Lehmann v. Cocoanut Bayou Ass'n, Inc.

• Decision Date: 05 April 2019
• Docket Number: Case No. 2D15-4968
• Citation: 269 So.3d 599
• Parties: Joseph LEHMANN and Therese Lehmann, Appellants, v. COCOANUT BAYOU ASSOCIATION, INC., Appellee.
• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals

269 So.3d 599

Joseph LEHMANN and Therese Lehmann, Appellants,

v.COCOANUT BAYOU ASSOCIATION, INC., Appellee.

Case No. 2D15-4968

District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District.

Opinion filed April 5, 2019

David A. Wallace of Bentley & Bruning, P.A., Sarasota, and M. Lewis Hall, III, of Williams Parker Harrison Dietz & Getzen, Sarasota, for Appellants.

Stephen Henry Kurvin of Sarasota, for Appellee.

SALARIO, Judge.

This is one mess of a dispute over title to real property. It involves a parcel of land on Siesta Key in Sarasota County, various portions of which were conveyed in more than one deed to more than one person over the span of decades. Many of the property descriptions in those deeds include boundaries defined by streets that no longer exist and that have changed names. Much of the land that once defined the boundaries of the property has been swallowed up by the Gulf of Mexico. There is no simple, reliable drawing in our record that clearly explains to the layman what the parcel looks like in relation to its surroundings. The applicable law has changed over time. Getting to the bottom of the case has been a bit like untangling spaghetti.

The bottom line is this. At our direction after a previous appeal, see Lehmann v. Cocoanut Bayou Ass'n, 157 So.3d 289 (Fla. 2d DCA 2014), the trial court conducted proceedings to determine ownership of the disputed parcel of land.¹ It divided the parcel into three parts and settled title with Joseph and Therese Lehmann for two of those parts and Cocoanut Bayou Association for one. The Association has not challenged that part of the trial court's final judgment that found in favor of the Lehmanns—perhaps because the parts of the disputed parcel they were found to own now lie largely underneath the Gulf—and we affirm the judgment to that extent. We conclude, however, that the Lehmanns also own the third part of the parcel because they or their predecessors in title owned the property extending to the centerlines of the roads that used to be there, either because they always had title to that property by virtue of having had title to the lots abutting those roads or because they had a reversionary interest in the land underneath the roads that vested when the roads were vacated by Sarasota County. We reverse the trial court's order to the extent it awarded part of the parcel to the Association and remand with directions to quiet title to all of the disputed parcel in favor of the Lehmanns.

The Disputed Parcel

The disputed parcel lies in what was originally known as the Siesta subdivision and is now called the Cocoanut Bayou subdivision. Today, it is a narrow strip of land that is at its widest point twelve and one-half feet wide and eighty-six feet long.

Based on a 1912 revised plat for the Siesta subdivision, the parcel would have been bordered on the east by the western edge of a short, east-west road called Bee Street that ended at the eastern edge of a north-south road called Gulf Avenue. The parcel's twelve-and-one-half-foot width would have been bounded to the north by the extended center point of Bee Street and to the south by an extension of Bee Street's southern boundary and the northern boundary of Lot 10 of Block 60 of the subdivision. It would have extended westward from Bee Street at Block 60 to the shores of Bayou Louise. On the western side of Bayou Louise were additional platted lots and, on the other side of those, the Gulf of Mexico. As shown in the 1912 revised plat, the disputed parcel and its surrounding land looked like this (with the approximate disputed parcel circled in the area to the west of Bee Street):²

The subdivision was partially replatted in 1944. For reasons that are not clear from our record, the area called Gulf Avenue a/k/a Shell Road in the 1912 revised plat is named only Shell Road in the replat.³ By the time of the replat, the Gulf had overtaken the lots that once existed on the western side of Bayou Louise, and much of the bayou had become dry land susceptible to being conveyed. On the western side of Shell Road there was a small area of dry land and then the Gulf. Circumstances remain much the same today except that Sarasota County vacated Bee Street in 1949 and Gulf Avenue in 1983. Whatever right or title the County had in those lands is gone, and Bee Street and Gulf Avenue no longer exist as roads. Also, virtually all of the dry land west of what was Gulf Avenue has been swallowed up by the Gulf.

With this understanding of the nature of the disputed parcel behind us, we now turn to the competing claims of ownership to that parcel.

The Competing Chains of Title

Understanding the competing claims of ownership to the disputed parcel requires understanding the recorded deeds purporting to convey title to that land. The beginning of the story for our purposes is that all of the property in the Siesta subdivision was originally owned by E.S. and Helen Boyd, with one exception. The exception is Lots 10 and 11 of Block 60—recall that Lot 10 abuts what was Bee Street on its south side and what was Gulf Avenue on its east side—which were originally owned by Kathleen Ingalls.

