FREEDOM — Tyler Hadyniak lives with his family on Beaver Ridge Road in Freedom.

The Hadyniaks moved to town in 1997 to escape the noise of New Jersey, opting for the other side of the pendulum: 90 acres of land deep in the Maine woods.

The family has always considered the portion of road by their land abandoned, and therefore their private property.

But not everyone in town agrees: Officials mentioned at multiple meetings last summer that the road is open to the public, Hadyniak said, and that the family is illegally posting it. The Hadyniak’s wooden barricades were run over by an ATV later that month, and shortly after, a private property sign was vandalized to say “town road open to public.”

Now, Hadyniak, an attorney, is representing his family in a lawsuit against the town, claiming ownership of part of the road. The town is fighting back, wracking up thousands in legal fees, paid by taxpayers, to counter that the family is obstructing a public right of way.

This kind of road dispute is not uncommon in Maine. It’s playing out in Hallowell and about 300 other towns across the state, pitting landowners against members of the public that use privately maintained roads for free. Nonprofits and state commissions are looking for solutions, but until then, road access remains unreliable for landowners, political for residents — and devastating for towns that can’t afford to fight legal battles.

A LAWSUIT ON BEAVER RIDGE ROAD

Beaver Ridge Road was laid out in 1823, creating a public easement, according to Kennebec County deeds.

But roads are not static. They’re a reflection of the people who use them, and patterns of maintenance and public use can change the status of a road from an easement to private property and back again.

Hadyniak, who is also chair of the town’s planning board, said that Freedom’s neglect of Beaver Ridge Road dates back to a 1948 decision to close the middle portion of the road for winter maintenance while failing to address the northernmost mile and a half of road, along which his family’s property lies.

“Based on the history of that road and based on representations this town made to my family back when they purchased our land in 1991, we understood this section of the road to be the private property of abutting landowners,” Hadyniak said.

His father, Chuck Hadyniak, is the lead petitioner on the suit with three other family members.

The family spent $12,000 to set up Central Maine Power utility lines by their property and $20,000 to line the road with gravel, Hadyniak said, plus regular costs of re-graveling, plowing and maintenance.

Property owners on public easements need to be able to access their homes, and roads that aren’t maintained will eventually be destroyed by public use, said Roberta Manter, who runs the nonprofit Maine ROADWays, or Residents and Owners on Abandoned and Discontinued Ways.

Abutting landowners end up paying for road maintenance twice, she said: once as taxpayers, and again as private landowners paying out of pocket to maintain access to their road, which the public uses for free.

In 27 years of posting their property as private, Hadyniak said his family never had a problem until last summer, when town officials declared the road open to the public.

“My family said, ‘You know what? We need a decision from the most authoritative source we can get, and that’s a court of law,'” Hadyniak said.

In the declaratory judgment request filed last July, Hadyniak cited multiple 1997 letters from former selectmen and the Maine Municipal Association stating that the road was private property of abutters. He claims it’s evidence of a town decision.

Town decisions are not played out over letters, town attorney Bill Kelly responded in subsequent filings, but through town action required by state law: notifying abutters and the public, holding a hearing, issuing an order of discontinuance, recording the determination in the county registry and notifying the Maine Department of Transportation.

The town did take action on the road in 1956. A vote discontinued maintenance but kept a public right of way “from O.B. Ward’s to discontinued road over Beaver Hill.”

The parties disagree on where that discontinuance lies.

The first portion of Beaver Ridge Road is publicly maintained. After a quarter-mile, at a point referred to as O.B. Ward’s house, a sign reads: “Road discontinued to maintenance, pass at your own risk.” It’s another quarter-mile to the Hadyniak’s private property sign and residences.

This is the beginning of the disputed portion of the road, 1.5 miles in total. Just past the family’s property, the road turns into a grassy, wooded path that continues northwest toward the Sibley Road for over a mile until part of the road is washed out. Some say it’s impassible there, supporting the idea that the road is abandoned by common law, or 20 years without public use.

Manter said that a road abandoned by common law will be all grown up with trees, impossible to get through.

“That’s a road that truly is abandoned by common law,” Manter said. “Presumably, nobody has used it, nobody has needed it in 20 years, and nobody will miss it if it’s gone. So the easement is completely extinguished.”

