SOLON — The property owner in a dispute with town officials about a rock wall he built along Brighton Road is asking a judge to intervene.

Kirt Olson filed a complaint in Somerset County Superior Court on Friday asking a judge to declare that his stone wall and nearby cedar barbed wire fence mark the boundary of the right of way.

Additional Photos

This rock wall on Kirk Olson’s property along Brighton Road in Solon must be removed by Nov. 9 or the town will because the wall is too close to the roadway. Staff photo by David Leaming

Olson is also asking that the court issue a preliminary injunction to prohibit the town from removing the stone wall until the court makes a decision.

Town officials say the stone wall, which Olson assembled last year, is nine feet too close to Brighton Road, making the town liable if a vehicle crashes into it and someone is injured.

At a special town meeting in August, residents voted to give Olson 90 days to move the wall. The countdown ends on Wednesday, and he has not yet removed it.

Town officials had planned to remove it next week, but they probably won’t do so now that the complaint has been filed, First Selectman Elaine Aloes said.

“We’ll have to respond to (the complaint) and take it to court and let a judge decide,” she said.

Olson has maintained that his wall is not in the town’s right of way. According to his complaint, the property has had a stone wall and cedar barbed wire fence along that section of Brighton Road for more than 60 years.

A fence becomes the new right of way if it’s been in place for 40 years, per state law.

He states that in 2010 he repaired the some of the stone wall and that the rest of the wall still remains unimproved along portions of his frontage on Brighton Road.

The fence and stone wall have been repaired from time to time since 1950, the complaint states.

It also says Olson received permission to build the stone wall from the town road commissioner and that town officials later went on his property without his permission to measure 25 feet from the road’s center line.

Town officials say there was a wire fence at the location for many years, but it was not maintained. They say there may have been rocks in the area, but they never constituted a maintained fence.

Some previous owners also question whether a rock wall was present for the last 60 years.

Marialyce Boudreau’s grandparents, Willy and Marion Tuscan, raised cattle, horses, pigs, chickens and foxes at the farm, she said.

Though there were wooden fence posts strung together with wire on some parts of the property, there were never any rock walls, particularly near the road, said Boudreau, 69, who now lives in Nashville, Tenn.

“Never in all my years of life was there any type of rock or stone wall on the property by the road,” Boudreau said in an email.

Her family moved to Solon in 1942 when she was an infant, she said. For a period of time they lived with her grandparents on the farm and then bought property next door. When she was 10, they moved to a house in town, but she visited her grandparents several times a week and knew the land well, she said. She lived in Solon until she graduated from high school.

Lee Fairfield, 64, of Solon, said his uncle, Herbert Hanson, owned the farm after the Tuscans, and he used to work there in the late 1950s. Hanson and the Tuscans are also listed as previous owners of the property by the Somerset County Registry of Deeds.

“We didn’t have a wall there. It was a barbed wire fence around. A wall isn’t going to keep cows out. We had trouble keeping them in there to begin with,” Fairfield said.

He said there were rocks in the fields, but that all fields have rocks. He said he remembers moving the rocks out of the way, but they never made a wall.

Phone calls to Olson on Friday were not returned.

Aloes said the town is not liable if someone crashes into a naturally occurring object like a large rock or tree in the town’s right of way.

“It’s the man-placed items that the town has to control in the right of way,” she said, adding if a man-made item remains there long enough, it will mark the new right of way and that owner can then claim the property.

Erin Rhoda — 612-2368

erhoda@centralmaine.com

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