1. A. Except as otherwise provided in the Land Use Easement Act, a land use easement may be created, conveyed, recorded, assigned, released, modified, terminated or otherwise altered or affected in the same manner as any other easement.
2. B. A land use easement is not effective and creates no rights or obligations until it is recorded in the office of the county clerk of the county or counties in which any part of the real property subject to the land use easement is located.
3. C. No right or duty in favor of or against a holder and no right in favor of a person having a third-party enforcement right arises under a land use easement prior to its acceptance by that holder and recordation of that acceptance in the office of the county clerk of the county where the real property subject to a land use easement is located, in whole or in part.
4. D. Except as provided in Subsection B of Section 4 [47-12-4 NMSA 1978] of the Land Use Easement Act, the term of a land use easement shall be the term stated in the easement.
5. E. No land use easement may impair an interest in real property existing at the time the land use easement is created, unless the owner of that interest is a party to the land use easement and consents to it.
6. F. The rights, obligations and duties created by a land use easement shall only be enforceable upon and impact the land located within that easement.

History: Laws 1991, ch. 15, § 3.

ANNOTATIONS

Prescriptive extinguishment of easements. — An easement will be prescriptively extinguished if the servient owner's use of the area is adverse to the easement owner's rights in the easement, open or notorious, and continuous without effective interruption for the prescriptive period of ten years. The level of adversity must amount to an unreasonable interference such that the easement owner is on notice that the easement is under threat, and the extinguishment resulting from the servient owner's adverse use may be complete, or partial, based on the extent it interferes with the easement holder's rights. Mimbres Hot Springs Ranch v. Vargas, 2023-NMCA-046, cert. denied.

Defendants' conduct failed to satisfy the adversity element for extinguishment by prescription. — Where, in 1981, a third party who owned property abutting plaintiff's property, granted plaintiff an express easement, consisting of an old road that allowed plaintiff to access its property without needing to cross a creek that tends to flood during monsoon season, and where, in 1993, defendants purchased the property from the third party, subject to plaintiff's easement, and where defendants replaced an existing wire gate with a metal tube gate across the easement, which has remained locked since it was first installed in 1993, and where, despite the locked gate, plaintiff's individual members have used the easement for walking, hiking, and occasionally surveying the property by going around the gate, and where, in 2015, plaintiff asked defendants to remove the gate so that plaintiff could improve the easement into a road that could be driven on more easily, and where defendants denied plaintiff's request, claiming that the easement was not valid due to non-use, and where plaintiff filed a complaint, seeking to quiet title to the easement along with an order enjoining defendants from blocking it, and where defendants counterclaimed seeking to quiet title in their favor, alleging the easement had either been abandoned or prescriptively extinguished, the district court did not err in granting plaintiff's motion for summary judgment, because defendants' act of placing a locked gate over the easement was not sufficiently adverse so as to unreasonably interfere with plaintiff's enjoyment of the easement and did not put plaintiff on notice that its rights in the easement were under threat. Mimbres Hot Springs Ranch v. Vargas, 2023-NMCA-046, cert. denied.