For decades, residents of three homes along Edgemont Memorial Park’s southern edge have pulled their cars into a shared driveway that, municipal officials just learned, is not on private property, but inside the park.
After making that discovery, the government tried to find a legal agreement permitting the residents to use the public land to reach their garages, but came up empty-handed.
The driveway existed before the inhabitants of the three dwellings moved in, and it is the only vehicular access point for their houses. For the owners of 256 and 258 Valley Road, the total lack of street parking at any time of day on their street, and the absence of front driveways to their properties, make the driveway through Edgemont Park particularly vital.
But for municipal leaders, this informal use of public land for a private purpose is a situation that must somehow be resolved.
A recent land survey, which was performed as plans moved forward for a new playground at Edgemont Park, uncovered that the three residential properties "were encroaching 18 feet into the park," Township Manager Joseph Hartnett said.
Municipal officials then hired a company to perform a property title search and check whether any of the homeowners had an easement, that is, an agreement allowing them limited usage of the public land, or some other document providing "a legal basis for the encroachment," Hartnett said. After the two- to three-week search concluded recently, no such records were found, he said.
He told The Times that the municipal government was planning to send certified letters to the homeowners asking whether they had any documentation backing up their right to use the parkland. If no records turned up, then the manager said he would ask the municipal Parks Advisory Committee and a citizens group, the Friends of Edgemont Park, for recommendations as to how to proceed.
"This has to be dealt with," Hartnett said. "Somebody has misappropriated 18 feet of park property."
The residents have been using the driveway, which is the only way to reach the three garages of 9 Edgemont Road and 256 and 258 Valley Road, since at least 1971, when Gene Bloch first moved into the Edgemont Road dwelling with his family.
At its entrance, the well-shaded driveway is bounded by a brown wooden fence on the right side and juniper trees to the left, and traveling down it one feels transported out of Montclair and into the countryside. The road runs along the northern side yard of Bloch’s house and ends behind the two aforementioned Valley Road homes.
"I am hugely concerned that [the arrangement] would be changed," said Bloch, who said he is worried the municipality would invite motorists to use the driveway as an access route to the upcoming "All-Children’s Playground," designed to have entrances, play stations and other accommodations for parents and children with disabilities.
When plans for the playground were being drawn up, park-goers were expected to leave their cars on Edgemont Road or in the park’s existing parking lot, on the north side of Edgemont Pond, Bloch said.
The resident said he’s anxious that "the town might want to play with the footprint of the playground," since more public land is available than officials originally thought. The park’s existing playground is right against the roadway, and the new one "gives us more breathing room," as long as it is built according to plan, Bloch said.
The three homeowners who use the driveway have been maintaining it for as long as they’ve resided there. Bloch has requested his landscaper to lay new gravel when necessary, and his two backyard neighbors have helped pay for the job.
Tom Nussbaum, who resides at 258 Valley Road, said he or his son Jake spends a couple of hours after each snowfall clearing the road with their snow blower.
If the residents were barred access to that roadway after all these years, then "that would be an insult," Bloch said.
Nussbaum said that when he bought his house 15 years ago, his lawyer told him an easement existed, but he has not seen any documentation backing that up.
"This is the only access to our house," said Nussbaum, an artist who built the steel sculpture outside the Bay Street Parking Deck entrance. He said his family is not fretting about the access issue being raised, since municipal officials have not been aggressively pushing alternative plans for the property.
"We intend to keep using it as our driveway," he said.
"It’s certainly possible an agreement could be worked out" under which the neighbors would retain their right to drive through the park to get to their garages, the township manager said. But it is also possible they could lose access.
"It is not their property, as far as we know at this point," Hartnett said.
If the driveway had spilled onto another private citizen’s land, then the residents might have had a legal "right of adverse possession," under which people who occupy someone else’s property for a long time gain the title to real estate that was not originally theirs. But that right does not apply to public property, Hartnett said.
One of the reasons officials feel some action needs to be taken on this issue is the danger that the municipality could be held liable if anyone were to be injured using that roadway, said 2nd Ward Councilman Cary Africk, who represents the Edgemont Memorial Park area.
Africk said the neighbors have been acting in good faith, believing all along that the driveway was part of their properties. "It would not be responsible or right" to tell the homeowners they could not use the road anymore, he said, adding that "an equitable solution" needs to be found.
He noted that the 18-foot-wide strip of land is "an odd sliver" that would be of little use to the municipality.
"It’s not like we could expand the playground or something," Africk said.
