Crystal Lakes discovers surveying error

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

For more than 30 years, Lou Anne and Pete Garno of Loveland thought they owned a nice piece of mountain property west of Red Feather Lakes.

They installed a well and septic system and built a house and garage. In March, they learned the U.S. Forest Service owns the land under those improvements, and they own less than half of the 2.5 acres they purchased in the Crystal Lakes Ninth Filing.

A substantial portion of four neighboring parcels and insignificant portions of 15 other parcels also overlap federal land.

Jeanne and John Perrine of Berthoud purchased two of the lots in the 1980s. Though they paid for seven acres, the Perrines also just learned they really own 4.7 acres. Like the Garnos, they have a year-round vacation home on the property.

"It really holds extreme sentiment for us," Jeanne Perrine said, noting that both daughters were married there, and they've hosted 19 Memorial Weekend parties for veterans, police and firefighters.

The situation has turned into a lesson in land surveying rules and buyer-beware precautions. The Crystal Lakes property owners may have to buy the land from the Forest Service at today's market prices, unless they can negotiate a land trade. Aaron Johnson, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, said the congresswoman is looking into legislative possibilities for a land swap or internal exchange mechanisms with the Forest Service.

Johnson noted that the overlap of Crystal Lakes with national forest is small - about seven acres - when compared with what the federal government owns in Colorado.

"It's going to take a bunch of lawyers to figure it out, I'm sure," Perrine said, though she still holds out hope for a simple solution.

Without access to the federal land, except through the private lots, the slivers of overlapping land are not worth much to anyone else, she noted.

The problem likely would have never surfaced except that the Bureau of Land Management resurveyed the land in 2003 as part of a fuels management program. Crystal Lakes general manager Jodean Sandquist said the Forest Service requested the survey so that the agency would not encroach on private property when cutting down trees. "They were trying to do the right thing," she said.

Federal agencies concur that the BLM survey is correct, and a private land survey done in 1975 that created the subdivision failed to use the correct markers.

According to a memo from the Forest Service's chief land surveyor, "... the private landowners have not ever had a legal ownership in the federal lands they are encroaching on. The owner of the federal lands being encroached on is the public. It is a well-known tenet of law that you cannot sell what you do not own ..."

Pete Garno contended, however, that the Forest Service should accept some responsibility in this case because it also relied on the private survey to get an elk migration corridor when the Black Mountain property was developed. "They accepted it, too," he said.