MOUNT VERNON — Lifelong county resident and businessman Robert A. Griffith is angry about the county’s threat to remove gates from his property at 7860 Columbus Road. The gates have allegedly blocked access to the Heart of Ohio Trail on more than one occasion.
In a statement drafted Thursday by the Knox County Commissioners, Griffith was to be informed that the county would be removing the gates in 10 days because of his lack of compliance with an agreement to have them closed no more than five minutes at a time. The gates allow Griffith to temporarily block the trail in order to move his horse from one parcel of land to another.
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But Griffith’s dispute with the county goes back much further. After the railroad vacated the line which now serves as the Heart of Ohio Trail, it entered into a legal limbo. Many property owners, including Griffith, purchased lands including the abandoned railroad grade, believing they would have full and clear deed to the land. Griffith purchased the property in question at auction in 1985. This was a secondary property for Griffith, whose main residence is on Gambier Road, just outside of Mount Vernon.
According to Griffith, the grade was seized by the county for the bike trail under eminent domain, splitting up his property without paying him for the land taken, nor for the inconvenience. Griffith said the only cash he has seen related to this transaction was a reimbursement of a little over $3 for property taxes paid on the narrow strip of land over the previous five years. Although taxes have been paid by landowners on the property for the last 130 years, statutes of limitation restrict government reimbursements to a period of no more than five years.
Griffith said he is not impressed that the county spent $20,000 to install the gates and related fencing.
“What about the $20,000 I spent bulldozing, cutting, topsoiling, seeding and maintaining that land for 20 years?” he asked, adding that he kept up maintenance on the original railroad bridges, too.
Moreover, he said, it was ridiculous if the county spent that much on the gates and fencing. Griffith said he would gladly have done it for half that, which would still have allowed for a huge profit, even if he subcontracted out the work. He also said the gates were incorrectly installed and have not been maintained since then.
One of the cruxes of the county’s argument is that Griffith has left the gates open, thus closing the trail, for more than five minutes at a time. Griffith said he only knows of one occasion, late in the evening, when the weather was cold and snowy, in which he left the gates blocking the trail, figuring no one would be through at night and he could move them in the morning. The following morning, Griffith said, he found ice and snow had frozen one of the gates in place.
“If they could open that sucker better than I could, they’re welcome to it,” Griffith said. He said that in response to the article in Friday’s News, he paid someone $20 to use a spud bar to chip the gate free of the ice and ice-swollen ground so that it could be shut. He also denies that the gates have ever been padlocked shut.
He said there is indeed a chain with a lock hanging on one of the gates, but that the padlock is never locked. What’s more, he said, if a maintenance worker came through on the path and discovered the gates frozen shut, why didn’t he chip them out so that they could be closed? Griffith said the other end of his agreement to keep the gates closed is that the county agreed to make them operable.
Griffith is skeptical that there could be many complaints, maintaining that in visiting the property twice daily for work since the trail officially opened in September, he has seen only one walker and two visits by a snowmobile, a vehicle prohibited on the trail. He said the snowmobile went around the gates and across his private property, as well as the property of other landowners. He added that he was able to trace the tracks all the way back to Mount Vernon, but lost them inside the city.
Griffith also said that such trouble-making and law-breaking have become common aggravations since the trail was installed. He said he relies on reports from his neighbors to keep track of comings and goings.
“I know everything that goes on down there,” he said.
Griffith said the previous struggling with the county caused him to have a heart attack, and that his doctor has advised him to get rid of the property because of the aggravation.
“I bought that place to retire on, but that’s out of the question, now,” Griffith said, adding that at this point, his only hope is to sell it. He doesn’t have anywhere else he can house the horse.
“I guess I’m going to have to send that horse to the killers in Sugarcreek to suit [the county],” Griffith said, referring to the horse auction house in Sugarcreek where unwanted horses are auctioned off to buyers who transport the horses across the U.S. border to be slaughtered for meat consumption overseas. The horse is a registered, show-quality quarter horse, according to Griffith.
Asked about the viability of dredging the underpass beneath the old railroad bed, as the commissioners suggested as an alternate route, Griffith said the commissioners are forgetting that a D-80 gas line runs through the underpass, thus preventing any digging without an expensive line relocation.
Griffith said he hasn’t been treated fairly by county officials through the whole process.
“They should work as hard as I worked to make the money to buy that place,” he said.
