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easement by prescription may be established "where original entry upon lands of another is under oral agreement or express consent of servient owner and party claiming easement expends substantial money or labor to promote the claimed use in reliance upon consent or as a consideration for the agreement." Id. Murrane v. Clarke County, 440 N.W.2d 613, 615 (Iowa App.,1989).

In the case of the roads in question, it appears that both were dedicated before the turn of the twentieth century. A review of the records of the secondary roads department shows that Spechts Ferry Road may have been dedicated in the 1850's and resurveyed in 1864. The road called Lovers Lane was a road formerly designed at “Road Number 8” and was dedicated and ordered to be resurveyed by the Board of Supervisors in 1844 and 1860.

Neither road now exists exactly in the original dedicated location. However, it also appears that the county has performed maintenance work on these roads, and has behaved as if the roads were county roads, for at least ten years. It appears that the county's situation is similar to that of Clarke County in Murrane v. Clarke County, supra. In that case, property owner brought an action to establish the proper location of a road, and to require the county to either move the road or compensate him in the taking of his land. Ultimately the Iowa Supreme Court rejected the landowner's claim. The Court determined that the road was located by mistake and was not located in its original dedicated location in 1884. The Court also found that there was a prescriptive easement where the county had a clear agreement between it and the servient property owner and the county spent substantial sums of money on upgrading the road throughout its existence for over one hundred years.

If the county wants to establish that it owns the roads in the form of a prescriptive easement, the county must submit evidence that it has openly and hostilely owned the easement, has spend sums toward their maintenance, that it conveyed this ownership to the landowners in question, for a period of at least ten years. In this regard the county's most recent success in Simon v. Dubuque County Board of Supervisors, 2007 WL 2376736 is instructive, as to what evidence the court considers where the county wants to establish it owns a road