Landowners Living in Backyard Limbo

The air smells of Christmas. But frankly, that’s about the only redeeming feature of Walt Farr’s backyard.

Crushed rocks pass for soil. Dead pine needles form the lawn. It’s so steeply pitched that you have to scuttle up sideways, slipping all the way.

But don’t disdain Farr’s backyard just yet.

Because technically, this land is your land.

Sure, Farr bought it legally. Yes, he’s paid taxes on it for years. Turns out, though, that the property line Farr relied on when he bought the parcel was inaccurate--mistakenly laid down by a surveyor back in 1927.

Farr’s backyard, it seems, is actually part of the Angeles National Forest. As such, it belongs to all of us. So do the backyards of 15 of his neighbors in this mountain community in San Bernardino County. Their decks protrude into the public domain. Their doghouses encroach on government turf. Though no ranger would ever insist on it, they technically need federal permission to collect the pine cones that plop into their hot tubs.

The U.S. government has offered to sell these strips of land, which amount to no more than an acre or two in total, back to the people who thought they owned them in the first place.

It sounds a bit batty, but most of the owners agreed to the deal. (One cannot be found and one is resisting payment.) The price was right: just $100 to $200 per parcel. And if they sniffed at the offer, they feared, the government might order them to tear down their fences and toolsheds, even the extra-bedroom additions they had built out back.

“We thought the easiest thing to do was to pay to get them off our back,” said landowner Lee Cook.

Easy in theory, maybe. But not, it appears, in practice.

It took the National Forest Service three years to complete the paperwork needed to clear things up. Rangers finally mailed the appropriate documents to landowners Friday. But officials say it will take several more weeks for the sales to go through.

Meantime, the confusion over who owns what land has clouded property titles, leaving owners unable to sell or refinance their homes.

More than a little fed up, the once and future landowners have harangued their congressman, their county supervisor, their forest ranger--everyone but Smokey Bear himself.

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After all, they moved to this scenic ski resort town hoping for peace, looking to get away from big-city hassles. Instead, they found themselves so tangled in bureaucracy that they joke about needing a Forest Service hiking permit to set foot in their backyards.

“They keep saying [a resolution] is just around the corner, but the corner never arrives,” said Theodore Frey, whose backyard intrudes 35 feet into Forest Service land. “I’m still waiting for the postman. I’ll probably be blue before he gets to me.”

Frey, 71, put his Wrightwood cabin on the market a year and a half ago. But his real estate agent, Eugene “Willie” Williams, has to tell prospective buyers that the backyard belongs to Uncle Sam.

The inevitable reaction: “Choke, gasp, choke, wheeze,” Williams said. “You tell them that and they say, ‘I’m not interested.’ ”

Exasperated by three years of similar headaches, several landowners came up with elaborate theories to explain the delay. They grumbled that the Forest Service was blocking the sales as some sort of political protest or as a ploy to wrangle a bigger budget from Congress.

The truth--at least according to the Forest Service--is a lot more mundane. Harried bureaucrats simply did not have time until last week to sign all the documents and draw up all the deeds.

They had to make sure there were no rare plants, endangered species or archeological treasures on the land. They had to verify that it’s not in a flood plain, not prone to landslides or avalanches. And of course, to prevent another controversy like this one, they had to record the new boundaries in to-the-dot detail, using the most precise instruments available.

“This land belongs to the people, and we have no authority to give it away or let it slip away,” said Cliff Johnson, who is handling the Wrightwood cases for the Angeles National Forest.

Johnson has promised that if the homeowners sign the papers and send in their checks by the end of August, he’ll have the new deeds into the recorder’s office by early September.

But landowners have accumulated files full of Forest Service letters pledging speed since they were first informed of the flubbed survey three years ago. The timeline kept shifting: It would be done by mid-1995. By February 1996. By August 1996. By January 1997. By next week. By the week after. Soon. Very soon.

Even a Forest Service spokeswoman says she can understand why the landowners wouldn’t quite trust the most recent promise. “We keep saying, ‘Next week. Next week,’ ” spokeswoman Gail Wright acknowledged. “I can understand their dismay over this.”

Dismay is perhaps too weak a word.

Wrightwood--a getaway town of 3,300 plunked on a mountaintop between Palmdale and Big Bear--exudes a rugged, rough-hewn air that attracts law-and-order types, firefighters, cops and probation officers.

It’s the kind of town where American flags decorate the light poles, even the video store looks vaguely rustic and the only billboard in town warns locals to “Bear-proof your garage.”

It’s also the kind of town where residents expect chores to get done crisply.

The landowners group includes several law enforcement and military veterans. They can’t abide broken promises. And they absolutely can’t stand living in limbo. Especially since they’ve agreed to pay the Forest Service’s survey and administrative costs of about $190 per parcel, in addition to buying back their land.

“We know the federal government is inefficient, but three years is about two years past the maximum time limit,” said Cook, 54, a San Bernardino city firefighter who wants to sell his house for retirement money. “It’s just a fiasco.”

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The trouble in Wrightwood traces to 1927, when a civil engineer by the name of Glen Hughes used an inaccurate method to survey a tract abutting the national forest. The boundary line he came up with extended private property about 30 feet into government land.

Ever since, people have bought, sold and developed the parcels using Hughes’ incorrect line.

But in 1994, the Forest Service completed a survey of the area as part of a routine check of government boundaries. The error was obvious. So the Forest Service asserted its claim to the 16 backyards that fell on government turf.

Landowners, informed of the problem by mail, could not understand why the government would make a fuss over such a small, scabby strip of land, good only for dog runs or pine-needle art.

“If you come out here and see the place, you won’t believe they’re screwing up peoples’ lives over it,” Farr said. “This isn’t exactly beachfront property.”

But Wright argued that sanctioning Hughes’ goof by letting homeowners keep their yards could have set a disastrous precedent for encroachment on public lands.

“If you let one developer do it, why not another?” she said. “You need a hard and fast rule.”