In 1945, Ms. Ingalls conveyed title to Lots 10 and 11 to James and Alice Thomas. In 1946, the Boyds conveyed title to Lots 9, 12, 13, 14, and the north half of Lot 15 to the Thomases. The deed also conveyed title to land located to the west of Gulf Avenue described by metes and bounds. That metes and bounds description had its point of beginning at the centerline of Bee Street extended beyond the end of Bee Street to the west side of Gulf Avenue. The line was then extended west to the waters of the Gulf, south along the water's edge for a distance, then east to the western edge of Gulf Avenue, then north back to the point of beginning. That conveyance covered all of the property to the west of the part of the disputed parcel at issue in this appeal and looked—very roughly—something like this:

See also Lehmann, 157 So.3d at 290 (describing the property conveyed in the 1945 Ingalls-to-Thomas deed and the 1946 Boyd-to-Thomas deed).

In October 1949, Sarasota County executed a deed vacating Bee Street, thereby relinquishing any title or interest it had in the property. The parties have stipulated that the Association thereby obtained title to the north half of Bee Street, and the Thomases, as the owners of Lots 9 and 10, obtained title to the south half. As a result, the Thomases' property bordered Gulf Avenue on both the east and west sides from the centerline of Bee Street to the south as of 1949. In December 1949, the Thomases conveyed Lots 9, 12, 13, 14, the north half of Lot 15, and the property described by metes and bounds in the 1945 Ingalls-to-Thomas deed to Ms. Thomas individually. In a corrective deed in 1950, Mr. Thomas conveyed the property described in the October 1949 deed together with Lots 10 and 11, which had not been conveyed in the 1949 deed.

Now things are about to get more complex. In 1952, the Boyds deeded some property to the Association.⁴ That deed conveyed title to the south 100 feet of Block 59, which shared a boundary with what was once the northern boundary of Bee Street. And it also purported to convey title to land adjacent to the northern border of the property deeded to the Thomases by way of the Ingalls-to-Thomas deed. That land was described by metes and bounds. The point of beginning was the western edge of Higel Avenue—a street immediately east of Blocks 59 and 60—one hundred feet to the north of the centerline of Bee Street. From there, it went west to the Gulf, south to the southern side of an extended Bee Street, east back to the point where Bee Street had once ended at Gulf Avenue, north to the centerline of Bee Street, east to Higel Avenue, and then north to the point of beginning. That conveyance included much of the land titled in the Association to the north of the disputed parcel today, as well as the disputed parcel. It excluded all of what was once Bee Street's southern half that the Association has stipulated vested with the Thomases through the Ingalls chain of title in 1949. It looked something like this:

See also Lehmann, 157 So.3d at 290-91 (describing the property conveyed in the 1952 Boyd-to-Association deed).

To the extent it is not obvious, there is a problem here. The Boyd-to-Association deed also includes a chunk of land—everything that deed tried to convey west of Gulf Avenue—that the Boyds had expressly deeded to the Thomases back in 1946. In 1952, the Boyds no longer had title to that land. And to the extent the deed they gave the Association tried to convey it, it was a wild deed. See Lehmann, 157 So.3d at 293 (holding that the 1952 Boyd-to-Association deed was wild as to that portion of land). The Boyd-to-Association deed also purported to convey title to the area from the intersection of Bee Street and Gulf Avenue on the eastern edge of Gulf Avenue to the boundaries of the expressly-deeded Thomas land to the west of Gulf Avenue—land which comprises part of the disputed parcel. The land both to the west and to the east of Gulf Avenue south of the extended centerline of Bee Street was not owned by the Boyds when the 1952 conveyance purported to pass title to the land under Gulf Avenue south of the centerline of Bee Street to the Association.

There is still more. In 1964, Ms. Thomas deeded Lots 10, 11, 12, the north twelve and one-half feet of Lot 13, and the northerly eighty-seven and one-half feet of Lot 9 to her daughter, Alice Thomas Shannon. That deed also included property described in metes and bounds as the land between the westerly boundary of the conveyed lots bounded on the north by the westerly extension of the north line of Lot 10 to the Gulf and on the south by the westerly extension of the north line of the north one-half of Lot 13. That description includes land on what used to be Gulf Avenue that was not expressly conveyed by the 1946 Boyd-to-Thomas deed—Ms. Shannon's root of title —but that nonetheless...