Pettee v. Young

• Decision Date: 09 November 2001
• Citation: 2001 ME 156,783 A.2d 637
• Parties: Maynard L. PETTEE v. Louine YOUNG.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

783 A.2d 637

2001 ME 156

Maynard L. PETTEE v. Louine YOUNG.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Submitted on Briefs: October 2, 2001.

Decided: November 9, 2001.

Sandra Hylander Collier, Catherine L. Haynes, Ellsworth, for plaintiffs.

Terence M. Harrigan, Rosalind S. Prince, Vafiades, Brountas & Kominsky, LLP, Bangor, for defendant.

Panel: RUDMAN, DANA, SAUFLEY, ALEXANDER, and CALKINS, JJ.

RUDMAN, J.

[¶ 1] Maynard Pettee appeals from a judgment entered in the Superior Court (Hancock County, Hjelm, J.), affirming a judgment of the District Court (Bar Harbor, Gunther, J.) in Pettee's action against Young.¹ The District Court found the deed from Young to Pettee to be ambiguous. We disagree and vacate the judgment in part.

I.

[¶ 2] Young and Pettee own adjoining properties in the Seal Harbor Village section of the town of Mt. Desert. Pettee has two buildings on his property. One is a finished cottage with full utilities and the other is an unfinished "carpenter's shop" without utilities. The first cottage has a sewer line that traveled through Young's property (including through the basement of her residence) to the main sewer line on Jordan Pond Road. The easement was not of record, but was undisputed.

[¶ 3] Pettee regularly rented the first cottage during the summer months, and periodically stayed there himself. He decided to renovate the carpenter's shop and add utilities so that he could begin renting it. The applicable zoning ordinance did not allow more than one residential building on the property, but it would allow a single building with more than one residential unit.² Pettee sought to solve his problem by building a "connector" between the cottage and the outbuilding so that they would be one building with two units. In order to obtain a permit to rent the building, however, Pettee still needed to install a new sewer line from the carpenter's shop to the main street. Accordingly, Pettee had his attorney draft an easement deed, which provided, in pertinent part:

Be it known by these men present, that We, Ralph Young and Louine Young ... for One Dollar and other valuable consideration, do grant to Maynard L. Pettee and Karen K. Pettee (The Pettees) ... as joint tenants, their heirs and assigns, an easement across our land on the easterly side of the Jordan Pond Road at Seal Harbor in the Town of Mount Desert, County of Hancock and State of Maine (Our land) for the purposes of i) extending overhead lines of lines of [sic] communication and electricity across Our Land from land owned by The Pettees easterly of Our Land to the public utility lines in the Jordan Pond Road and ii) laying and maintaining underground lines of sewer pipe across Our Land from land owned by The Pettees to the public sewer in the Jordan Pond Road.

The easement hereby granted is to confirm a prior easement which we granted The Pettees and to grant to The Pettees, their heirs and assigns, the right to make such adjustments and additions to the location of the overhead lines and underground pipes as they deem necessary to properly serve the land owned by The Pettees.

The Pettees, for themselves, their heirs and assigns, agree that, upon completion of and laying or maintaining of the underground line or lines which may have disturbed the surface of the earth, they will restore the grade of the earth to that which it was prior to the work undertaken.

The deed as proposed was signed by Young³ and delivered to Pettee.⁴

[¶ 4] Pettee began renovating the carpenter's shop in the summer of 1996. Young became aware that he was renovating the shop in 1997. She became concerned about and agitated with the traffic that the construction project was creating. Young first took the matter to the Town's Zoning Board, which sided with Pettee. Young appealed that decision to the Superior Court, which affirmed the Zoning Board's decision in April 1998.

[¶ 5] In May 1998 Pettee informed Young that he was going to install the new sewer pipe through her property. Young contacted her son, Nathan Young, who was the chief of the nearby Bar Harbor Police Department, and asked him to call the Mount Desert Police Department. Nathan called Sergeant Arthur Lawrence, and Lawrence paid Pettee a visit as a result. Lawrence reported that Pettee was cooperative, and as a result of the visit from Lawrence, Pettee ceased all construction activities. After a final unsuccessful attempt to persuade Young to voluntarily allow him to install the sewer line, he instituted this litigation.

