A Plymouth alley appears to have migrated outside of its right of way, and now the owner of the neighboring property wants her land back from the city. Nancy Young says she has lived at the property on Webster Avenue for over 30 years, but when she had her land surveyed a couple years ago, she discovered that the land where the alley sits actually belongs to her. Young says that she consistently has to rake stones out of her yard due to the number of cars that use the alley.
During Monday’s Plymouth Board of Works meeting, City Attorney Sean Surrisi showed board members an aerial view of the property, along with lines marking the locations of the land parcels. While the map shows a right-of-way that runs straight north and south, the actual alley veers toward the northeast, as it approaches Webster Avenue.
Surrisi says that over time, the alley appears to have moved. “The alley, as it’s used, has migrated away from the right of way here that the city owns, and it’s kind of the sort of thing that, just over time and use, I think, tends to happen in places with these old, narrow alleys,” he says. “You can see, all along this stretch here, it’s quite a bit over into that area.”
Before the city can go about fixing the alley, there are still some issues that need to be resolved. For one thing, if the map is correct, a neighboring landowner’s fence currently sits right in the middle of the actual right-of-way. However, Pamela Milton, who lives across the alley from Nancy Young, says her fence is within her property, according to surveys done before she purchased her home.
To settle the issue, board member Mike Delp recommended that the city look into paying for its own survey of the alley’s right-of-way from Webster Avenue south to Ledyard Street. “Sometimes these maps can be off a little bit, but it appears with the utility lines, when I’ve looked at it, that for whatever reason, that alley has migrated to the east there,” Delp said.
The board voted to solicit quotes, to determine how much it would cost to go about having a survey completed.
