Santa Rosa may drop legal fight over bike path

Santa Rosa has tentatively agreed to drop its long-standing legal challenge against a gated community that has objected to bicyclists and horseback riders using a disputed easement between Oakmont and Annadel State Park.

On the eve of trial in the 5-year-old case, attorneys for the city and the Villages at Wild Oak Association on Friday told Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Elliot Daum they had a tentative agreement to settle the matter.

Details still need to be ironed out, but if the outlines of the deal can be formalized, the city and the association have agreed to dismiss their respective lawsuits over the access issue, City Attorney Caroline Fowler said.

Michael Scott, attorney for the association, confirmed settlement discussions are underway but declined to provide details, saying he was “very leery of jinxing it.”

Fowler, who has been before the council in closed session twice in recent weeks, also declined to discuss details. One of the issues that will need to be resolved, however, is what kinds of changes need to be made to the signs along the easement that currently read “Private road” and “No trespassing” and “No bicycles,” she said.

Those signs are inappropriate and confusing for the public given that it is a valid legal easement for pedestrians, she said.

The installation of those signs by the association along the 2,300-foot-long pathway that has become popular with recreational bicyclists in recent years is what prompted the city to sue the 61-home association. The city has said it was acting to preserve what it believed was a legal easement across the subdivision allowing access for not only pedestrians but also bicyclists and equestrians, as was called for during the public approvals of the subdivision during the 1970s.

But the association argued, and Judge Daum agreed last month, that the final recorded easement over the property only allowed “pedestrian and emergency vehicle access.” The city claimed that despite what it called a “mistake” by city staff over the easement language, the public still had a “prescriptive easement” across the property due to their regular use of the easement over the ensuing decades.

But Daum’s earlier ruling made it clear the city had a very narrow path to success on that remaining issue.

Not taking the case to trial under those circumstances was a smart move, said Gary Helfrich, executive director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition.

“If it did go to trial and the city lost, then no other party could ever bring up the issue again,” Helfrich said.

The proposed settlement, as he understands it, will make it clear that bicyclists and horseback riders do not have a legal right to cross the property, Helfrich said.

“That means that anybody riding a bicycle there would be trespassing and it would be up to the private property owner to enforce that,” Helfrich said.

What that would look like, how and by whom it would be enforced and how vigorously all remain to be seen, Helfrich said. It’s entirely possible people would have to walk their bicycles across the pathway, he said.

He called the outcome of the case a “huge disappointment.”

While he understands the association may have a legal right to do what it did, he called the gated community’s position “selfish and mean-spirited.”

Hypothetically, his coalition could choose to litigate the issue further, he said. But given the history and acrimony the case has generated, it’s better at this point for everyone to work toward another solution to help keep bicyclists off Highway 12 by helping them get from Channel Drive to Oakmont, Helfrich said.

One idea that previously has been discussed and now likely will be revisited involves improving a narrow bridge over a tributary of Santa Rosa Creek that links up with a pathway near the city’s former treatment plant, he said.

Unlike the Wild Oak easement, which runs along a portion of the private Timber Springs Drive, that alternate path would connect bicyclists to a public city street, namely Stone Bridge Road in Oakmont, he said. While building the improvements and perfecting that easement will cost money, it might be the best way forward, he said.

“Let’s find out how to make it work instead of beating our heads against a wall,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.