[¶ 6] The District Court found the easement deed to be ambiguous and accordingly considered extrinsic evidence of the parties' intent. The court concluded that Young had intended only to confirm the already-existing rights of the Pettees, not to give them new rights to lay additional pipes or relocate the present pipe. The court interpreted the language in the deed that referred to the laying of new pipes to allow Pettee to do what was necessary to repair or replace the pipe if it failed or needed to be replaced for some other compelling reason. Thus, the District Court entered a declaratory judgment that the deed described an easement over the present course of the sewer line and forbade Pettee from moving or expanding the line unless relocation was the only solution for some failure in the line, and also entered judgment in favor of Young on slander of title and punitive damages counts.

[¶ 7] Pettee filed an appeal with the Superior Court, which affirmed the District Court's decisions on all three counts. We affirm in part and vacate in part.

II.

[¶ 8] The construction of a deed is a question of law that we review de novo. Bennett v. Tracy, 1999 ME 165, ¶ 7, 740 A.2d 571, 573. A court construing the language in a deed must give the words their "general and ordinary" meaning, Rhoda v. Fitzpatrick, 655 A.2d 357, 360 (Me.1995), and must first attempt to construe the language of the deed by looking only within the "four corners" of the instrument. Rancourt v. Town of Glenburn, 635 A.2d 964, 965 (Me.1993). If the language of the deed is unambiguous, then the court must construe the deed without considering extrinsic evidence of the intent of the parties. Id. If the deed is ambiguous, then the court may admit extrinsic evidence of the parties' intent. Northern Utils., Inc. v. City of S. Portland, 536 A.2d 1116, 1117 (Me.1988).

[¶ 9] The District Court concluded that the deed language was ambiguous for three reasons: (1) there was tension between the language indicating that the deed "confirm[ed] a prior easement" and the language in the same sentence that granted Pettee new rights, (2) the location of the easement was not stated with particularity, and (3) the phrase "adjustments and additions" was modestly worded. The reasoning of the District Court is unpersuasive and does not survive a careful parsing of the language of the deed.

[¶ 10] Although the District Court did not err in determining that the deed in question confirms the existing easement, we conclude that the deed also grants additional rights. Specifically, the sentence at issue does two separate and distinct things, and there is no conceptual problem with what it does or grammatical problems with how it does it. Indeed, the word "and" suggests that what comes before it and after will be different things, and that the clause that comes after it will do something in addition to confirming the prior easement. Thus, there is no tension between the two phrases, and their presence supports Pettee's broad construction of the deed.

[¶ 11] The second reason that the District Court concluded that the easement was ambiguous was that the deed did not establish with specificity the scope of the rights granted or the geographic location of the easement. Pettee counters that the language of the deed unambiguously grants him the right to lay pipes anywhere on Young's property that he deems necessary to properly serve his own.

[¶ 12] The plain language might at first support Pettee's reading of the deed, but we have been reluctant to construe a clause in a deed as unambiguously granting an unrestricted right merely because there is no express limitation on that right. See Anchors v. Manter, 1998 ME 152, ¶ 16, 714 A.2d 134, 139 (discussed in detail, infra); Fine Line v. Blake, 677 A.2d 1061, 1064 (1996) (discussed in detail, infra). We have even found language describing the scope of an easement to be ambiguous when the deed expressly stated that the easement was granted "for all purposes." Saltonstall v. Cumming, 538 A.2d 289, 290-91 (Me.1988). Nevertheless, a careful reading of our decisions shows that we have always required some reason to suppose that the absence of limiting language does not connote the absence of limits.

[¶ 13] For example, in Fine Line, 677 A.2d at 1065, we held that a deed was ambiguous as to the purpose of the easement granted when the deed said nothing about permissible purposes. The easement in Fine Line described the geographic extent of the easement in detail, but did not state or limit the purpose of the easement. Id. at 1063. Because the deed did not contain an express limitation on the purposes for which the easement could be used, the trial court concluded that the easement unambiguously granted an unrestricted right of way. Id. We vacated the decision of the trial court, concluding that the absence of a clause indicating the purpose of the easement did not mean that the easement was unrestricted. Id. at 1064-65. Rather, it was an ambiguity that warranted consideration of extrinsic evidence. Id. at 1065. We reached this conclusion because the original deed had granted an easement that allowed access to a wooded lot at a time when there were no plans for — and the parties could not reasonably have been expected to foresee — the development of a multi-unit subdivision. See id. at 1064-65.

[¶ 14] We also held that the absence of a clause restricting the scope of an otherwise unrestricted right...