Seventh Court Bars Riparian Landowners' Inverse Condemnation Claims on Statute of Limitations Grounds in Canadian River Reliction Dispute

The Amarillo Court of Appeals reversed a trial court judgment awarding damages to riparian landowners who alleged the State of Texas unconstitutionally took their oil and gas interests beneath a six-mile stretch of Canadian River riverbed exposed by reliction following the 1965 Sanford Dam construction. The court held that landowners could not aggregate their combined acreage to avoid the ten-year adverse possession statute of limitations applied by analogy to inverse condemnation claims, and that no individual landowner presented evidence of a taking exceeding 160 acres.