policy remains in doubt.