Residents on Chestnut Street have recently been awakened by the sound of chainsaws and skidders to a harsh reality: That land behind their house that they’ve been paying taxes on for nearly a decade isn’t really theirs. It now belongs to a housing developer.

Why?

Well, the city says that’s complicated.

The problem dates back to 1987, when the Legislature passed a law saying that communities had 10 years to either accept paper streets as streets by paving them or vacate its right to them.

Paper streets are streets that have been approved but never paved. They exist on paper only.

When that 10 years lapsed and the city had done nothing about them, it ceded the rights back to abutting land owners and began taxing them on it – apparently in error.

“By law, the public interest splits down the middle and reverts back to the landowners,” said City Administrator Jerre Bryant. “That doesn’t mean ownership of the land does.”

Say what?

Bryant wasn’t kidding when he added, “It can become a fairly complicated legal issue.”

What’s left a sour taste in the mouths of some residents, however, is that they’ve mistakenly been taxed on land they didn’t own. And, worse, Chestnut Street residents learned about the mistake when construction crews came through to clear the land.

When they called city hall to find out what was going on, the city told them the land wasn’t theirs after all. That’s left residents with the perception that the city is siding with housing developers over tax paying residents.

Unfortunately, for Chestnut Street residents, it may be too late for the city to do anything other than refund the back taxes with an apology. Some of these landowners, however, would no doubt rather the land be left untouched than get a small check from the city for the back taxes they paid.

To that end, perhaps the city can give these residents some legal advice – en masse – being that it was the city that made the mistake 10 years ago.

The whole situation certainly leaves us with a lot of questions. If developers continued to maintain rights to the streets after 1997, what was the point of the 1987 law?

And, shouldn’t residents have some claim to the land, anyway? They, after all, paid taxes on it for nearly a decade, even if it was in error. Some of these housing developments that created the paper streets were likely approved decades ago, if not as far back as the early 20th century.

If housing developers continued to maintain rights to the streets, shouldn’t they have been paying taxes on them? And, shouldn’t they now be the ones to refund these taxpayers?

Or, are the 1987 law and the back taxes – unlike these streets – not worth the paper they’re printed on?

Brendan Moran, editor