Robert Kanzler, a Freedom resident who camped on the Beaver Ridge hillside as a Boy Scout through the 1980s, said that the disputed portion of the road is still actively used by many in town. He often snowshoes through it— even the part that is washed out and supposedly impassable.

Out-of-towners don’t always understand the status of their road when they buy property in Maine, Kanzler said. Sellers weren’t even required to inform buyers of the status of their road until 2017, and weren’t required to disclose who maintains the road until 2023.

“They’re surprised, because they do not understand,” Kanzler said. “On their deed, it does not state that it was or is an easement. They think, just because they bought both sides of the road, they automatically own to the center. And they don’t.”

Chuck Hadyniak also camped by the road. On a 1990s camping trip with his father, he said, a selectman pointed out where the road was abandoned by their property.

He said that the family might not have made the move to Maine — quitting their jobs, selling their houses in New Jersey and spending up to $300,000 to build the residences — if they had not been told that Beaver Ridge Road was abandoned. Now, Chuck Hadyniak said he wants to defend his property.

“We want what’s legal,” he said. “That’s why we’re going this route. And we would like people to be open minded enough to let the court decide. We’re making our argument — if the town wants to make their argument, that’s fine.”

When a road is abandoned by common law, after 20 years of public nonuse, it reverts to the private property of abutters to the centerline. But if a road is abandoned through statutory abandonment, or no public maintenance for at least 30 years, it retains a public easement.

The town held a series of hearings over the past month, collecting testimony from dozens of residents about their use of the road. Court action is paused until the Select Board finishes fact-finding and makes a municipal determination on the road.

At the last hearing, Select Board chair Laura Greeley proposed using eminent domain to purchase and take the road for public use — a potentially cheaper option than continuing the legal battle, she said.

Select Board member Heather Donahue lives on the public portion of Beaver Ridge Road. As an abutter, she has recused herself from any future votes on the road.

Donahue, an avid hiker and snowshoer, said she moved to the road because trails were an important feature to her. She said the Hadyniak family’s suit amounts to “extortion.”

“Two lawyers in the family means it costs nothing for them to pursue this,” Donahue said. “It only costs our taxpayers. I can only guess their hope is that by peddling half truths to the court the litigation will get so expensive by the time we actually get to try those facts at trial, that our residents will vote to rescind the easement.”

OUTER CENTRAL ‘STREET’

Thirty miles to the southwest, Patrick Wynne, a former Hallowell city councilor whose term ended in January, is in a similar battle.

Wynne moved with his family to a house at 407 Central St., just a quarter-mile east of the end of the paved road, in 2014. Soon, he began hiking down a street — or rough gravel trail — that continues past the end of the city-maintained section. After a snowstorm one spring, Wynne and his family were coming back from skiing on the trail when they were confronted.

Thomas DeRaps, a neighbor, told Wynne he was trespassing. DeRaps and his wife, Cheryl, are the caretakers of the 44-acre property the Wynnes had been skiing on, per the request of owner Michael Newsom, who lives in Pennsylvania.

“We told them when they moved in, ‘This is your property line. This is where the Newsom’s begins. It’s all posted. They don’t want anybody up here.'” Cheryl DeRaps said. “We’d caught them several times up there trying to fly kites or whatever.”

Wynne continued to use the trail, and still does.

“I just went ahead and exercised my liberty to access public land,” Wynne said. “I use it now … It’s fantastic because you can get on the snowmobile trails and actually connect into (the Hallowell Recreation Area and City Forest).”

Wynne believes the trail is city property — that the Central Street right-of-way extends all the way down the 1,000 feet of gravel trail to the Manchester line, based on historical deeds of the surrounding properties and 1810 town meeting minutes that say the road began at the “westerly end of the line” that divided the properties of two of rural Hallowell’s first residents.

City Manager Gary Lamb publicized those 1810 minutes in a City Council meeting Dec. 9, claiming that for now, it was sufficient evidence that the road was still the city’s property.

Wynne said it was a victory for the city. The “no trespassing” signs the DeRapses had put up along on the trail had to come down, he said at the meeting, and residents could now use the path for recreation as they please.

“There is actually a sign that specifically says, ‘This is not a public hiking trail,'” Wynne said during the Dec. 9 meeting. “It is offensive, as a member of the public, to be shut out from land that belongs to all of us.”

