A lawsuit filed against Oprah Winfrey’s Yellow Brick Road company has been dismissed in San Miguel County District Court.
Seventh Judicial District Judge Steven Patrick filed a dismissal on July 9 saying the case should be before the Mountain Village Municipal Court, not San Miguel County District Court. The dismissal says there is no mixed issue of state or national concern with the lawsuit and that there is little case law to support some of claims made in it, as well as other reasons. The lawsuit was originally filed in March by Charles D. Goodman who owns a Ski Ranches property contiguous to a 66-acre parcel Yellow Brick Road closed on in March.
In the lawsuit, Goodman’s lawyer, longtime Telluride attorney Robert Korn, said Goodman is being cut off from trails to which he is entitled access. The access is due to long-standing easement agreements, but the lawsuit also said proper noticing was not given when some of the trails were reclassified. The suit names Yellow Brick Road, the Town of Mountain Village and Hoyt and Carol Barnett, among others as defendants.
According to court documents, Goodman’s trail easements across portions of the property that Winfrey now owns date back to the late 1980s. At the time, the U.S. Forest Service owned all of Winfrey’s land, which meant trails cutting across it were open to the pubic. Goodman’s house has been there since the early 1970s and in 1989 he and a neighbor managed to establish trail easements with the Forest Service to preserve access to the land next to theirs.
Shortly after the easement deal, the Forest Service traded the land to the Telluride Ski Co. (now Telluride Ski & Golf Company) and in the 1990s it was incorporated into Mountain Village. Hoyt and Carol Barnett were the next to purchase the now-disputed property, and they had it subdivided.
According to court documents, Korn claimed the Barnetts asked for a “correction” on a plat of the property to eliminate several of the old trail easements. Korn said the administrative changes to the property were made shortly before Yellow Brick Road purchased the property and were done without proper public noticing. With the dismissal, Patrick agreed that proper noticing had not been given, but a 28-day limit to file complaints had passed when the lawsuit was filed.
