HARRISBURG, Pa. — A state appeals court ruled on Tuesday that a Montgomery County woman can sue the state for accidentally condemning a piece of her home during a highway expansion project, overturning a lower court decision that had blocked her case.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of homeowner Margaret L. Burns, who discovered that a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) project to widen County Line Road swallowed up part of her concrete porch and front steps. The court sent the case back to the local trial court to determine the exact extent and duration of the property damage.
The legal battle stems from an August 2019 declaration of taking filed by PennDOT, which sought to acquire 0.114 acres of Burns’s 7.84-acre property in Horsham, Pennsylvania. PennDOT’s official plot plans specifically designated her house as a “masonry dwelling” and featured a cutout designed to exclude the structure from the expanded state right-of-way.
However, when Burns hired an independent surveyor in May 2024 to map out the state’s recorded plans, the survey revealed that the new state boundary line actually cut directly through her front porch and steps. Armed with this information, Burns filed a petition in January 2025 seeking just compensation for both the listed land theft and the unlisted damage to her house.
PennDOT moved to throw out the home-damage claims, arguing that Burns had missed the strict 30-day window to object to the 2019 filing. A Montgomery County Common Pleas Court judge agreed with the state in April 2025, ruling that any economic damage to the house was already covered under the broader land-taking claim.
Senior Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt rejected PennDOT’s timeline defense, stating that a regular property owner should not have to hire an expensive surveyor just to double-check if state blueprints are lying to them.
“The only reasonable way to read the Plot Plan is that it placed the porch within the rectangular footprint of the dwelling,” Leavitt wrote in the court’s majority opinion. “The porch was not a mere ‘detail,’ and its omission from the Plot Plan understated the actual contours of PennDOT’s taking and was misleading.”
The appellate court relied on a prior Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent establishing that when a government agency files inaccurate blueprints that understate a taking, it counts as a de facto condemnation—meaning the state took property without officially declaring it. Under state law, landowners are not bound by the standard 30-day waiver deadline if the original government plans were fundamentally misleading.
While the lawsuit wound through the appeals system, PennDOT quietly obtained permission from the trial court in September 2025 to amend its original plans. The state scaled back its permanent land acquisition to 0.044 acres and reclassified the remaining 0.070 acres as a temporary construction easement, effectively returning legal ownership of the porch to Burns.
PennDOT argued this change made the dispute irrelevant, but the court ruled that a Board of Viewers must still calculate separate damages for both the formal land taking and the period when the state held title to a portion of the house.
The state also contested whether a de facto taking could even be claimed, noting that Burns was still able to live in her house throughout the project. The court dismissed this defense, pointing out that Burns’s petition explicitly stated PennDOT’s technical ownership of her porch left her unable to complete necessary structural repairs.
The Commonwealth Court also shot down a procedural complaint from Burns, who argued her due process rights were violated when the local trial court ruled on PennDOT’s objections without hosting oral arguments or requesting legal briefs. Leavitt clarified that because the facts of the survey and the blueprints were already agreed upon, the issue was strictly a matter of law, which judges are permitted to decide without a formal hearing.
The split process will now return to Montgomery County, where the trial court must officially catalog the physical boundaries of the state’s intrusion before a Board of Viewers can calculate the financial compensation owed to the homeowner.
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