Photo illustrates past complex river movements. Today’s boundary position will depend on the area’s fluvial and title history. This image shows the same area as shown in the 1864 map. 8 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 47, No. 3 Featured Article continued Boundary control legal principles are fairly uniform nationwide, hence there are books by Skelton, Clark, Brown, Robillard, Wilson, and others that do a good job of stating and explaining them. Some legal principles are broadly applicable nationwide. The general riparian rules for erosion, accretion, and avulsion are examples and they are adequately covered by the authors listed above. Under the Equal Footing Doctrine, the federal government left most riparian issues to the states (while reserving federal interests). Because states can (and have) developed their own law and rules relative to water law and riparian boundaries, there are differences. Some riparian boundary issues are very state-specific. One doesn’t have to dig too deeply into riparian boundary subjects to find rules that are very different state-to-state: If a state owns the bed of a river that is navigable for title (not all states do), what is the title boundary between the state and the upland owner? If you said Ordinary High Water Line, you’d be correct for less than half the states. So, books by the authors listed above don’t delve too deeply into riparian boundaries . . . as they shouldn’t. Some Examples To illustrate how state-specific some riparian/littoral boundary issues can be, here are some questions or hypothetical situations. For your jurisdiction, state the applicable legal principle, along with any qualifying statements or explanations necessary. No answers are supplied with this quiz because there is not one answer that will be correct for all 50 states and federal lands. One or two will be close to the same nationwide, but even they will need a qualifying note or two. If you’ve not accomplished many surveys of riparian tracts, you may not have thought of or encountered some of these circumstances. All of these issues have been before the courts. It is likely these issues are settled for your state. (Perhaps not to the specificity desired by the Professional Surveyor, but the general principle can be stated.) 1. For a non-navigable stream, what line is the boundary between opposite landowners? Define, exactly, that line and how it is located. 2. Who owns the bed of a waterbody that is navigable for title? Is it the State in trust for the public? Is it the upland landowner but subject to an easement in the public for commerce and recreation? Or is it in some other entity? 3. Suppose the bed of a river is navigable for title and is owned by the State. Where is the boundary between the State and the upland owner? Define, exactly, that line and how is it located. 4. Who owns an island that forms in a navigable river? 5. On a navigable river that has barge and commercial traffic, for the states on opposite sides of the river, where is the state boundary? Define, exactly, that line, and how is it located. 6. Suppose a non-navigable lake is not meandered by the GLO and slowly goes dry. The littoral owners hire you to survey their lakebed ownership. First, do these upland littoral owners have any rights in the now dry lakebed? Describe how you proceed. 7. Suppose that post-avulsion on a navigable river, there’s a cutoff lake, formed from the abandoned channel. The cutoff lake partially fills in. Who owns the bed of this cutoff lake?
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