Posted on 03/15/2018 6:06:44 AM PDT by C19fan
I’m in agreement up to the point they lose their land. They do need a serious correction though. What they are doing is wrong.
Public Access points here only existed at bridges over the river. It has only been in the last 15 years property owns set up public access points. This is being done to keep our private property from being damage. Putting in and pulling out does a lot of damage to a river bank which cause erosion.
The public access points is property donate so people can access the river with out trespassing on people’s property. My river is national scenic river where people have the right to paddle.
Our local issue: people think they can come through our property to access the river. That is what the public access points are for. They get upset when I tell them no, they do not understand private property rights.
Here in central Wisconsin , Adams county, there is a 40 foot set back rule facing any body of water including streams ponds or lakes which prohibits the owner clearing or maintaining any vegetation that is growing there.
Texas recognizes that a navigational steam may be dry at times. You can boat, swim, float, walk, wade, picnic, camp, etc up most ‘streams’.
Yep. I have a non-navigable but sizable creek passing through my property— I own both sides. And yes, I can take whatever water I want as long as I don’t dam it up. I wouldn’t want to do that, anyway, because it would hurt my downstream neighbors, and they are nice folks.
Only true in some states.
That is the federal law and Real Estate law. Every navigable river has a legal easement for the public in every title deed I have ever seen. The problem became two fold under Obama. First the river users wanted more, they wanted to be able to land their boats and camp on private property, they wanted oh maybe 100' inland to camp and have fires and be on the river. That is not ever going to fly, stay in the water, legal, land to poop or pee or lunch, no!
Then Obama and his EPA really got into it and declared all water, all of it, was navigable, so the feds had a right to regulate. Thats when I stated freaking out. I have ponds, and a seasonal creek on my property. The water is collected from my mountainous land into catch basins, ponds, to be used to irrigate our garden and orchard. Obama and his control freaks in the EPA decided all the water is now "navigable" and theirs to control.
Can you imagine a little farmer like us would have DC bureaucrats coming onto our property and telling us our ponds are not engineered properly and they had to go, or maybe worse, you must stock your ponds and open them up to the public?
Back in the 70’s in the Scouts we used to paddle and camp the Suwanee and Peace rivers in FL and camped on open pastures out of sight of any homes. Never had an owner hassle us.
Now the Friday night drunks in Fargo Ga. had a different opinion when we camped in their public park. (with the sheriff’s permission)
Yes, I am aware of that. Most of them are at least wet all the time.
So much of this has been adjudicated so many times in favor of public access that the stake taken in New Mexico is stupid it is so wrong headed.
Signs, signs, everywhere a sign.
blocking out the scenery
Breaking my mind
Do this, don’t do that
Can’t you read the signs...
They have absolutely no right to cross your property for river access but of course, as you well know, they have an absolute right to float the stream, wade it or fish it and you can’t do a thing about it.
As I noted, I did not want the near constant battle of explaining to an increasingly stupid public that they do not have the right of trespass on the shore or a right of access via private property.
This situation in NM is just dead wrong and needs to be slapped down.
I would think that those fences would be torn down every year during flood season.
***************
If you look at the construction closely it shows that the
entire barricade is hanging from a cable at the top and the
PVC swings back and forth. I agree you’d think sometimes
something would get hung and tear it but his approach is
unique. The barbed wire is a different situation. But a
couple of stands if torn down isn’t that much.
Yeah, you can’t privatize waterways. The feds will smack this down eventually when the lawsuits get to that level. In the meantime, carry a pair of wirecutters if you are going boating in New Mexico, I guess.
Have a waterproofed battery saw? Would need a tight fitting plate around butt end of bar to block loose wire ends getting sucked into sprocket drive area:
http://www.cuttersedge.com/products/bullet_chain
Not really. You can’t pump it dry. The downstream owners have riparian rights as well, so there is a limit on how much you can take and for what purposes.
I once toured a coffee plantation outside Ponce, PR. It was in beautiful condition and even had an impressive water turbine made in New York in the 1840s which sill functioned perfectly. When in use, the turbine produced power for the mill, and ran a generator. The turbine drew water from a weir that fed a canal about 18 inches Square. The plantation had to close when PR became a US territory and Spanish water rights were replaced by US law which gave owners downstream more right to the water.
Except that logic (or more importantly, that legal principle) does not apply along the Mississippi, which has been claimed as waters of the U.S. since shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.
It’s along smaller rivers, streams and tributaries that some owners may have a claim to owning to the center of the channel.
It's still a states' rights issue. My state supreme court decided some years ago that on NAVIGABLE waters the public has the right-of-way up to the high water mark.
I know of one state not quite buying it: Wyoming
I do not know about New Mexico since it is so much younger as a state than Virginia, but I do know a little bit about some controversies surrounding this issue in my home state of Virginia. In Virginia, there are still some property owners whose families have held their land for centuries with no break in the chain of title. Some of them can trace their family’s ownership back to Land Grants from the King of England. In many cases, these original land grants specifically mention that the grant includes title to all or a portion of a given river or stream which runs adjacent to or across the property.
I know the U.S. government has, on a “blank4et” basis, declared waterways to be public property, but I think that in the event a particular landowner can trace his title back to a document that references ownership of a particular section of a river or stream, then that owner has a legitimate claim to ownership of the waterway.
Now, I’m not saying these owners should be permitted to maintain ownership, but in such cases, if the U.S. government wants to claim such waterways as “waters of the U.S.” or “navigable waters” or “public property” or whatever, I think the U.S. government should be required to properly condemn the affected section(s) of rivers/streams using the 5th amendment power of imminent domain - and I think the owners should be justly compensated.
With that said, I suspect that such issues were probably taken care of in New Mexico at the time it was admitted to the Union.
Just about every location has some very confusing rules about where ownership starts and stops when it comes to rivers, lakes, oceans etc.
For Michigan, it’s been the case since 2005 that the public had the right to be on any beach property wherever it was (and regardless of whether there was a landowner who owned the adjacent property) as long as they did not go past the ‘high water mark’. I believe that this right however was restricted to the activity of ‘just passing through’…. not setting down a towel and sunbathing there for the day. Next door in Ontario, this also was the case but this got changed in 1951 to be the ‘low water mark’ which obviously makes a world of difference. In 2012, there was legislation in the works to revert back to the 1951 ruling but it never made it past the finish line and what they got now is a bit of a hodgepodge mess.
As for barbed wire fences across the river, I would imagine that if a canoer made it around the bend on a fast flowing river and couldn’t avoid coming up against the barbed wire and drowned, there would be hell to pay….sort of along the lines of booby trapping a house to not just keep an intruder out but to kill the intruder.
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