Dec 10, 2019 4 min read

Robinson Township officials spent at least tens of thousands of dollars in public money and more than a year on a legal dispute over the status of a few hundred feet of road that sits just on the other side of property that belongs to Supervisor Rodger Kendall’s neighbors.

Their trouble was for naught. In a four-page ruling on Dec. 3, Washington County President Judge Katherine Emery ruled that Rita Drive – a dead-end street off Candor Road with only a few houses near it – was a public road.

But in doing so, Emery refused to grant that designation to a path extending at the end of the paved section across land belonging to husband and wife Russell and Karen Dysert, which would have essentially made a public right-of-way that extended to Kendall’s land.

Kendall, whose property is on Valley View Road, said in a recent interview that the case – which pitted the township against the Dyserts and two neighboring couples, Lori and Michael Macklin and Jayne and Joseph Klick – wasn’t about creating a separate entrance onto his property.

Similarly, township solicitor Gretchen Moore said the proximity of the area at issue in the case to Kendall’s land “is not the focus.”

“Mr. Kendall has other access to his property,” said Moore, a shareholder at Strassburger, McKenna, Gutnick & Gefsky in Pittsburgh, following the trial.

“This is a case about history,” she added. “That’s all this case is about.”

The history lesson wasn’t cheap. Responses from the township to open-records requests show that just by the end of June – with months of work left before the trial would be held – the township’s lawyers had billed it for a total of $37,800 in attorney fees and other legal costs of the case and a separate but related one that the three couples brought against the township in August last year.

In the counterattack, the Rita neighbors argued that the township’s efforts to have what they said was their private street declared public amounted to a “de facto taking” of some of their property. They asked that a board of viewers be appointed to award them compensation.

Robinson appealed to the Commonwealth Court in March, after the residents prevailed before county Senior Judge Daniel Howsare.

Emery wrote that she assumes that case will be withdrawn in light of the position that the landowners took in trial months later, when they reversed their previous stance and agreed that Rita was public.

Kendall, a Democrat who in November lost a re-election bid to Republican Christopher Amodeo, didn’t testify during the trial. The question of his possible personal stake in the matter wasn’t part of the trial evidence.

Instead, the case that the township filed in April 2018 to seek a declaratory judgment dealt with question of whether or not Rita – named for a deceased resident – met the legal criteria of a public road. Testimony showed that township employees had plowed and done other work to maintain the lane, which is about 15 feet long, for at least 21 years.

Emery wrote in her decision that “other members of the public also utilized the road, such as utility workers, delivery drivers or the occasional onlooker or lost driver.”

Up until the trial, Dwight Ferguson, the Sewickley attorney who represented the nearby landowners, argued that the quiet street was akin to a “driveway” rather than a public road.

But at the start of the trial, he said that his clients were no longer contesting whether or not the paved street was public. But he maintained that the public section ended at the edge of the Dyserts’ property.

Emery agreed.

“The court finds that the pathway has not been used by the public, not has it been maintained and repaired by the township,” she wrote.

Ferguson and Moore didn’t immediately answer requests for comment on Monday.