Case study · Contested work
Two sites where the straightforward path was already gone.
Most sites are carried by doing the ordinary work in the right order. These two were not. One had been written off as unleasable by everyone who looked at it. The other had a national tower company’s outside counsel sitting in the room to argue against it.
- 80Acre parcel made unleasable
- 15Feet the easement was said to cover
- 1Border the fix had to cross
- 1Tower permitted and built
One
The parcel everyone had written off.
A rural build on the FirstNet public-safety network. The search ring had a workable parcel in it, and the file said the parcel was dead.
What had happened was this. A Canadian wind energy developer had approached the landowner and told him its easement would cover fifteen feet on either side of its trunk line. That is a normal, narrow utility corridor and the landowner agreed to it. What the developer then recorded was a blanket easement across the entire eighty acres.
A blanket easement does not describe a corridor. It encumbers the whole parcel, which means the owner cannot give anyone else a clean interest in any part of it. The landowner did not know. He found out when someone tried to lease from him.
The obvious move was to move the search ring. Every prior review had reached that conclusion, which is why the site was sitting in the file marked unleasable. Moving the ring is cheap for whoever is holding the pen and expensive for the program, because the next parcel is worse, or further, or has its own problem.
The reason nobody had tried the other path is that the developer was Canadian. That is not a detail, it is most of the difficulty. A counterparty in another country sits outside every ordinary source of pressure in this work. There is no shared local counsel, no title company both sides already use, no county recorder either party has a relationship with, and no practical prospect of the landowner pursuing it in a foreign forum over an easement. Nothing obliged them to answer the phone, and both they and everyone reviewing the file knew it.
So the only available lever was showing them, patiently and repeatedly, that what had been recorded did not match what their own representative had agreed to. That is a slower conversation than a demand letter, and it is the reason the site had been given up on rather than worked.
What I did instead
- Read the recorded instrument, not the summary of it. The gap between what the landowner was told and what was filed was in the document, available to anyone who pulled it.
- Established that the recorded scope exceeded the agreement. Which made this a correctable error rather than a negotiation for something the developer had bargained for.
- Took it to a company in another country, with no leverage available. No shared counsel, no local relationship, no realistic enforcement path across the border. Persuasion and persistence were the entire toolkit.
- Got the easement re-surveyed and the agreement amended down to its actual footprint, which is what both parties had understood they were signing.
Title cleared. Ground lease secured. The tower was permitted and built. The landowner also got back the use of the other seventy-nine acres, which was never mine to negotiate for and was the right outcome anyway.
Two things made this work, and only one of them is transferable. The problem was visible in a recorded document to anyone who pulled it, which is the part worth generalising: sites get abandoned because reading the instrument is slower than moving the ring. The other part was staying with a cross-border conversation, for as long as it took, with a party that could have stopped returning calls at any point. That is not a method. It is just what the site cost.
Two
The application they sent a lawyer to stop.
A competing permit application in Illinois. A national tower company learned it was being filed and retained outside counsel to appear and argue against it.
That changes the room. An objector with counsel is not there to raise a concern; they are there to build a record, and the body knows it. The usual failure at that point is to arrive with a vendor’s presentation against a lawyer’s argument.
Every hearing material was built in house. The deck, the exhibits, and the supporting findings, prepared against the standards the body was actually required to apply rather than against the objection I expected. That is the only durable answer to opposing counsel: not out-arguing them, but handing the decision makers a filing that already satisfies each finding they have to make.
The application was approved over the objection. I do not hold a law degree.
What they have in common
Both were decided by the document, not the meeting.
One was resolved by reading a recorded easement carefully enough to see that it did not match the agreement behind it. The other was resolved by writing an application against the findings the body was required to make. Neither turned on being persuasive in a room.
That is the whole argument for doing the jurisdictional and land-records work before anyone commits capital. The sites that get abandoned are usually not impossible. They are unread.
The method
- Source of truth. The recorded instrument and the controlling ordinance, pulled and read, rather than the file note summarising them.
- Structured operating data. The gap between agreement and recording, and each required finding matched to its evidence.
- Workflows and controls. A review that is allowed to reach a different conclusion than the last one, which is how an abandoned site gets recovered at all.
- Tested and handed off. Title cleared, lease secured, permit approved, tower built.
What is not claimed
Where the numbers stop.
The eighty acres and the fifteen feet are the figures from the instrument and the agreement. I have not stated how long either matter took, because I did not record it and I am not going to estimate it next to numbers that are exact.
The opposing tower company and the wind developer are not named. Neither is the carrier on the second site. The parcels and the jurisdictions are not identified.
Read next
Where this record comes from.
The hearing record describes all three denials in twelve years, rather than counting them.
The land and entitlement practice is the twelve years these two sites came out of.
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