Sumter Cty. v. Morris

896 S.E.2d 571

SUMTER COUNTY et al.

v.MORRIS et al.

S23G0169

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: December 19, 2023

Superior Court, Sumter County, R. Rucker Smith, Judge

Raleigh Willis Rollins, H. Thomas Shaw, Alexander & Vann, LLP, 411 Gordon Avenue, Thomasville, Georgia 31792, Hayden Hooks Hooks, Arnold & Hooks LLC, P.O. Box 6540, Americus, Georgia 31709, for Appellant.

Ralph F. Simpson, General Counsel, Simpson Mediation Services, 124 East Entrekin Road, Cobb, Georgia 31735, for Appellee.

Warren, Justice.

Property owners and residents of the Statham Lakefront Subdivision seek to require Sumter County to repair roads in their subdivision. The trial court held that the County has no obligation to maintain the roads, but the Court of Appeals vacated that order and remanded the case for the trial court to determine whether there was evidence of "recognition of the streets as public streets or acceptance of the dedication by the public." This Court granted Sumter County’s petition for certiorari.¹

Adhering to precedent from this Court, which holds that a county is not obligated to repair and maintain a road if county authorities have not accepted the land owner’s offer to dedicate the road to public use, we conclude that the Court of Appeals erred by remanding this case for the trial court to consider whether the public accepted the road as a public road, and we reverse that portion of the judgment. And because of ambiguity in the Court of Appeals’s decision, we remand the case for the Court of Appeals to clearly rule on whether the trial court was correct to conclude that Sumter County authorities did not impliedly accept the roads as public roads.

1, On November 16, 2020, John Morris and 29 other people (collectively, "the plaintiffs") ' who were residents of or owned property on Statham Lakefront Road, East Entrekin Road, West Entrekin Road, and Selma Lane in the Statham Lakefront subdivision in Sumter County (collectively, "the Subdivision Roads") sued Sumter County and its Board of Commissioners,² asking for a writ of mandamus under OCGA § 9-6-21 (b) to require Sumter County to repair the Subdivision Roads and for a declaratory judgment "declaring that [the Subdivision Roads] are public roads of Sumter County, Georgia and that the Defendants have an official duty to repair and maintain each of them."³

At a hearing in June 2021, evidence was presented showing that the Subdivision Roads had been open to the public since their creation. In 2010, Sumter County signed an easement agreement with the Statham Lakefront subdivision homeowner’s association that gave the County an easement on one of the Subdivision Roads "for the sole purpose" of road maintenance. The County conducted maintenance on the Subdivision Roads from at least 2010 until 2019, including resurfacing the roads in 2015 and 2017 as part of larger county projects that were paid for with some funds that can be used on non-county roads and some funds that can be used only on county roads. Conflicting evidence was presented as to whether any county-road-only funds were used on the Subdivision Roads. Subdivision residents also sometimes conducted maintenance on the roads. There was no evidence presented that the Subdivision Roads had ever been expressly accepted as county roads at a meeting of the Sumter County Board of County Commissioners, but evidence was presented that the roads were discussed twice at Board meetings, and that the Board chose not to accept them.

(a) The Trial Court Order

In September 2021, the trial court issued an order denying the plaintiffs’ motion for mandamus and declaring that "(1) Sumter County is not the owner of the Subdivision Roads, and (2) neither Sumter County nor the Board is required to maintain or repair the Subdivision Roads." The court found that "the Board did not accept any offer to dedicate the Subdivision Roads to Sumter County" and instead "consistently rejected offers to dedicate the Subdivision Roads to public use."

The trial court then held that "the fact that the public may have used the Subdivision Roads does not result in Sumter County becoming responsible for the maintenance and repair of these roads." The court also recognized that Sumter County had performed maintenance on the Subdivision Roads but found that no county-road-only funds were spent to maintain the Subdivision Roads, that the County’s "work was authorized" by an easement, and that subdivision residents "also performed work on the Subdivision Roads." The court concluded that because Sumter County did not exercise "exclusive" "dominion and control" over the Subdivision Roads, "the work Sumter County performed on the Subdivision Roads does pot establish an implied acceptance of an offer to dedicate those roads."