The DeRapses, who have lived at 399 Central St. since the 1970s, say it’s unclear where that “westerly end” actually was, and that no road existed past the property until at least 1954.

Even if the trail was a municipal road, the couple argues, it would have long since been abandoned after 20 years of public nonuse.

The only people accessing that section of trail for decades, they said, would have been the family who owns a woodlot across the town line in Manchester and has permission to use and maintain the trail from abutting landowners. People using a road with permission don’t count as “the public” in cases of abandonment.

A 2008 survey of the area referenced the 1810 minutes and said the status of the section beyond the end of the pavement is unknown. Cheryl DeRaps said Hallowell’s code enforcement officer at the time ordered their signs be taken down in 2020, but retracted his decision and said the road’s status was unclear “after further research.”

Since the Dec. 9 meeting, when Wynne said the stretch was “wide open” to the public, the DeRapses have received call after call from residents asking to hike or ski on the trail and the Newsom property to the north.

They’ve declined each time. They said it’s not their permission, or Wynne’s, to give — it’s the landowner’s.

A ROAD FORWARD

The DeRapses eventually reached out to Manter, who became an expert in these disputes after her own abandoned road lawsuit blew up into a Maine Supreme Judicial Court case.

David Manter, Roberta’s husband, had been maintaining the long-discontinued Young Road in Fayette at his own expense for years — even as logging operations began to take advantage of the public easement that still existed there. He claimed Fayette should reimburse him for maintenance, but town officials declined.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court ultimately sided with the town because it had been too long since the initial discontinuance, choosing not to rule on the constitutionality of a private citizen having to maintain a public easement.

Public easements are still common in Maine today, and Fayette alone has about 20, Manter said.

Now, 38 years after Fayette v. Manter was decided, Roberta Manter runs Maine ROADWays to help people in road disputes find historical information about their roads, learn legal precedent and find remedies.

The Outer Central Street case is one of hundreds of what Manter calls “problem roads” across the state. She has identified about 300 towns across the state with problem roads, and about 100 disputes have gone to court in the last 50 years.

Many towns don’t keep an inventory of their roads, making it difficult to tell which are abandoned or discontinued. Manter keeps track with a map on her wall, where she has noticed trends in the names and locations of problem roads.

“You’ll find an awful lot of these discontinued roads contain either the word ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’ or ‘bog,’ and the reason they were discontinued was because they were difficult to keep maintained,” Roberta Manter said. “So, great idea: ‘Because they’re hard to maintain, we’ll just stop maintaining them and expect them to stay passable.'”

Manter said she thinks the best solution to this statewide problem is creating a middle ground.

The Maine Abandoned and Discontinued Roads Commission, of which Roberta Manter is a member, recommended the same in their most recent report released earlier this month. The group said the Legislature should create a “minimum maintenance” option that doesn’t require full upkeep by the town, but would still allow residents “reasonably passable” access to their property.

The minimum maintenance option would be cheaper than keeping abandoned or discontinued roads up to the current “safe and convenient for travelers with motor vehicles” standard for town ways, Manter said.

“Not all roads need to be to that standard, but (sometimes) the town doesn’t have any other choice,” she said. “If they can’t keep a road to that standard, their only other choice is to discontinue it and do no maintenance whatsoever.”

Keeping some level of maintenance would also allow first responders to access roads like Beaver Ridge Road in case of an emergency, said Kanzler, the Freedom resident.

“Those are actually emergency access routes, these easements, for fire,” Kanzler said. “If you had a forest fire, those roads should be open enough to where you could get a four-wheel drive — walkable, hikeable or anything.”

And then there’s the type of access that only exists between neighbors, he said.

“It’s really sad, because locals have used these roads for many years,” Kanzler said. “There’s a couple gentlemen, one lives on one side, one lives on the other. We ride back and forth up through there on the ATV all the time to go have a cup of coffee and a muffin.”

Chuck Hadyniak, the Freedom landowner, said his family isn’t trying to block access routes. They just want quiet.

“Listen, we’re not monsters,” he said. “My goodness, I mean, the reason we’re here is because of the compassion that we’ve seen and the friendships that people have offered us. And if there was fires here? Oh my goodness, that would be ridiculous of us to say, ‘No, you can’t. This is a private road.'”

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