Tenure
Thirteen co-owners, joint tenants
Park Lake is held in common by the lot owners who surround it.
This page is a map of relationships, not a title opinion. Recorded instruments at the Pierce County Auditor govern. If a sentence here disagrees with a deed, the deed wins, and the archive should be corrected.
Co-owners
13
Tenure
Joint tenants
County
Pierce County
What joint tenancy means here
The thirteen co-owners hold Park Lake as joint tenants. In ordinary Washington title language, that is an undivided interest in the whole of the pond — not thirteen pie slices, and not a homeowners’ association board sitting on top of the water. Each owner’s rights run to the lake as a single thing.
Joint tenancy often includes a right of survivorship. Whether that is how a particular interest actually passes is a question for the recorded deed and for counsel, not for a website. What the owners can say plainly is this: decisions that change the pond — trapping, dredging, cutting a buffer, granting access, spending from a common purse — are decisions of the thirteen, not of whichever household lives closest to the west shore.
This site is the shared desk for those decisions: headlines when something should be on the record, documents when a paper should not live in one kitchen drawer, history when a memory should outlast a term of ownership.
What the lake is not
- It is not a City of Gig Harbor or PenMet park.
- It is not open to the public as a swim beach or boat launch.
- It is not a substitute for recorded easements, if any exist, across adjoining lots.
For the thirteen
Send a scan, a correction, or a notice to [email protected]. Put the year on the photograph. Put the recording number on the deed. The pond will outlast all of us; the file should be good enough to hand to the next owner.