A twisty road to justice: Attorneys nearing end of lengthy Map Act case.

Byline: Bill Cresenzo

It's been a long and winding road for the North Carolina attorneys representing hundreds of property owners left in limbo after the state reserved their properties for future highway improvements.

Now, clients of Neil Yarborough of Yarborough, Winters & Neville in Fayetteville and Matthew Bryant and Paul Hendrick of Hendrick, Bryant, Nerhood, Sanders & Otis in Winston-Salem are finally getting paid for the land that the state had earmarked for highway projects, some of them after decades of waiting.

"We are making good progress, and the landowners owners are finally able to get on with their lives," Bryant said.

The Map Act, enacted in 1987, allowed the state to reserve private property for future road projects, such as the Fayetteville Outer Loop and the Winston-Salem Western Loop. But in 2016 the state's Supreme Court ruled that the Map Act was illegal because the landowners weren't being properly compensated, or even paid at all.

"The Map Act restricted plaintiffs' fundamental rights to improve, develop, and subdivide their property for an unlimited period of time," Justice Paul Newby wrote in the unanimous opinion. "These restraints, coupled with their indefinite nature, constitute a taking of plaintiffs' elemental property rights by eminent domain."

The General Assembly repealed the Map Act in June. Now, landowners are getting their just compensation as the Department of Transportation has begun sending out payments to landowners.

"These are farmers, homeowners, heirs to family property, developers, business owners, and even lawyers," Yarborough said. "They were intimately involved in the settlement process and therefore were willing to resolve their claims for the agreed-upon compensation."

Since early 2017, more than 359 of 619 cases against the DOT have been settled at a cost of $163 million, according to a July Joint Legislative Transportation Oversight Committee report. More than 1,700 parcels had already been purchased by the department, at a cost of $277.45 million, and the DOT has also paid $123 million to acquire 1,000 parcels that were not in litigation. The DOT has paid contracted legal counsel $11,338,844 in relation to Map Act claims.

"The biggest challenge in securing settlements with DOT was forcing it to realize we had actionable claims and that it was in DOT's best interest to begin accepting the responsibility for compensation," Yarborough said. "Once that realization took hold at DOT, the...