Subdivision Restrictions Lifted to Aid Needy Sisters
Two sisters who inherited 276 acres of land several years ago now want to sell part of it so one of them can pay her medical bills. Subdivision regulations that the Fayette County Commissioners Court passed in 2018 got in the way of those plans.
Fortunately for the property owners, Commissioners granted them a limited variance during their meeting on Thursday, July 28.
Denise Woodyard and her sister inherited the property from their late father in 2015. Woodyard said her father purchased the place in the 1970s. She and her son live on the property. Woodyard said her sister recently needed some costly medical services. Woodyard said her family devised a plan to split the property into four tracts – two tracts of roughly 100 acres and two tracts of roughly 30 acres. Her sister would sell one of the 100 acre tracts to pay for her medical expenses. Woodyard and her son would remain living on the other 100 acre tract. The family would also retain the other two 30-acre tracts for possible sale in the future.
The property belonging to Woodyard and her family lies about a mile from the nearest public road. The family accesses their property via a private oilfield road, as do several of their neighbors.
“Our subdivision regulations state that you have to have an exclusive easement or 30 feet of property touching a public road,” Pct. 1 Commissioner Jason McBroom said to Woodyard at the meeting last Thursday.
In 2018, Commissioners Court passed a new regulation that stipulates all new tracts of land must have exclusive access to a public road. The rule was intended to stop the creation of private roads. In some cases, long-established private roads have led to disputes about maintenance between the property owners who use them. In some other cases, poorly-maintained private roads have hampered fire departments, EMS or law enforcement responding to emergencies.
McBroom suggested that the family ask neighbors to sell or trade them a strip of property to access a public road.
“I have a hard time understanding why I would either have to give someone land or pay someone for access for property that I inherited,” Woodyard said. “My daddy didn’t leave me all that to pay somebody so I could sell land.”
Woodyard said her family and the neighbors who use the private road have shared maintenance costs.
“If there’s a pothole, we fix it,” she said. “If there needs work done, we do it.”
County inspector Clint Sternadel said the 2018 subdivision regulations prohibit the family from dividing the property, though they could sell the entire property in one piece. Sternadel said the regulations would allow the property to be divided and sold to an adjoining landowner without exclusive access to a public road.
County Judge Joe Weber said a lack of exclusive access could limit the property’s sale potential.
“See if you can get an easement,” Weber suggested to Woodyard. “It might cost you something, but in the long run, it might make it more marketable to sell.”
“This is a unique situation where the landowners inherited it and have owned it for quite some time,” Sternadel said.
“Is it worthy of granting some kind of exception here,” Weber asked. “I don’t think we have many pieces of property that are like this.”
The Commissioners eventually agreed to grant Woodyard and her family a variance for one of the 100-acre tracts so that Woodyard’s sister can sell it to pay for her medical expenses.
Sternadel said that if the future buyer wants to further divide the 100-acre tract, they would be subject to the exclusive access requirement.
The rest of the property will remain as one tract for now. Sternadel said the variance would give the family some time to obtain exclusive access for the other proposed tracts.