Who Owns the Stump Between Your Sidewalk and the Street in Madison

The strip is yours to mow and not always yours to dig

Almost every 1950s and 1960s street off Gallatin Pike was platted with a planting strip between the sidewalk and the kerb, and the houses on Amqui, Due West and the Neelys Bend grid all have one. Homeowners mow it, rake it and shovel it, so it reads as part of the yard. On paper it usually is not. That band of grass generally sits inside a public right-of-way that Metro holds, and the deed line stops at or near the back of the walk.

The practical consequence only shows up when a tree in that strip comes down. Grinding a stump means putting a cutting wheel into ground the property owner does not control, next to a kerb, and frequently within a few feet of the electric, gas and communications runs that were laid in the same corridor. That is a different conversation from the maple in the middle of your front lawn.

How to settle it in an afternoon

Two checks answer it. Pull your parcel on the Davidson County property viewer and look at where the boundary actually falls relative to the sidewalk. Then look at the survey plat if you have one from closing, because on these older sections the right-of-way width is written on the face of the plat and it is often wider than anybody assumes.

If the stump sits inside that band, the removal is Metro's call rather than yours, and the request goes to Public Works rather than to a contractor. If it sits behind the line, it is an ordinary job and we can quote it from a photo like any other.

We check this ourselves before quoting anything at the kerb. It takes a couple of minutes and it avoids the worst version of this, which is a homeowner paying for work on ground they did not own and then being asked to restore it.

Why the utility corridor makes it stricter, not looser

The strip is where everything runs. On the older Madison sections the electric drop, the gas service and whatever generation of communications cable came through last all share that few feet, and the depths are inconsistent because they were installed decades apart. A Tennessee 811 ticket marks the public lines and takes three working days, and we file it on every job rather than treating it as optional.

What 811 does not mark is anything private, and the strip collects those too: an irrigation zone somebody ran under the walk, low-voltage lighting, a sleeve to a lamp post. Those are on the homeowner to point out, and in a strip nobody has dug in for forty years that memory is frequently gone.

What we do when the answer is no

We tell you, and we tell you before there is an invoice attached to it. If a strip stump is Metro's, the useful thing we can offer is the rest of the yard: the stump behind the walk that has been mowed around for three years, the sucker growth off an old root run, the second stump out back nobody mentioned on the phone.

Where a street has several strip stumps of the same vintage, and they usually do because the whole block was planted in one season, it is worth neighbours raising it together. One report about six stumps on one street carries further than six separate ones.