Homeowners told their backyards are owned by canal company

PLEASANT GROVE, Utah (KUTV) — Marcell Bobo has owned her home, and the land around it, for nearly 20 years — or so she thought. The company which owns the canal behind her home says, actually, much of her backyard belongs to them.

“When I got home one day, I had someone marking ‘right of way’ all the way through my driveway,” she said.

Next door, Sheryl Flanary says the canal company is seizing several hundred square feet that she purchased. Flanary's property was exactly one acre, and she had plans to split it into two half-acre lots and sell them to a developer.

About a dozen of Bobo's and Flanary's neighbors have also been told they are losing land, including one family that built a barn on the land that the canal is now claiming.

These neighbors all have proof they were sold the land, and many have even been paying taxes on it.

Steve Cain with the Provo Rivers Waters-users’ Association says it’s not trying to steal anyone's land.

“We have a boundary-line conflict that is actually the result of very old transactions," he said.

Cain showed Get Gephardt how the property lines recorded down at the Utah County recorder’s office, indeed, overlap. Large swaths of land are recorded in both the name of the canal company, and the neighbors.

Cain says it’s the canal company’s land.

"They were sold land by someone who did not own it," he said.

This all raises an interesting question: If two different people say they own the same piece of land, who wins? The answer is, whoever had it first, according to attorney Gregory Schulz.

“Given what you've explained to me, the canal company is right," he said.

Schulz says that, here in the United States, these types of problems actually happen all the time because county recorders don't check to make sure somebody has the right to claim property. Recorders simply record what people tell them to record and then let the courts sort out discrepancies.

Schultz’ advice to the neighbors who, it seems, bought land they don't actually own, is to seek help from title insurance and, if the policy didn’t cover the backyard, track down the person who sold them the land.

"Your recourse is to get the money back from the person that you bought it from," he said.

Schulz also says anyone who pays taxes on land that isn’t theirs is due a refund, so the neighbors can look to Utah County for that.

It's not the news for which Bobo, Flanary and their neighbors had hoped, but some silver lining is that Cain says the canal company is holding special meetings to figure out ways to work with the neighbors and give them the option of buying the land back from them, if they so choose.