(b) The Court of Appeals Opinion

The plaintiffs appealed the trial court’s order to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals agreed with the trial court’s finding that Sumter County "never expressly accepted any offer to dedicate the roads," but explained that "lack of express acceptance is pot controlling" because "acceptance of a dedication may be implied." Morris v. Sumter County, 365 Ga. App. 323, 327, 327-328, 878 S.E.2d 81 (2022). The court further explained that an offer to dedicate may be accepted " ‘by the appropriate public authorities or by the general public.’ " Id. at 328, 878 S.E.2d 81 (quoting Kaplan v. City of Sandy Springs, 286 Ga. 559, 560, 690 S.E.2d 395 (2010), with emphasis added). The Court of Appeals held that the trial court erred by concluding that the plaintiffs were "obligated to demonstrate that the Board had accepted dedication," stating: "the trial court misconstrued the case law and disregarded the common-law provision that dedication could be accepted not only by the Board but also by recognition of the road as a public road by the public." Morris, 365 Ga. App. at 329, 878 S.E.2d 81 (emphasis in original).

The Court of Appeals did not expressly address the trial court’s holding that Sumter County did not impliedly accept the dedication of the Subdivision Roads, but held that the trial court should, on remand, consider the "evidence that the County maintained the roads, using public funds, between 2010 and 2019" in deciding whether the dedication of the road "had been accepted by the general public or whether there was evidence of recognition of the streets as public." Id. at 329, 878 S.E.2d 81. In light of this analysis, the Court of Appeals vacated the trial court’s decision and "remand[ed] the case for the trial court to consider whether there was evidence of recognition of the streets as public streets or acceptance of the dedication by the public." Id.

(c) Sumter County’s Petition for Certiorari

Sumter County petitioned for a writ of certiorari from this Court, and we granted the petition, posing the following question:

Whether the dedication of land by the owner for use as a public road and use by the public of such road, but without express or implied acceptance by the county authorities having jurisdiction over roads, obligates the county to repair and maintain the road.

*

As explained more below, we reaffirm our precedent that a county is not obligated to repair and maintain a road offered for public use by the owner unless the appropriate county authorities have expressly or impliedly accepted the dedication of the roads as public roads. Thus, the Court of Appeals erred in remanding this case for the trial court to consider whether the general public accepted the dedication of the Subdivision Roads as public.

We do not know, however, whether the Court of Appeals’s direction to the trial court to consider "evidence of recognition of the streets as public streets" is meant to direct the trial court to consider the County's recognition—meaning implied acceptance—of the streets as public, or to consider the general public’s recognition. Thus, we remand for the Court of Appeals to clarify this ambiguity by clearly addressing the trial court’s holding that Sumter County did not impliedly accept the Subdivision Roads.

We begin our discussion with the question posed in granting Sumter County’s petition for certiorari, which this Court’s precedent, properly understood, resolves. We then consider and reject the plaintiffs’ attempts to circumvent this precedent and instead rely on inapplicable statutes and cases. Finally, we address the ambiguity in the Court of Appeals’s opinion and the issue the Court of Appeals should decide on remand.

[1] 2. The question posed in this case is whether the public’s use of otherwise privately owned roads can obligate a county to maintain those roads when, as with the Sub- division Roads here, the private owner has offered to dedicate the roads to the public, but there has been no acceptance of the roads by the appropriate county authorities.⁴ As this Court explained in Penick v. Morgan County, 131 Ga. 385, 62 S.E. 300 (1908), a road can become a public road that the county has control over and responsibility for if county authorities accept an offer from the land owner to dedicate the road to the public. See 131 Ga. at 389, 62 S.E. 300 ("If the owner of land dedicates land for use as a public road, the county authorities can, in their discretion, accept it for a public road and open a public road over it.").⁵ If county authorities accept the dedication of a public road, the county generally has an obligation to repair and maintain the road, and that obligation can be enforced by mandamus. See Ross v. Hall County Board of Commissioners, 235 Ga. 309, 313, 219 S.E.2d 380 (1975) (holding that the petitioners were entitled to mandamus under the materially identical predecessor to OCGA § 9-6-21 where "[t]he uncontroverted facts of this case clearly and unequivocally established as a matter of law both express dedication of the roads to the public use by the developers of the Mountain View Lake Estates subdivision, and implied acceptance by the county commissioners"). See...