Fred McGUIRE and Mickey McGuire, Appellants (Contestees), Board of County Commissioners of Platte County, Wyoming…

Summary

The court held that a landowner whose property has no legally enforceable access to a convenient public road establishes statutory necessity as a matter of law, but must still describe the proposed private-road route with adequate specificity. Because the applicants failed to provide that description, the county commissioners properly dismissed the application without prejudice, although their contrary findings concerning necessity were unsupported. The court also held that the long-used BLM road qualified as a public road under the statute and that the district court could review, but not replace, the commissioners' original statutory decisionmaking. Justice Rooney, dissenting, would have required dismissal because the statutory condemnation procedure had been superseded by Rule 71.1.