California Surveyors Forums

Greetings (from a safe distance)

I have a city that is abandoning a PUE which isn't being used. The city has a map and a description of that portion of the easement to be abandoned.
The question is: Should the city prepare plots plans and a legal description for each of the 10 Lots that are affected by the abandonment ?
OR, after the city passes the abandonment resolution, should they record an abandonment document pursuant to the resolution and include the map that shows the affected lots ?

Their concern is that title will pick up the abandonment for each lot and there will be no future issue.

Thank you for your masked input. Be safe

Good

The City of Davis has (or had, anyway -- it's been a few years) a policy of vacating ROW along an entire block face whenever an individual lot owner requested ROW vacation and the city believed it was justified. The policy came about after a rash of single-lot vacation requests came in during a remodel boom, and Planning staff decided that it would be more efficient to deal with vacations block-by-block rather than lot-by-lot. When I prepared descriptions for these, I described a single parcel, calling out the individual lots as it passed them (e.g., "...along the westerly boundary of Lots 33, 34 and 35..."). As far as I know, this worked fine; I've not heard of any title problems arising the the approach.

A legal description of the portion of the easement being abandoned should be sufficient. Listing the affected lots in the preamble, will improve the chances of it getting picked up in title. And even if it title does miss it, a quick email to the title officer with a copy of the recorded abandonment resolution will be enough for them to fix their records. I don't see any need to prepare a separate abandonment legal for each lot, unless the easement was originally acquired on an a lot-by-lot basis.